My Ugly Bald Cardinal

Mites: the answer to the question of July 20's post, "What caused my beautiful father cardinal to go bald?"

According to Dr. Zinn, friend and ornithology consultant, head mites are common among cardinals. They can preen the mites from their body feathers, but not from their heads.

Like many phenomena of nature, this one is sad, true, easy enough to understand---and renders a thing of beauty ugly---REALLY ugly.

Knowledge of the presence of head mites prompts other questions and more online research, though I can't vouch for the answers I found on the blogs of other birders: Are the mites harmful to the longterm health of the cardinal? No. Will the mites die off like insects in winter? Yes. Will the cardinal's head feathers grow back? Yes. Will the eggs of the mites left in abandoned nests survive the winter and begin a new generation next spring? Yes.

The particularly frightening, bald, black-headed, mostly-red patriarch of the cardinal nests in and around my backyard, still frequents the feeder over the deck, as do his comical first-year offspring. His mate and children are all varying shades of tan with reddish tails. One tall skinny daughter with disheveled yellowish feathers hops on the deck looking quite shell-shocked. She eats only the debris on the deck floor beneath the feeder, but her more aggressive brothers, equally comedic, vie for direct time and place at the portals of the feeder. Some of them are splotchier than others as they molt to exchange their brown feathers for red. The adolescent males exercise their crest feathers up and down, strutting and prancing, discovering their male prowess, providing us with great summer theater through the window.

One of them, poor baby, is beginning to show signs of mites---that is, losing feathers about his neck and head. It's the cardinal equivalent of male pattern baldness. dkm

The Hawk Next Door

By its size and stubby tail, I know the hawk that accompanies me while I work outside in the cool of the morning is a youngster. Male or female, I don't know, but it has a persistent whistle, which I hear often, even from inside the house, and this morning, from a lower bare dead branch of the dogwood just above my head.

It's a little unnerving to weed with a hawk watching my every move. What does it want? dkm

The Colbert Report

It's been too hot to be outside---but I'm ever aware that the wild creatures who share their space with me can't share my luxury of choice about staying where it's cool. The life that teems out there has not stopped just because I'm not there to observe it.

All it takes to find a topic for a blog-post is to show up. (Wish I could remember to apply the same principle to my more intentional writing endeavors.) This morning, no matter the high heat, I spent a half-hour weeding in Sarah's 21st birthday garden, and sure enough, much presented itself about which to comment---mainly the hawk next door.

At first I wondered if it was one of our abundant bluejays mimicking a hawk's whistle, as I've been fooled many times before. But these whistles seemed too long, too persistent, too loud for a jay. I stopped weeding to look in their direction, in time enough to spot the powerful and majestic silence of a hawk taking flight from the fence between my yard and the neighbor's into the leafy canopy. Had this hawk been watching me weed? I had been aware of its whistle while I worked. It continued from some higher perch unseen, long after I returned to my hoeing.

I half-expected the Colbert Report to begin. dkm

Squirrel vs. Gravity and Safflower

Q: How long can a squirrel hang upside down without righting itself?

A: At least eleven minutes if an uncontested food source is involved.

I know because I timed it, and it would have been longer if another squirrel hadn't chased the first one away. I had cleaned up an old tube-shaped bird feeder that hangs from an arm on a pole in my garden and that I know is not squirrel proof. I refilled it with safflower seeds because the package said squirrels don't like them and finches do. Without dwelling on that bit of false advertising, I find it hugely surprising that a squirrel can hang upside down from a bar for eleven minutes eating ANYthing.

This squirrel's hind feet held tight to the bar while its body stretched long and thin and straight downward. I had an urge to tickle its pure white soft-looking belly. Its head and front feet snatched the seeds from the bottom of the feeder, barely within reach. Its tail flopped loosely around, I assume assisting with balance.

The whole spectacle seemed counter to everything I know about gravity. Wouldn't the pressure of blood draining into the squirrel's head cause it to turn upright once in a while? Wouldn't the downward force of gravity prevent the chewed and swallowed seeds from moving upward through a wrong-turned outstretched esophagus? How long could it have continued its upside down quest if it hadn't been chased away? These are questions whose answers can not be found on the internet. Still, I'm curious. dkm

Window Theater

What would cause a seemingly healthy male cardinal to go bald? At first he looked deformed, misshapen, splotchy red and black about the head, but as more and more crest feathers fell out, I saw that his head was perfectly round like a bird's head should be--and surprisingly black, when featherless. By now, he is frightening to behold, with bare black head above a body fully feathered in red. He never stills long enough for a photo.

