Category Archives: Birds

Faces of Flight – Scream

Birds, Conservation, Faces of Flight, Opinion, ,

Inca Dove
Galveston, 6 a.m.

The doves are power cooing the windows out of their frames. How did doves and lost love become synonymous? The only sadness I feel is for lost sleep. The main chorus consists of white-winged and Eurasian collared-doves. Both are immigrants. White-wings were limited in my childhood to a few scattered through oaks around the court house. Collared doves were unknown. Now both blanket the city, and I often see droves lined shoulder-to-shoulder, wingtip-to-wingtip, along the telephone wires. This morning the crowds have apparently chosen my yard for their caroling. Cucurrucucú, paloma, ya no le llores.

Within this cooing cacophony I detect the slight, almost apologetically soft flutes of the Inca dove. The Inca is also an immigrant, arriving on the island in the 1950s. The Inca survives around the edges, avoiding being bounced by the brutes. I rarely see more than a few together, quietly sifting for seeds through the scalped grass at the Ursuline Convent. The only loser to the recent immigrants is the native mourning dove. Mourning doves have been forced from many Texas urban centers out to the hinterlands.

These changes have taken place over the brevity of one lifetime – mine. I wonder how many people noticed. Perhaps the incessant noise of urban life, the auditory trash, inures us to the coming and going of nature. Our senses are cauterized, and that which we should miss never exists in the first place. Who can hear the pleadings of an amorous dove through ear buds?

Recently I drove to Rockport for a lunch meeting, and once finished curved north along the Texas Coastal Bend before returning home. Time spent along the Texas coast will leave you with two distinct impressions. First, the Texas coast is chock-a-block with birds, particularly doves. Nowhere can they be escaped. Second, also inescapable is the debris and detritus of humanity. Only in protected areas (refuges, private ranches, sanctuaries) and in a few caring towns can you avoid the abandoned double wides, scoured industrial sites, belching refineries and factories, and the tattered, sclerotic communities that define the coast. Yes, we share some of our trashiness with others around the Gulf of Mexico. The truth is inescapable – we are awash in visual and auditory trash. Humans and garbage walk hand in hand along this beach.

I confess; I am an Aldo Leopold aficionado. In college I found his writing tiring, even depressing. Now, at age 60, I hang on his every word. Here is Aldo’s take on the human existence:

One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.

Mourning Dove
As birders, as nature watchers, we are, at least at a rudimentary level, ecologists. Perhaps our ecological interests are bottle necked (identifying birds), but I cannot imagine a sentient birder who cannot see both bush and bird. Our experiences with birds and nature should offer us a unique perspective to share with our fellow citizens currently walled off from nature.

Few of us care enough to make the effort. Birding is a game, a pastime through which we relax and escape. We are fortunate, for numbers of birds readily adapt to highly altered landscapes and our disinterest. We look for crows at dumps (aka landfills), waterfowl in settling ponds, pelagics from rip-rap jetties, and shorebirds on tidal flats created by these jetties. Most of us bird in damaged landscapes; few us of have ready access to “wilderness.”

But a park and a trash heap are different. A park is modified, but in a way that most of us find pleasing. Trash is an affront to the senses, yet people, like birds, seem to adapt to a degraded circumstance. Why?

I know the standard arguments – ignorance and poverty. But I have traveled to places where the poor did not live in squalor, where people took pride in the very little that they had scraped together in this life. Along the Texas coast, between these spellbinding protected lands, I see little pride. What I see are heaps of trash.

My family fled to Texas from hard-scrabble Mississippi immediately following the Civil War. I love my state as much as anyone, and from that attachment comes my anger and disgust. Perhaps we in conservation have spent so much time fighting for protected places that we overlooked what surrounds them. Shouldn’t conservation bleed into communities as well?

Nabokov said:

I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute.

I hope that no one is born a brute, but I do see many (or evidence of many) who have forsaken art and beauty. Enter birding. Birds, to me, are art more than biology. If we hope to touch the insensate masses, we must use poetry and song as much as prose and science. This is the reason that so many Americans still struggle with global climate change, and, in many cases, are aggressive deniers. With all of our proof, all of our science, we have failed to give the common man the slightest reason to care.

Birds see a world at risk where our crude actions, our trash, spoils even the most rudimentary existence. But birds cannot speak for themselves. We must be their voice to testify. It is not enough to only see, to only watch.

Scream.

Ted Lee Eubanks

15 October 2010

Faces of Flight – The Mulberry Birds

Birds, Conservation, Faces of Flight, Recreation, ,

Rose-breasted Grosbeak
Splat.

