Perspectives III

An Early Morning Bird Count

This morning’s bird tally, taken from my departure from home at 7:30 until I arrived at my day’s work at 7:50:

English Sparrow (a dozen or more)

House finch

Ring-billed gull

Common crow

Black-billed magpie

Common pigeon (Rock Dove)

English sparrows are the underdog of the bird world, maligned as an introduced, non-native species, frowned on for their tendency to hang around urban locations in flocks like grubby urchins lounging on street corners.  Like many people, though, I like an underdog – especially an irrepressibly cheerful underdog, and English sparrows fit this bill admirably. 

I wake up to the cheeping of sparrows most mornings.  Several of them have adopted out backyard pines as their preferred hangout, and their bright calls sparkle through the needles as they go about their business.  English sparrows are enormously successful birds in large part because they, like a few other animal species, not only have adapted to humanity’s presence but also actually prefer and seek out the company of humans.  They cluster around our suburban and urban communities, scrounge around our trash receptacles for food, build messy nests in our sheds, garages and eaves.  They’re my regular morning companions, and I’m glad to have them around.

That’s the great thing about evolution.  Different species respond differently to ever-changing environments.  The North America career of the English sparrow is a great example.  Like it or not, humans are the dominant ecological influence in much of North America, and while our presence hasn’t been beneficial to many species, the ubiquitous English sparrow has adapted quite well.

House finches hang around our house with their distant cousins the English sparrows.  I like house finches for many of the same reasons I like English sparrows, minus perhaps the underdog consideration.  While they haven’t adapted to our presence with the wild, carefree abandon of the English sparrow, they still do quite well around human habitations.

My first exposure to house finches came when I was in the Army, stationed at the Academy of Health Sciences in San Antonio, Texas.  The main Academy building was a huge square with an open courtyard in the middle, and house finches found it a wonderful nesting site. 

Here in Colorado, house finches compete with English sparrows and juncos for seed at our backyard feeder, adding their bright calls to the morning chorus.

Ring-billed gulls are tourists here in Colorado, visiting in the winter to glean scraps in parking lots and trash dumpsters.  This morning was a breezy one, and I saw one gull lift off from a parking lot surface simply by lifting his wings into an arch and letting the breeze float him off the surface without so much as a wingbeat.  Gulls seem to be gifted at riding the winds just like this, perhaps because they spend so much time on coastlines, where the offshore breezes are constant.

Crows roost nightly in the big pines in our backyard, and in the even larger pines in our neighbor’s yard across the cul-de-sac from our house.  In the spring, we always have at least one pair nesting in our neighbor’s big white pine.  One of North America’s most intelligent birds, crows are canny, they are adaptable, they are successful.  They’re also nest-robbers, a black mark in their public image, but even nest-robbing serves an evolutionary purpose.  Crows find it an irresistible temptation, a rich source of quality protein that’s readily available in spring and early summer.  And the selective pressure favors smaller birds who nest carefully, hiding their nests in foliage or other cover; this not only foils crows, but senseless children, like the two boys who knocked down a robin’s nest in our neighborhood last spring, killing the three-day old hatchlings.  In the long run these pressures improve the survival of both sides.

Driving to my day’s work, I stopped at a traffic light and spent a few moments watching a black-billed magpie rock back and forth on top of a street sign.  Such a long tail seems an unlikely thing to burden a bird with, but this one seemed to enjoy the windy morning.  This magpie, though, would flip his long tail feathers upward, letting the wind rock him forward until he had to flutter his wings to stay on the sign.  He’d then drop his tail and rock backwards, only to repeat the process a second later.

Why would he do that, over and over?  Maybe it was just fun?

When I arrived at my destination, my last bird of the morning count appeared in the form of a pair of pigeons clattering overhead.  While the species carries the official name of “Rock Dove,” the birds themselves are best known simply as “pigeon,” enunciated by city-dwellers with the same inflection as “rat” or “politician.”  Pigeons are much like English sparrows, an unsung underdog of the bird world, despised as dirty, accused of spreading disease – both of which are and have been true in many places, at many times.

But the ordinary pigeon is also regarded as fine table fare in many areas.  I’ve eaten many a clean, farm-country pigeon myself.  They’re powerful flyers, fast and agile, a challenging target for the wingshooter.

Living in a major metropolitan area like Denver, it’s easy to feel like nature is a far-away thing.  Looking west to the mountains, you get visions of pristine meadows, clear streams, clean stands of trees.

But the simple exercise of a ten-minute morning bird count can show us that nature is usually a lot closer than we think.