bird nerge
Yes, after another long hiatus of about two months, Tzipi showed up in my yard with Mississippi. O.J. was screeping in the trees so Tzipi looked a bit nervous. He still flew to my hands twice as per his custom; once to get a nut that he ate on the bird bath, and another to grab a few to bury for later. Mississippi was just a couple feet above me in our Maple tree, which was pretty close for her.
I think it’s amazing that he still makes his cameos. I wonder how much he drops by and I’m not here. I wonder what makes him decide to risk getting screeped and come over her. I wonder if he sees me walking around the neighborhood. I guess there’s a lot much I can’t know about him.
Tzipi came back.
After several months of not seeing him, I had to face the cold fact that Tzipi might be dead. Of course, I hoped he had just moved away because of O.J.’s bullying, but life in the wild being what it is, it was just as likely that he was gone for good.
I felt pretty crummy about this because, of course, I had come to really love Tzipi. He was the first wild animal that I successfully befriended. Well, I considered him a friend but it’s unlikely that he saw me as anything more than a human birdfeeder. Be that as it may, he was very intelligent and charming and just easy to love.
Now, O.J. is the *only* jay we’ve seen in our yard for quite a long time. Two days ago, K and I were about to head out when we noticed that there was jay in our yard that was not O.J. Although he didn’t look exactly like Tzipi, he started acting in a very Tzipi-like way — specifically, perching in the spots that Tzipi liked to perch. So, against all hope, I grabbed a few sunflower seeds near me (which I had been trying to lure a squirrel with, but that’s another story) and went outside. The jay didn’t fly away when I opened the door, although he fluttered around a bit. Then I opened my hand and he flew to me!
Tzipi!
He was most displeased with the seeds, so I told him to wait a second while I went inside and grabbed some almonds. I grabbed a whole lot of almonds in my enthusiasm. He took two and flew off. I had a huge lump in my throat and yes, shed a few tears.
All my life I have had dreams about my pets after they die, that somehow, against all physical laws, they manage to return from death. I can’t tell you how many times I have dreamed this dream. Even when I visit my pets’ graves, I can’t help but think that somehow they will pop out of the ground, alive and healthy. It’s one of the crazy, malformed tricks of the human mind. My mind, at least.
To see Tzipi fly to me after all these months was nothing short of a dream come true. It was so stunning and emotional.
He hasn’t been back but I hope he will be. At least now I know he is safe and sound.
Long live Tzipi, the best Scrub Jay ever.
I haven’t seened Tzipi for about a month now. I still see his kids and Mississippi, although less than I did. But Tzipi just seems to be gone. One day I was at the end of the street and I thought I saw a jay that was Tzipi. I came around a bend and saw a jay in a small tree next to the path. He sat in a tree somewhat close to me, closer than I would expect a jay to be. We stared at each other for a moment. I said, “Tzipi?”, which was silly because obviously he’s not going to answer. So I don’t know if that was him or not.
I’d like to think it was, that O.J. finally pushed him out of his territory, rather than his being dead. I guess I may never know.
Since I have made Tzipi’s acquaintance, I have read all I can about the Western Scrub Jay, which is now considered one of the most intelligent animals in the world because of its prodigious memory. I learned that Scrub Jays often live with their parents for their first five years of life and help with succeeding chicks.
So it’s should be no surprise that Tzipi and Mississippi now have some adolescent kids hanging around my backyard. O.J. & O.J.G.F. do as well but they are not quite as extroverted as Tzipi’s kids. Like their dad.
One of his kids we refer to as Junior Tzipi because he looks just like Tzipi except 3/4 size. The other we refer to as Fuzzyhead, for obvious reasons, and Fuzzyhead appears to be female although because her head is fairly gray. But it could be that these are just baby feathers.
Fuzzyhead comes around a lot at this point. More than any other jay. She’ll come to the feeder even if you are in the backyard, although she will position herself so she can’t see you. This behavior seems similar to the tale of ostriches putting their head in the sand so that you can’t see them. It’s kind of funny to see. I have tried to get her to come to me but she will have none of it.
Junior Tzipi just shows up now and then, and is even less likely to hang around if we are in the yard.
Tzipi mostly comes around at dusk now, for a bedtime snack.
Mississippi still comes around a couple times a day. She always runs along the fence to the place closes to the feeder, which is pretty cute.
