Those Flying Teddy Bears

“All that is round invites a caress,” writes Gaston Bachelard, and the chickadee is the embodiment of caressable roundness. With its big domed head, tiny bill, and widely-spaced eyes, he is the teddy bear of the avian world. Who can resist that baby-like charm? Grown men have been known to stand for hours, hoping that a chickadee will consent to pick a seed out of their outstretched hand. 

Everything about a chickadee--including his mating call: hey sweetie!--is sweet. I, along with every other pandemic prisoner depending for company and entertainment on the goings on at the feeder, am a sucker for that sweetness, so I feed them seeds and suet, and make sure that the bird bath stays unfrozen even in sub-zero weather. If only I could know every one of their tiny hearts’ desires, I would try to fulfill them, all in the hope that in return they would think of me as their friend. 

But last week I listened to a lecture by the ornithologist  David Hof , Ph.D. about the emotional lives of these birds, and got a shock. I’m sorry to say that chickadees are, by human standards, anything but sweet. In fact, you could say that a chickadee is a wolf in bird’s clothing, except that wolves are a lot nicer. 

I learned from Dr. Hof that chickadee society is as hierarchical as the most rigid caste system. Worse, all chickadee males outrank all females, with the lowliest male able to shoo even the alpha female away from the feeder, no matter that she is married to the alpha male. Like many birds, a male chickadee sings to keep other males out of his territory and away from his mate, but he does not apply the same standards to himself: if he covets his neighbor’s wife, he sneaks into his neighbor’s tree and has his way with her. 

I was not exactly shocked by this. I knew from watching endless nature documentaries that many animals, including the most endearing, form rigid hierarchies, fight over mates and territory, and commit adultery. A lustful nature is not necessarily incompatible with sweetness. But my remaining illusions were shattered when Dr. Hof related that, after spending hundreds of hours capturing, banding, and observing a tribe of chickadees, he had found one in the act of murdering a rival-- a brutal attack in which the beta bird of the flock went on pecking savagely at the alpha long after the latter had expired (the widow fluttered off, but I shudder to think of the marriage that she was later forced to endure). 

It’s not fair, I realize, to hold chickadees to higher standards than other birds. Among eagles, the biggest chick in the nest usually kills one or more of its brethren, and female eagles have been known to kill their mates. But eagles look like frowning, angry old men, with their flat heads, deep-set eyes, and enormous, downward curving beaks, so we are not surprised to hear of eagle cruelty. But the cruelty of chickadees feels like a betrayal, their fluffy adorableness a feint designed to take advantage of our good nature. 

Of course, the chickadees can’t help it, anymore than the male lion can help killing his rival’s cubs when he takes over a pride, or the stags can help giving each other concussions in their attempts to sire the next generation of fawns. Wolves are merciless towards strange wolves who wander into their territory. Chimpanzees bicker for dominance, and kill individuals from other groups. 

But chimpanzees, wolves, stags, lions, and chickadees are nothing more than furry or feathered envelopes engineered to protect the real culprits: the implacable genes that will stop at nothing to keep themselves going. As Darwin proved, the individual is expendable; it’s the species that counts. Which, when I think about it, is beyond depressing, but at least it makes it possible for me to look more charitably on the chickadee, and find it in my heart to forgive him.

 

Birds In Blizzard

While the nor'easter rages outside, I'm watching the birds at the feeder under the eaves. Long past the time when they usually retire to their roosts, they're flying in for a few last bits of energy to get them through the night. Titmice, their little crests down from the cold; feisty chickadees; and winter-dull goldfinches swoop in, perch, grab a single sunflower or nyger seed and fly off into the trees to feast in peace. You'd think that they would use way more energy in those flights than a single seed could supply, but the yard is not littered with bird corpses, so they must know what they're doing.

Slate-colored juncos--elegant little birds with deep-gray backs and wings, white bellies and yellow beaks--are ground feeders, gleaning what our obese squirrels have left of the seeds that drop from the seed containers. Just now, as the agile titmice dove at the feeders swaying in the gale, I saw a pathetic sight: a junco fluttered up from the ground towards the trove of sunflower fuel, fell short, fluttered down, then fluttered up again. What was he thinking? That is the last thing he should have been doing, wasting energy pursuing an impossible goal.

