Foiling the Birds

 

I don't like combatting birds, but I have often attempted to do so.  I have stuffed chicken wire into nooks and crannies on the house to deter the English House Sparrows when my father was about to blow a gasket in frustration with them.   I carefully pulled apart the growing Cardinal nest when my mother was afraid it was within swiping reach of the neighborhood cats.

After my parents died, I made numerous treks to Michigan to clear out the big old house.   One hot summer evening I arrived with a backache and a bottle of Jim Beam after a thousand mile drive.   A clatter that sounded like some Victorian mechanical contraption interrupted my first cocktail.   I crept about as if startled by an intruder, searching for the alarming noise.

Research on the computer told me that Chimney Swifts had taken up residence in the chimney and had a hatch of babies.   After learning about their declining numbers I knew that I would not disturb them.   My affection grew by the day for the mechanical-sounding clamor of the babies when the parents returned with food.   I took coffee breaks by the fireplace so that I could hear them.   As I cleared debris out the house I would pause to watch the parents zipping through the sky above the roofline.   In the evening I sat in the garden arbor and listened to their twittering.   They very much were company for me as I rattled around a house grown strange with human ghosts and the household collections  of 46 years.

I am asked what to do about the pesky birds at the farm.  The swallows are determined to get the best places for their nests.  

A wily cat who opens the screen door to let himself out lets in a Swallow, who perches on the ceiling fan and inspects the top of the built-in china cabinet while the lady of the house tries to shoo it out.   Denied the home's attractive interior, they carry little daubs of mud to the window ledge outside the front door despite the brightly colored Christmas ribbons tacked up to discourage them.   I press wrinkled sheets of aluminum foil to the window ledge as further deterrents.

This morning as we have coffee on the porch the Swallows swoop in and see the foil.   They swoop out and light on the gravel drive, three of them, chattering and facing the porch.   It is hard to not imagine their vexation.

The Phoebes and their nest . . . now, that is another story altogether. Stay tuned.

Farm Birds

Terry Tempest Williams wrote that "there are those birds you gauge your life by," and I have had a few.  I try not to begrudge any bird but admit to having problems with the English house sparrow.  Recent MSUM graduate Matt Pullen argues that when it comes to animals and birds, everyone creates their own hierarchies.  The birds that one person values, the next person could cheerfully blow off the face of the earth.  While I would love to have a nest of barn swallows on my house, a former colleague of mine power-washes the little mud cups off his house every season, cursing all the while.  Pullen says that it is "too easy to value one targeted species over another . . . When we listen to the story of the land, we tend to privilege the portion of the narrative that is most relevant to ourselves."

The work that goes into nest building is astounding.  The Killdeer lays its eggs on the ground.  She carefully chooses a site and sifts the earth so that the finest grains line the shallow scoop which cradles her earth-colored eggs.  Last summer a man who had a longstanding irritation with the "faker" bird that drags its wing along the ground to lure away would-be predators was heart-broken for her.  She laid her eggs in the corn field, and the farmer who leases the land plowed the nest under.  Had the spring been less damp, he would have been in the field earlier and she would have laid her eggs after he had done his work.  Undeterred, she busied herself to scooping out a new nest.  Those eggs were eaten by a large orange-striped Plains Garter Snake, a knock-out beauty amongst the more typical yellow-striped garter snakes.  The Killdeer had no nestlings last summer.

The woman who owns the farm enjoys the song birds, even the Barn Swallows that she calls comical, graceful, and sweet.  But she does not want them nesting in the garage or the shed, and certainly not on the window by the front door, when there are other places they could choose.  Last weekend we sat in the recess on the porch, and the swallows swooped in to survey the window frame.  The garage door was open, and they drifted up into the rafters to inspect those possibilities.  Down went the garage door and up went long streamers of brightly colored Christmas ribbon on the front window frame.  The breeze tosses the ribbons, and the swallows will look for a nest site with fewer distractions.

Last winter we said that we would clear out the swallow nests in the shed.  What happened to the one swallow we do not know, but there she still sat in the cold, a reminder of the tireless workers that birds are and the short, brief lives that are theirs on the farm.  I wrote about her in a piece that was accepted by a journal at the university, although the editors balked at the title.  "Flitting" is a word I re-learned from nineteenth century novelist Elizabeth Gaskell.  While it suggests a type of quick flight movement from one place to another, it also suggests a change from one state or stage to another.  Often our mere impatience with species other than our own prevents us from acknowledging their toils and vanishings, from hearing the narratives relevant to them.  Of course, we humans construct their narratives, and, as I suggested in the previous blog entry, there is often potential danger in that act.