O.J. has been taken baths in our pond on a regular basis.
So that’s the latest on the gang. I have hopes of feeding Fuzzyhead by hand but don’t have a lot of time these days to stand and wait for her.
The Nerge has been on an unplanned hiatus. We at The Nerge apologize. And by “we” I mean “me”.
There reason for this pause in posts is that I’ve changed jobs from the EPA to a Oakland-based startup. I’m learning tons of new stuff, and that plus the intense level of chaos of the new job has basically eaten my brain.
Another minor factor is that I have spent way too much time on Twitter, reading and writing in 140 character spurts, rather than doing anything substantial. That was fun for a while, but it’s time to get back to some real writing.
That being said, you’ll be happy to know that we still get regular visits from Tzipi and Mississippi (as in “Mrs. Tzipi”). Lately the rivalry between Tzipi and O.J. (for “Other Jay”) has been fairly intense.
O.J. has long legs a long tail that he holds up at a jaunty angle. His whole demeanor says “I am The Sh*t.” He has a girlfriend who seems ridiculously young and speaks in what I can only determine is some Scrub Jay type of baby-talk. I never see O.J. talking to her; she just babbles to him in her little squeaky voice. Their relation is very different than Tzipi & Mississippi, who talk to each other in soft clucking sounds with occasional barely audible squeaks. Now I may be projecting all over the place that O.J.’s relationship seems slightly fucked up, because I have a preference for Tzipi, because he eats out of my hand. I fully admit my bias towards Camp Tzipi. Anyway, just like in the human world, you can’t always understand others’ relationships.
So here in Nergeland we’ve come up with a new verb: to screep. This is when one jay (let’s say, oh, maybe O.J.) comes flapping down at another (perhaps Tzipi?) in a territorial power play, while shouting “Screep! Screep! Screep!” Tzipi often gets screeped by O.J., which is to say O.J. chases Tzipi off and walks around for a few minutes thinking he’s cock of the walk. But Tzipi doesn’t care, because he knows he’s got the ace in hole; he can get almonds from me, personally, anytime he damn pleases. This seems to confound O.J. — that Tzipi has trained me to hand-feed him tasty treats.
Mississippi, on the other hand, has been watching these transaction between Tzipi and I quite closely for some time. Yesterday she’d decided she’d observed long enough, and actually took some almonds from my hand as well. It was a fine moment. I now have images in my head of baby jays (their offspring) flocking to me some day in a Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah kind of way. I, the pied piper of Scrub Jays. Without the leading innocents to their deaths, of course.
I haven’t seen this clip since I was a kid, it is way weirder than I remember.
Which reminds me of what my favorite rabbi, Rabbi Ferris, used to say (maybe he still does): if you’re feeling down, just sing “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” three times in a row, each time more exaggerated than the last. By the end of the third round, you’ll feel so ridiculous that you’ll actually feel better. Try it sometime.
Just as I sat down to write this post last week, the crappy stupid cat next store jumped on top of my fence and killed a junco. I have no idea how he did it or what happened. I looked up, he was on the fence, and the junco was dying on the ground. I buried it in my yard and then I drew this sketch the next day.
Anyway, this is what I meant to say before that sad incident.
One day about fifteen years ago, I realized that other than the most common birds, I had no idea what was flying around me. I also had no idea how to distinguish one bird song from another. It was all just tweet, tweet, tweet. (Now that means something much less tuneful.) In any case, I started trying to learn about birds. I got an Audubon Guide, and eventually moved up to a Peterson Guide, and looked through them over and over. I bought various cassette tapes of bird calls, or borrowed them from the library. I have one particular one, Birds Songs of California, that I must have listened to hundreds of times. I am finally pretty good at identifying birds. It’s very satisfying to walk down the street and know who is in the trees just by listening. It’s thrilling to see a type of bird I’ve never seen before.
Although K is usually with me when I am IDing birds, he is not a birder per se. He has definitely learned a lot by being stuck in the car with me while I listen to the Bird Songs tape (yes, I still have a cassette and player in my car), and from my blurting out the names of birds as I see them. I have only once gone out specifically to bird, with the one friend I have who also is bird-obsessed. Mostly I just look for birds as K & I are hiking, which turns out to be quite a lot of birds over time.
Lately, in the back of my mind, this thought started to burble up that I should become more serious about birding. That I should make a concerted effort to see and ID more birds. That I should finally go on an outing with other birders, where I would probably learn a lot more than looking in books.