After watching five or six of these vain flutterings, I filled a plastic tub with sunflower seeds and flung them into the shrieking wind. "Those seeds will be covered up in no time," said my husband. As it happened, the wind was blowing against the direction in which I had thrown the seeds, and they stuck fast to the surface of the snow. Soon four, five, six juncos appeared, feeding greedily. For a few minutes even a female cardinal came by, her feathers ruffling in the gusts. Cardinals are scarce in these latitudes, so even I, who used to get a dozen at a time at my Maryland feeder, have taken to gasping with wonder when I see one. I hoped she would stay, but she didn't.

It's almost dusk now, and although the titmice, etc. have gone home, the juncos are still out there, in the midst of the weather hoopla, pecking the ground like hens. But one little clever one, wing feathers tending to brown, beak a paler yellow--a female--is hanging out in the one-inch-wide strip of bare ground right against the house. Except that that ground is not really bare, but covered in sunflower husks and seeds fallen days and even weeks ago. She's filling up on these, feeding contentedly next to the wall, away from the males battling the storm. Bon appetit, junquette. I have high hopes for you. May you live to fledge a nestful of babies in the spring.

Sun Squirreling

These days I'm storing up sunshine like a squirrel stores nuts.  I don't know that I can really store sunshine (maybe in the form of Vitamin D?), but at least I can store up the memory of it.  On second thought, forget that.  I know that it is impossible, on a sleety January day, to recall how it feels to sit in the warm sun.

Regardless, I sat outside on the sunny patio stripping lavender for a while this morning.  I have quite a harvest this year.  My plants, which I placed up against the stone wall in front of the house, made it through their first Vermont winter, thanks no doubt to being snuggled under a thick duvet of snow, their backs against the sun-warmed stones.

Normally, I don't strip lavender, but roughly chop the stems and throw the whole thing into potpourri.  This year, however, I want to make lavender-filled eye pillows, and the stems might feel a little rough against the eyelids of my loved ones--not to mention my own eyelids--so I'm having to separate the blossoms from the stems.  It's a slow, repetitive task, but if you're olfactorily fixated like me, you don't mind it.

While I worked, Wolfie and Bisou passed the stick du jour back and forth to each other.  The bird feeder was right behind me, so I could hear the flutterings of the chickadees as they landed and took off, and also the bulletins they sent out (i.e., tweets) as to their location and activities.  "Just arrived at feeder for lunch," "Dropped a seed!" "Stopped on chicken-house roof to check dog locations," and on and on. 

Replace the flaming maples with gnarled olive trees and the chickadees with hoopoes  (you can see them here) but keep the sun, the cobalt sky and the scent of lavender, and I could have been somewhere on the foothills of the Pyrenees. 
  
Then a chilly breeze came up, and I came back to Vermont.  I gathered up my lavender, called the dogs, and went inside.

Nuthatch, Chickadee

Chickadees and nuthatches are the mainstays at our feeder in winter, and I think they kind of "go" with the look of the landscape--elegant black and white, with subtle blue or rosy shadings that mimic the play of afternoon sun on snow.

Both are tiny birds, but the chickadees look cuddlier than the nuthatches. Nuthatches are more streamlined. They have small heads and long beaks--adult proportions. Chickadees are "neotenic"--they have the kind of features that remind us of babies and trigger the cuddling response. Puppies and kittens are neotenic with a vengeance: big heads, widely spaced eyes, tiny muzzles. That's why we fall victim to them, even when we ought to know better. Chickadees--even the bossy adult males--look like babies too: their heads are round and large in proportion to their bodies, their eyes are wide apart, and their beaks are the size of a niger seed: the very essence of cuteness.

It was sunny today, and cold, but in the middle of the day you could actually feel the warmth of the sun. And up in the bare branches of a birch a chickadee could feel it too, and sang its song with extra oomph: "Heeere sweetie, sweetie, sweetie!"

Before you know it, the sweetie will answer the call, and then spring will really be on its way.