Purple juice spreads over my right shirt sleeve, gradually coalescing into a shape vaguely reminiscent of the Lesser Antilles. I peer upward, through the leaves, and see a rose-breasted grosbeak, its beak and breast equally tinted with a wine hue. The grosbeak gulps fruit with an audible appetite, each mulberry carefully manipulated in that outsized beak into its proper position before being inhaled into the bird’s gullet. Mistakes and choices are made, and a few of the berries slip from its grasp and fall to the ground or onto my shoulder.

Fingering my binoculars, other birds begin to appear within my focus. Buntings, orioles, tanagers, and grosbeaks are packed into this one tree, each enmeshed in a mulberry feeding frenzy. These are the mulberry birds, a cadre of audaciously decorated birds that are lured into my sight by the gravitational pull of one fruit – the mulberry.

In this instance, my mulberry tree is one of a row planted many years ago by Louis Smith in what became Houston Audubon’s Boy Scout Woods Bird Sanctuary in High Island, Texas. One fall Louis harvested a number of substantial branches from mulberries in the area, and then planted sections of the limbs along the pathway into the woods. The following spring these mulberries came to life, with their futures only briefly threatened when a couple of neighborhood kids decided to make their mark by uprooting the fledgling trees. I helped Louis replant the starts, and they seemed to take little notice of being yanked from the ground. I have often wondered how many individual birds have been nourished by Louis’s trees, and how many birders have been stained by their fruit.

The red mulberry (Morus rubra) is native to the eastern United States, spreading along the Texas coast as far south as the Coastal Bend. Birds (particularly migrants) sow the seeds widely through their droppings, and mulberries can be found sprouting in what would seem to be the most inhospitable locations. No matter, though. Come spring the fruit are guaranteed to attract a rich array of mulberry birds, no matter how bizarre the tree’s location might be.

The white mulberry (Morus alba) is a close cousin of the red, brought from Asia to America for silkworm culture in early colonial times. This species has naturalized and hybridized with the native red mulberry. In fact, the white mulberry is considered to be an invasive pest over much of its range. White mulberry is an aggressive pioneer, invading disturbed areas such as abandoned farm fields, highway right-of-ways, and undeveloped urban open spaces.

More ominously, the white mulberry threatens the viability of the red through genetic pollution (undesirable gene flow into wild populations). There are a number of white mulberry cultivars, including those that weep and those without fruit. To be honest, I have as much use for a fruitless mulberry as I do for a heatless jalapeño. The mulberry birds are oblivious to my reservations, and attack the fruits of both with equal zeal.

White mulberry leaves are the favored food for Bombyx mori (silkworm of the mulberry tree), the domesticated silkmoth whose cocoon is the source of silk. Chinese records indicate that the silk moth has been domesticated since 2700 B.C., and the species no longer exists in the wild. The domestic silk moth is now completely dependent on man for its survival and reproduction, and may be the most fundamentally domesticated animal in the world. How ironic that the fruit of the white mulberry is consumed by the wildest of creatures (migrant birds), while the leaves feed the most neutered.

The threat of genetic pollution is hardly limited to mulberries. The native wolf of the Gulf coast, the red wolf, has been on the receiving end of habitat loss and predator control since colonial times, and the remaining few freely interbreed with the expanding coyote. As a result fewer than 300 “pure” red wolves remain in existence.

Golden-winged Warbler

Golden-winged and blue-winged warblers also interbreed, with the hybrids even given their own common names (the dominant Brewster’s, and the recessive Lawrence’s). The golden-winged favors early-succession habitats, such as abandoned farmlands. As disturbed lands reforest, the golden-winged is displaced. In addition, these anthropogenic (man-caused) habitats allow the blue-winged to expand into the golden-winged range. The blue-winged then freely hybridizes with the golden-winged, often replacing the golden-winged within fifty years of its initial arrival. There are concerns that the golden-winged warbler may well disappear as a viable species in the future.

Yet my concerns about man’s tinkering with nature are momentarily shelved as I relish the sight of this grosbeak working his way along the branches like a shopper breezing through the produce section. Each fruit is individually inspected and assessed according to criteria known only to grosbeaks. Is this fruit ripe? Is this fruit sweet? Is this fruit blemished? I also wonder if each individual grosbeak has a particularly taste in mulberries, or does the need for nourishment after a nonstop flight over the Gulf of Mexico trump taste. I can only imagine what drives this grosbeak to choose one mulberry (tree and fruit) over the others, but in the end choices are made. My grosbeak is particular.

My grosbeak is also a short timer, wasting little time with this meal before continuing away from High Island to the forests of the eastern U.S. and Canada. This mulberry tree, here by plan, annually attracts birds that ultimately span thousands of miles of breeding and wintering range. For one moment, one brief instance, this tree is festooned with birds brought together by fruit rather than geography. And, for this same moment, I am brought together with the mulberry birds, also by plan.

Ted Eubanks
17 October 2010