LETTER FROM BOBOLINK FARM
BLACK AND BLUE
By Barbara Tatham Johnson
In our eagerness to be close to nature, humans often spoil the freshness and
beauty of what we seek to experience.
The chain-link pen confined two crows. On one side stood a pen with two
ravens. On the other side a pen held a turkey vulture at a West Virginia
game farm I visited many years ago. A small group of human onlookers
gathered as a crow hopped a stiff-legged dance with a penny clamped in the
tip of his beak. Occasionally, he put the penny on the ground and cawed.
From a corner of the pen the other crow, missing his tail and the large
flight feathers on both wings, sidled and listed toward the crow with the
penny. In his beak he carried a scruffily worn spruce tree cone. He began to
toss the cone in the air playfully, being obvious about the great fun he was
having. The human audience laughed to see such sport, and the other crow
dropped his penny and rushed to grab the cone when the second crow appeared
to clumsily miss his catch. The feather-deprived crow quickly picked up the
penny and retrieved the cone, which the first crow had dropped to protest
the penny theft. The feather-deprived crow flopped back to his corner and
slid the penny beneath the pipe that formed the bottom of the fence. He
withdrew it and flipped it to the tip of his beak. He began a game with the
human audience by putting his head through the diamond-shaped links of the
fence and pulling back when someone reached to take the penny. When I turned
to leave, the crow was flaunting the penny first to the humans and then to
his complaining pen mate. Perhaps someone tossed another penny into the pen
to recycle the process. I had noticed the crow had two pennies under the
pipe.
I am fortunate to live where I can observe wild nature easily. Intelligent
and playful creatures, wild crows bring levity and spirit to the early days
of spring when the season challenges my patience with changeable weather. I
share their unbridled zest when they stunt and dive and perform aerial
acrobatics in the strong spring winds. If I am lucky enough to catch a
reunion of crows back on their home grounds when the winter roost breaks up
in March, I feel the elation of their animated hopping and chest butting and
raucous cawing.
One spring when the meadow lost the snow cover and began to green, I noticed
the groundhog who wintered in the rock pile on the south edge had emerged
and was feeding hungrily on new clover and dandelion growth. Ravenous, the
animal busily nosed out the greenery and did not notice the crow that landed
a few feet from his rear. The crow strode forward and yanked hard on the
groundhog’s tail, then lightly hopped up in a low retreating flight when the
surprised (I could almost hear a puzzled groundhog’s “ouch!”) animal wheeled
about. The groundhog was hungry and turned back to his fresh meal. The crow
repeated his stunt for several minutes until, bored with repetition, he flew
away with what I translated as guffawing caws.
Most years, by late March a pair of crows constructs a thick branchy
platform high in one of the white pines around the meadow's edge. I watched
one spring as a crow gathered old dry grass with elaborate care. My husband
and I thought we might locate the new nest when the bird took the grass to
it. Suddenly, the crow dropped all the grass and moved to a nearby dirt pile
where she began to peck at the soil. Soon she flew slowly and obviously to
the bare branches of a red maple tree and perched a while. Had she noticed
our eager faces at the window? Was she encouraging her mate to help gather
nesting material? We could not know. Eventually, we discovered the nest
site, but we became circumspect in our observations.
Another year a crow discovered a long piece of bailing twine left in the
meadow from the previous year’s hay harvest. The twine was firmly caught in
the matted meadow, and the crow could not free it with forceful tugs. She
gathered loops of the twine with her beak much as I would coil rope over my
arm. Holding the anchored end of the twine firmly under one foot, she yanked
hard, then yanked once more. With the frayed, severed end dangling, she flew
away with a prize addition to her nest.
The glossy black beauty of a crow pair studiously striding about the
greening meadow to find bits of food is a prelude to the flurry of bird
activity that begins with the arrival of bluebirds and tree swallows.
My husband and I placed seven bluebird nest boxes around the meadow years
ago in hopes of attracting bluebirds, and sure enough, the first spring that
the boxes were in place, a bluebird pair claimed one. Tree swallows contend
with bluebirds for these nest boxes, and the swallows usually win out. At
first we did not realize that despite our good intentions, we had created as
much of a problem for the bluebirds as a solution but, with research, we
found that placing two boxes in proximity to each other allows the tree
swallows to be satisfied with one box (the tree swallows do not want to nest
close to one another) freeing the other box for bluebirds.
Bluebirds contend aggressively with other bluebirds for nest sites. A lone
bluebird male arrived one morning and indicated he had a romantic interest
in the female of a pair who were examining a nest box near the pond. The
female looked on as the two males joined in furious combat that seemed a
fight to the finish. They pinned each other to the ground by head or neck,
legs and wings in use for leverage or to strike. They fell apart and
reclinched in a wrestling tumble of flashing blue. At last, one pinned and
battered the other so hard, the bird broke free and escaped, not to return.
There was no bloodshed, and I did not know if the victorious male who flew
to the female was the original mate. His assertiveness was an indication
their nesting would be successful against the interlopers and the rival
nesting species they faced in the breeding season.
The appearance of a male English sparrow signals problems. Brutally
aggressive in claiming a nest site for his mate, he victimizes both the
swallows and the bluebirds. English sparrows will kill an incubating tree
swallow in her nest and build their nest over dead bird and eggs if allowed.
In some instances, the female sparrow decides she prefers another nest box,
and she and her mate will chase away a bluebird pair that have just
completed nest building.
Raccoons are a danger to birds in nest boxes. At this time, rabies has
decimated the local raccoon population, but in time it will recover. Each of
our nest boxes has anti-raccoon guards to prevent raccoon access to the nest
box.
The drama and tragedy is intensified and easily observed in the artificial
nesting situation I have created, and I considered removing the boxes. Yet,
over the years, the tree swallows have raised dozens of youngsters, all
efficient and prodigious consumers of mosquitoes and black flies, and the
bluebirds have prospered to cheer us with their color and soft sweet song.
Tree swallows and bluebirds are steadfast and resourceful. One male
bluebird, a couple of years ago, injured his right leg. He was a scrappy
bird and managed to stay on guard against intruders as well as help feed his
young. He could not enter the nest box with food but could hang on with his
uninjured foot to the entry hole, and he passed his contributions inside to
his mate. In a few days, when he was fit, he helped his mate fledge five
youngsters.
Five years ago during a weeklong spell of cold rain, the tree swallows could
not gather enough food to keep their young alive. Those birds whose young
had not hatched were able to successfully raise their brood when the weather
improved. In a nest box with very young swallows, I found two who survived
the food deprivation. I removed their dead nest mates and hoped that the
parent birds would return to care for them. They did, and the two young tree
swallows fledged two weeks later.
During the same spell of wet weather, it was no easier for a pair of
bluebirds to keep their nearly grown young healthy. When the female bluebird
disappeared a few days before the young were ready to fledge, I watched the
male bluebird work tirelessly to bring enough food to keep them alive. Three
of the five babies survived, and the male bird helped them fledge
successfully.
As a member of an invasive species with insatiable curiosity, I acknowledge
I do have an impact on my surroundings. I try to make that impact as light
and as positive as I can. Moments of wonder and laughter are my rewards.