To this end, I attended a presentation recently of the birds indigenous to my local watershed. I was pretty excited to get more information about the neighborhood birds and to meet other birders.
As I came into the room, I entered a sea of L.L. Bean. I am definitely working from a small statistical sample, but it seems that birders like to dress in a practical, no-nonsense way at all times. Hair styles also were nondescript. As I sat down with my asymmetrical ‘do and bright red pants, I thought “uh-oh.”
By “uh-oh” I mean that experience I have had, time and time again, when I investigate a group that I hope to become part of, only to discover that what I thought was going to be a homecoming is going to be more like monkey-in-the-middle.
And then it got worse.
Near the very top of my “Things I Hate” list is this: attending an event where I expect to be a spectator, but without advance notice I am forced to be a participant. This happened recently at a circus show where the clown (who was cute and charming unlike most clowns) was trying to pull me onstage. We had stupidly sat in the first row. K went in my place; apparently K has no fear of looking ridiculous, which amazes me.
Back at the presentation: after a truckload of announcements, the person MCing the event asked if we would each give our name and a tell a story of a recent exciting birding event in our lives. I could see this if we were a group of four or even ten people, but there were about fifty people in the room. I was so annoyed. I also mistakenly thought that there would be other introverts in the room who would bow out. Here’s where I was wrong. Birders are EXTROVERTS who will talk about birds TO ANYONE, ANYTIME.
One by one, each person told there long-winded tale of bird encounters. The woman just before me gleefully told how she had seen a hawk carry off a feral cat. She was just beside herself with joy that this hawk killed a cat. I kind of felt like vomiting. When it was my turn and I only said my name (even then I wanted to give a fake one), someone said, “Yeah, well, how can you top that last story?” I was excused from bowing out by the cheering of the cat-hating fans in the room.
This is another thing that bothers me. People, at least in this country, have a weird propensity to like only one species of animal and to develop an animosity towards others. I saw this repeatedly when I worked or volunteered at animal shelters. As you know from the beginning of this post, I’m not too fond of the dumb neighbor and her murderous cat, but that doesn’t mean I’d jump for joy if I saw another animal hunt down and kill him. That’s just sick.
As I sat and listened to many, many bird stories, that sinking feeling of not belonging burbled up from within. I not only didn’t fit in with this group, I didn’t even like some of them. Like feral cat lady, or competitive guy bragging about his life list, or women talking about watching a hawk eat a pigeon for an hour. (Really? An hour?)
The presentation itself was good, with great photos and helpful information. I probably also learned something, somehow from the personal anecdotes which lasted longer than the presentation itself. The most important thing I learned, though, was that I will continue to bird on my own. As Satre said, “L’enfer, c’est les autres.”
Also, the Golden-Crowned Sparrows are back for the winter, and… a Swainson’s Thrush visited our yard!
Now just waiting for the Cedar Waxwings to show up.
Last week a sick bird showed up at my bird feeder, a female house finch. She seemed to have something wrong with her eyes. They were very watery and she could barely see. It made me very sad. I realized also that I was going to have to take the bird feeder down and sterilize it so as not to spread whatever illness she had. Supposedly one should take the bird feeder down for a whole month if one sees a sick bird. That’s right, a whole month without chirping birds in my backyard.
For the next two days, the sick bird reappeared eating crumbs of seeds off of the cement. Once or twice I saw a male house finch with her. I decided to try to catch her and bring her to a wildlife rehabilitation place. First I dug up my Havahart trap. Although intended for rodents, I had once accidentally caught a towhee when trying to catch a particular rodent. So I knew that birds might be lured inside. I placed it on the ground with oodles of seeds inside.
Several times I saw the Sick Bird go very close to the entrance and said, “C’mon, go inside…. gooooo inside…. goooo…. you’re right there…. Aw, shit!” And Sickly Bird would hop away. I even use hand motions to virtually push her inside but you know, you can’t control a bird with your mind.
In desperation, I got the fish net and snuck up on her on the ground. Very, very slowly. And lo and behold, I caught her! With gloved hands I very carefully carried her to the aforementioned cage and tried to place her inside. I don’t know how, but somehow, she escaped and flew away. In a flash. I just stood there, utterly helpless and frustrated, knowing that was the last I’d see of her.