The cardinal in question has come to the feeder outside the sliding glass doors since mid-May, almost certainly the patriarch of the nest in the neighbor's holly tree. Through two months of live-acting, he gradually revealed more and more black-skinned head.

First spied mating in the azalea thicket, then in and out of the holly tree, often on the banister feeding his beloved a sunflower seed from the feeder, he has been a model lover and father. Now his adolescent sons and daughters come to the feeder with him, sometimes lined up three at a time on the deck banister, waiting their turn on the feeder perch. The young are smaller and browner and comical looking, the males turning redder and cockier by the day. Only the absence of their father's head and crest feathers makes for a less than perfect family portrayal.

Is it caused by an environmental hazard, or is it genetic? I'm guessing the former. Either way, I half-expected the young to show signs of the same problem, since both their habitat and genetic codes are the same as their father's. So far, the new generation looks healthy. Time will tell.

Mysteries abound when one pays long slow attention. I would have expected more answers, fewer questions. It's been quite the opposite. The only truth revealed is that the more one sees, the more one finds about which to wonder. dkm

M.A.P.S. / Releasing a Bird

To hold a wild bird in one's hand is to touch the pulse of the natural world. The warmth of its bird body, the beat of its heart, the clutch of its foot around a finger, the quiver of wing. Each sensation, taken individually, was a thing of wonder; collectively, they coalesced into an awareness like no other, of such combination of frailty and bravery and stoicism and toughness and patience and endurance and perseverance and grace as to be a model for how we all should live.

Yet such sentient abundance paled next to the exhilarating release of tension that came from the lifting up and letting go of each bird---to feel it take leave, to see it first dip then rise into the air on its own power when only seconds before it had been powerless against the soft fold of a human hand. The high competence of a small bird in the face of what must have been a terrifying ordeal was exemplary. Unrolling my fingers to return each bird to its own wild brought a lightness of spirit to be remembered for a lifetime. dkm

M.A.P.S. / Banding a Bird

If a bird captured for momentary study does not already sport a numbered leg band, one is applied. Banding is the final step in the process, after examining the bird, after recording the collected data, and before the ultimate release. I could never have guessed how one goes about putting a metal band (I think it is lightweight aluminum---please correct me if wrong, Dr Zinn :-) around a wild bird's leg without hurting it, so again my curiosity was piqued.

Of course, as for most human endeavors, there are tools perfectly engineered for the task. The thickness of a bird's leg is first measured with a simple but cleverly designed instrument of calibrated notches, in order to select the correct size of band. The sizing instrument is a flat plastic card with notches along all four sides that correlate with all potential leg sizes. This photo shows the leg-sizing card, the apparatus for measuring the wing, and the hand pliers used to clamp on the band.

The bands are small metal tubes, open on one side like the letter "C," that come on a carefully regulated wire, so as to always be applied in proper numerical order. The precisely sized and numbered band is inserted into a specialty pliers, again with perfectly sized notches engineered so as not to injure the bird, and using the hand pliers, BINGO,the band is gently clamped around the shaft of the leg, allowing it to fit like a loose bracelet.

Swallow, little swallow, (a reference to Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince), your discomfort is almost over. Next step, release, but for that near-religious experience, you must wait till next post. dkm

M.A.P.S. / Studying a Captured Bird

Most surprising of all the new information gained on my bird banding day was how gender and reproductive status are determined in species that look alike. The researcher blows on the belly to part the feathers, thus revealing either a female's "brood patch" or a male's "cloacal protruberance," both of which are red and swollen during the breeding season. The brood patch is a large featherless patch on the breast and belly with which the female warms her eggs or nestlings. The cloacal protruberance of the male is what it sounds like.

I found it comical to discover that the brood patch is assessed with descriptive terms like vascular, wrinkled, smooth, heavy, and molting, while the cloacal protruberance is assessed only for small, medium, and large. Make of that what you will regarding cross-species similarities, but don't deny that it makes you laugh.

Common Yellowthroat

Inspecting the feet

Measuring the wing of a cat bird

Determining flight feather wear

Blowing apart the feathers to assess "brood patch" or "cloacal protruberance"

Recording the data

The data collection was fascinating to watch. Each bird was inspected, measured, and assessed at close range for more than 30 specific bits of information, all of which were meticulously recorded, and many of which I had never before considered. My learning curve was high. Things like flight feather wear, molt limits, plumage; measurements of wing, skull, tail, body fat, eye color, mouth & bill, and much much more, for the purpose of determining age, gender, health, and reproductive status. Much of it was more technical than I was able to follow, though I found it intensely interesting---especially the myriad determinations about the plumage---the primary & secondary coverts (outer feathers), and inspecting the molt limits for primaries, secondaries, tertials, and rectrices to determine age, history, and health status.