I reprint "The Flitting" here:

                 All summer the swallows careered over the fields, toiling to build nests in the barn, sculpting mud and grass from the slough into rude down-lined cups plastered onto the rafters, hurrying to raise inky-eyed, gape-mouthed, floppy-necked babies.  Now December snow races, wind-driven, between the wallboards in long fingers over the earth floor.  The barn smells crisply of familiar things: decaying mouse turds, rusty tools, flaking paint, crumbling rags on an old man’s workbench.  The swallows’ nests still cling, dry oyster half-shells glued to the rafters.  The birds have all gone into the great southern warmth, but one sits lingering here:  tiny and sunken and frail, wingtips folded over forked tail, like a messenger from a forgotten world.  Did she wait too long, heart stopping in the deepening cold?  Or did a germ take her in that patient attendance on new life from summer’s full ripening arc?  Are the eggs beneath her yet, arrested mid-blossom, calcified into a powdery silt clasped by the mild-clawed feet?  Winter’s ice-crystalled air eddies in the barn’s roof trusses, rippling the soft gray feathers that once glittered midnight blue.  The startlingly naked, dark-socketed skull is like a fine cameo or a dusky pearl wreathed by a circlet of downy neck fluff.

                Eyeless and uncomprehending, she seems as vulnerable as a lone figure midway across a harvested field on a cold moonless night.

Inaugural Flight

When I first moved to this upper Midwest plains area I was nonplussed.  The land was so flat, so featureless.  I said that it looked like God had simply put down his thumb and pressed hard.  I thought I was clever.  I got a lot of mileage out of that line.  The people who thought it was funny either didn’t live around here or lived around here and thought that the land was flat and featureless. 

That was a long time ago.  Over the years I have retrained my eye, my mind, and my language.  One of my students, Seamus MacDonald, wrote in an eco-journal for one of my classes about hunting for elk in Montana.  He said that “the only way to spot an elk that isn't moving in a wooded area is to look for its shape.”  He talked about looking for elk-shaped logs, elk-shaped brush, and elk-shaped lumps of land.  I’ve learned a lot from his observations.  I am now pretty good at picking out brown shapes in brown landscapes.  And green shapes in green landscapes.  But how can one hone language to make something recognizably elk-shaped?  I don’t know, but I am ready to try.

There is a Northern Harrier in this photograph.  It isn’t easy to see; the photograph isn’t that good.  Look for a hawk that is Northern Harrier-shaped.  From a distance the Northern Harrier looks like one of our Midwestern crop duster planes skimming perilously close to the earth and then popping up like a winged cork at a boundary line before cascading back earthward.  Sometimes Harriers pull in one wing and do barrel rolls over the fields.  The bird's Latin name is Circus cyaneus: circus for the "circle" that describes its flight habits and cyaneus for cyan, the steely blue color of the male Harrier.  The female is a rich brown.

A unique feature of Harriers is the disk-shaped arrangement of feathers around their eyes and ear openings.  While other birds of prey rely almost exclusively on sight for hunting, the Harrier is like an owl in that it also relies on sound that is directed to their ears by the facial disks of feathers. I once watched a pair of Northern Harriers in central Montana work a series of fields amidst a constellation of Short-eared Owls.  The two species hunt in similar fashion, skating over the seed heads of the grasses and sieving sound with their moon-shaped faces.  The slightest animal movement glisters on their retinas, and they plunge feet first on a mouse or snake.

The bird's common name, "Harrier," has roots in the old English "herigan," which means to harass or plunder, lay waste, slay, or hunt down.  A group of Harriers is known as a "swarm" or "harassment." "Harrow" is a by-form of harrier, as the OED claims, which means to plunder, sack, spoil, lay waste, ravage, or destroy.  A harrow is, of course, also an implement for breaking the soil. Anyone who lives on or near a farm knows what a harrow is.  Harrows come in many forms, but they all break up, pulverize, scatter, stir, root up, or disturb in some way.

Both "harrier" and "harrow" have violent connotations and, interestingly, seem to describe more aptly the human marauders, despoilers, and monsters of the ages.  That is a lot of freight to lay upon the sleek, buoyant hawk with the disk of feathers around the owl-like eyes.  Yet in "harrier" and "harrow" are suggestions, too, as to how the bird operates.  A Harrier will ply the grasslands all day looking for prey-shaped creatures, listening for prey-shaped noises. The prairie churns in the wind like those sinuous, rippling meadows that resemble the sea in Andrew Marvell's Upon Appleton House and the famous mower poems.  The hawk chooses.  It courses steadily across the inland sea of fields.  It scans, builds up distinctions, and selects the mouse-like shape from the water-like grass.  It plunges.

The first Northern Harrier that I saw this spring was on Easter Sunday in the Sheyenne grasslands of North Dakota.  She was flying into a 40 mph wind, shoulders twitching slightly to maintain a steady hover above a marshy slough.  As the hawk harried the field, the human violence in the old word that names her fell away like a husk. Grace and efficiency remained.

Writing about the relationship between humans and the natural world means being a deft and careful harrower of the word as well as the world.  It means pulling back when acts of naming and violence become indistinguishable.  That is the purpose of this blog:  to watch, to hover, to select, to connect.  My eyesight isn't what it used to be, but I can spot brown shapes in brown landscapes.  I can't hear shapes the way that the Northern Harrier does, but I will be a harrier and harrower of words and hope that the violence inherent in the act falls away like a husk more often than not.