LETTER FROM BOBOLINK FARM

JOIE DE VIVRE

By Barbara Tatham Johnson

The day begins with a full-blown nor’easter. As the morning light grows, the bird feeders attract flocks of goldfinch and a few black-capped chickadees. The bustle of hungry birds cheers me and distracts my attention from the piling snow.

The goldfinch crowd explodes nervously into the air several times, alarmed by something I cannot see or hear. I wonder how much energy from their oil-rich seed meal they expend in their flights of extreme reaction to perceived threats, but dallying at the hanging feeders exposes the birds to watchful hawks. As more homeowners present seed in abundance to wild birds in winter, the overwintering populations of sharp-shinned and Cooper’s hawks rise. Many hawks, learning that food is abundant and easily caught at bird feeders, do not migrate south but “short stop” for the winter to enjoy dependable meals.

Herb Wilson, a biology professor at Colby College who writes a column on bird life in the Maine Sunday Telegram, observes that birds will not starve if feeders become empty but “We do know that feeding birds increases winter survivorship…[scientists studying] black-capped chickadees in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Alberta saw that fed chickadees have significantly greater winter survival compared to chickadees that must find their food.”

I decide it all evens out. The feeder birds have a better chance to live until spring, and the hawks prosper on the few birds that are not alert enough.

A pair of purple finches arrives. The wine red male adds color accent to the scene and seems more alert than hungry. The female clamps on to a foothold at one feeder portal and burrows into the shelled sunflower seed with an occasional look about for danger. A pair of tufted titmice leaps back and forth from seed holes to the nearby cherry tree, preferring to consume each tidbit within the shelter of crisscrossing twigs and branches.

After yet another whirring departure of goldfinch, the chickadees, with a kind of flight I can only describe as “skipping,” come from the snow-iced forsythia bush to take advantage of the uncrowded feeders. They touch the footholds, pluck a seed, and dart back to the shelter of snowy shrubs. As soon as the seed is consumed, they skip back for another.

Black-capped chickadees, trim, quick, animate nuggets of bird life, maintain a state of constant motion. Ornithologist Arthur Bent, in his Life Histories of North American Jays, Crows and Titmice, writes “[The chickadees move] with such rapidity that the eye can scarcely take in their flashlike movements. When alarmed they disappear as if by magic—we see only the place where they were—an ability that must save them many times from the strike of a bird of prey.”

This hustling, sprightly, sometimes fidgety movement gives the chickadee an air of zestfulness. They amuse and cheer us with nimble animation. In Walden, Thoreau describes the chickadees that visited his cabin: “Meanwhile also came the chickadees in flocks, which, picking up the crumbs the squirrels had dropped, flew to the nearest twig, and, placing them under their claws, hammered away at them with their little bills, as if it were an insect in the bark, till they were sufficiently reduced for their slender throats. A little flock of these tit-mice came daily to pick dinner out of my wood-pile, or the crumbs at my door, with faint, flitting, lisping notes, like the tinkling of icicles in the grass, or else with sprightly day, day, day, or more rarely, in spring-like days, a wiry summery phe-be from the woodside. They were so familiar that at length one alighted on an armful of wood which I was carrying in and pecked at the sticks without fear.”

We love the obvious chumminess of chickadees and savor the companionship of bright jingling conversation with the little birds on woods’ walks. Edwin Way Teale writes of “troupes” of chickadees, and, as we read, we nod in recognition of their acrobatic and entertaining movements.

The nineteenth-century nature essayist Bradford Torrey described the chickadee as “the most engaging and characteristic enlivener of our winter woods” and “the bird of the merry heart.” Emerson poetically portrays the chickadee as “This scrap of valor just for play / Fronts the north wind in waist coat gray / As if to shame my weak behavior.”

Arthur Bent, whose books are delightful repositories of bird observations as well as bird science, includes this 1907 account by Edward H. Forbush. “I once saw a Chickadee attempting to hold a monster caterpillar, which proved too strong for it. The great worm writhed out of the confining grasp and fell to the ground, but the little bird followed, caught it, whipped it over a twig, and swinging underneath, caught each end of the caterpillar with a foot, and so held it fast over the twig by superior weight, and proceeded, while hanging back downward, to dissect its prey…I have seen a Chickadee drop over backward from a branch, in pursuit of an insect, catch it, and, turning an almost complete somersault in the air, strike right side up again on the leaning trunk of the tree.” The scientific explanation of chickadee flight mobility that I read in an ornithology textbook seems underwhelming in comparison. “ A black-capped chickadee launches itself with both its legs and wings. If frightened in mid-flight, this tiny bird can begin to change its course within three tenths of a second.”

The storm intensifies through the day. The birds at the feeders seem focused on preparing to survive the night. Snug inside this evening, I will not think about chickadees and goldfinch and other visitors to the feeders. I’ll relax with a good book, conserving energy for the effort to clear away wet heavy snow when the storm ends sometime tomorrow.

The chickadees and goldfinch will shelter, most likely, within the hemlocks along the stream bottom. With temperatures falling to below freezing, each little bird, with a full reserve of body fat accumulated during the day’s feeding, will fluff body feathers to entrap air warmed by body heat into an insulating blanket. If the birds’ brains sense too much heat loss as the night grows colder, involuntary muscle contractions in their limbs, producing a kind of continual shiver, will begin to generate heat. To conserve fat reserves, the birds may let their body temperatures drop close to twenty degrees below their daytime level and enter a state of “regulated hypothermia,” a hibernation of sorts, to survive extremely cold nights.

With first light the birds, whose fat reserves are nearly totally depleted, will return to the feeders to fill up before the day’s end. I will, of course, be right at the window to watch. In the solid grip of winter, sharing sustenance is the joy of living.

 

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