If the captured bird already had a band on its leg, the number was recorded along with the new data, later to be entered into computer and compared with earlier observations of same bird. If not, it was given a band, a process to be described in next post. dkm

M.A.P.S. / Checking the Nets / Extracting the Birds

Step two of the bird banding day was to check the nets and extract any captured birds, which we would do every half-hour throughout the morning. It is still darkish in northern Indiana at 6:30, but now the birds are singing like crazy, unlike the quiet of 6:00 when we opened the nets. To my untrained ear it is a random dawn chorus---beautiful but indecipherable. To Dr. Zinn, it is an audible map and promise of which birds might be caught, banded, measured, studied, and released on this day. I am nothing less than astounded at the numbers of individual bird songs she can hear, identify, and imitate, including her fluency of mnemonic codes for each.

I meet the gathered team of five expert bird banders---Dr. Zinn in the middle, three graduate students including my daughter Hannah, and a gentleman volunteer who is a retired biologist from Cornell ornithology laboratories. I notice they are all wearing waterproof boots. Already my wet cold feet tell me why. Promptly at 6:30 the team members clip a few small drawstring bags to their belts, get their net assignments and head out. The bags, made of white cloth, are for carrying the birds, once extracted from the nets, back to the banding table. They prevent trauma, injury, and escape.

I follow Hannah to our assigned nets. My shoes and socks soak up the morning dew as we slog through the long prairie grass. Of our three nets, two are empty, and one holds two small brown birds struggling to get free---a song sparrow and a female indigo bunting. An indigo bunting! Hannah gently cups the first thrashing sparrow in her hand, holding its neck between two fingers so the head is on the outside of her hand, the body in her palm. She carefully lifts each thread of the net from the body, but the feet are so hopelessly entwined as to necessitate calling Dr. Zinn for assistance. The second, the bunting, Hannah extracts easily and drops into a bag. Dr. Zinn arrives from somewhere in the dawn to skillfully rescue the sparrow. We carry them back to the banding table. I imagine myself to be a small sparrow, stunned by whatever I have flown into, frightened by the monster hands, mystified by the whiteness from which I cannot escape, unable to understand that this is a temporary discomfort or that I am making a contribution to scientific research. I might be fighting for my life, but I'm not sure, because so far I'm not hurt and no one is eating me. Who knows? I only know I don't like it.

I, as an amateur observer of the work, am thoroughly energized by the experience---the wonder of the natural world, the thrill of new knowledge gained, the marvel at the organizational efficiency of the bird banding process, the care and respect the researchers exhibit for each tiny specimen they study. More on that part of it tomorrow. dkm

M.A.P.S. Opening the Nets

I had the remarkable opportunity to participate in a bird banding last week, thanks to my daughter and her environmental education professor, Dr. Lisa Zinn, whom I have consulted in earlier posts on questions about backyard birding. Dr. Zinn organizes bird bandings for MAPS (Monitoring Avian Productivity & Survival).

I was honored by the invitation and had no idea what to expect of a bird banding. Will describe it in detail, assuming anyone interested enough to be reading this may be as curious as I was about the details of banding birds. It will take several entries to describe.

Opening the Nets:

Our day began at 4:30a in order to arrive at the banding station in time for the 6:00a spreading of the nets. The only recommended attire was water proof boots, which I did not have, but after the first 30 minutes, wished to.

By the experts' casual references to opening the nets, I'm sure they would be surprised at my intense wondering about what exactly that meant. What it meant was untwisting a large black rectangular-shaped net and stretching it vertically between two 8 ft tall poles, about ten yards apart. When the net was fully untwisted, spread, and hooked up, it made an invisible wall between the poles, 8 feet high by ten yards wide. The nylon strings of the net were as fine as sewing thread but unbreakable, in a grid of half-inch squares. The net itself was three layers thick, the top of each layer lower than the one behind it so that no matter where a bird flew into the net it would fall down into a pocket made by the next lower layer, and thus would be held captive in the net without getting hurt.

Ten such nets were set up at strategic locations around the marsh and grasslands of this nature preserve in northern Indiana. Once all ten nets were spread we sat down at the banding station with a good cup of coffee to wait. In a half-hour, and every half-hour throughout the day, we would check the nets for captured birds. That's enough for one day's entry. More tomorrow. dkm