We’ll Always Have Parrots!

The United States was once a haven to many native parrot species, but we managed to kill them all off within two centuries, except for two species. The thick-billed parrot (aka the thick-billed macaw, or conure) and the green parakeet are the only living members of the wild parrot family still extant in the US. So, the uptick of expanding feral parrot flocks thriving in LA and San Diego is pretty cool—even if they aren’t native as they are fast disappearing from their native ranges.

The green parakeet habitat ranges from Southern Texas, into Mexico and Nicaragua. When I was traveling in Oaxaca, Mexico, and in the Lacondon jungle, young boys would try to sell the caged birds to the tourists. We would make jokes and tell them in Spanish that we would buy one when the green parrots were ripe. They sheepishly got the joke, Spanish being their second language as well.

There are nearly a dozen permanent feral parrot species residing in the urban wilderness of California. San Diego’s wild parrots divide their time between Mexico and the San Diego beaches, LA has the most diverse large flocks of wild escapee parrots, and San Francisco runs a close second. Homeless musician Mark Bittner wrote a book, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill which was turned into a PBS documentary of the same name by Judy Irving in 2003. The two met, fell in love and were married in 2008.

The San Francisco parrots, the chatty cherry-headed conures or red-masked parakeets, are native to northwest South America, especially Ecuador and Peru, while the mitered conures hail from Argentina, Bolivia, and Peru. And apparently there is one lonesome blue-crowned conure in the mixed species flock as well. These raucous and saucy urban creatures have resided on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, since at least the 1980s—possible escapees from a pet store. 

California condors return to the Bay Area

Today, in the news headlines, rare photos of six California condors circling the updrafts of Mount Diablo for the first time in over 100 years. It seems these condors drifted north from the Pinnacles National Monument. Slowly they have been re-populating California. They haven’t quite hit the 500-bird mark but it’s a miracle compared to the last statistic, which was the virtual death knell for the species, when the last 22 free wild condors captured in the 1980s in order to save the species from extinction.

In the 1950s, the ranchers were hellbent on exterminating all the bobcats and cougars, foxes and coyotes, the golden, and the bald eagles, and all the hawks from the landscape—it was considered a necessity for taking care of the livestock. I remember their stories of eagles dropping lambs and calves on rock outcrops to kill them. I watched these wild creatures disappear from my childhood landscape. Their presence was noted by their absence. But I had a vast memory bank.

When the ranchers ran out of eagles and redtail hawks to shoot down, it seems they began in on the bluejays and vultures, perhaps for an excuse for something to shoot at, leaving behind a plethora of lead bullets in the landscape. Ten years ago, California was the first state in the nation to successfully ban lead bullets and lead sinkers for good, the wildlife has been making a slow comeback.

The native bluejays were replaced by Stellar’s jays who moved in en masse to fill the empty niche. And no, they were not drab scrub jays that you see today, these bluejays had black striped blue and white wing and tail feathers that I loved to collect.  I remember the first time I saw a Stellar’s jay hopping up Barranca Road by the Bianchi‘s field. Dark head and a crest. I had never seen one like it before, so I stored it away in my memory banks. 

A frumpy bluebird shoved out of the nest too soon so I put him back.

By this time, the western bluebirds had also disappeared from the landscape, because of DDT poisoning. This was about the time Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring came out. I used to think that bluebirds were male robins because they were blue and orange. You know, blue for boys? I was a strange child of the outdoors and was constantly making mental connections between things. Call it similitude if you must. 

The redtail hawks never returned to their home range, but were replaced with striped red-shouldered hawks from Sonoma County. I can’t stand their piercing cry. I prefer the song of the red tail hawk any day. I used to practice saying Tcheer! And they’d answer back. Collecting their red tail feathers was considered a big coup.

I once took care of a friend, Christian Djorziak’s injured redtail hawk. When I tossed her a chicken neck, she would lean back on her massive wings as if they were elbows and grab it with her feet. I marveled at her beauty, how big she was up close. Those sharp eyes, those talons, that beak. Respect and awe.

A dark morph redtail hawk checks out free range chickens, LaFranchi Ranch, Nicasio.

In the late 1950s we sometimes saw condors in West Marin, but it was very rare. Compared to turkey vultures they were massive in the sky—much bigger than vultures or eagles. I only saw one, never a flock. The condors had large white patches on their underwings—one reason why it stuck out in my mind. It was a placeholder for the future, a time for when I could properly identify them. But by then, they were long gone from the wild. Facing mass extinction from DDT and lead bullets, like the peregrine falcon.

In the early 1970s we used to drive up a steep fire road out to the Big Sur garbage dump just to see the last of the wild California condors circling in the updrafts over the desolate valleys and ridges. And you could definitely see their distinctive white underwing patches, or chevrons pointing the way out.

And outside of Cusco, Peru, I watched massive Andean vultures circling over the ruins of Sacsayhuamán. They too had white patches on their underwings. And elegantly dressed in fluffy white neck ruffs, like Elizabethan courtiers, or cartoon vultures.

A friend writes how she once saw black vultures with their distinctive white under wing patches, near Wildcat Beach on the coast in the 1990s—their range does not typically overlap with our CA redheaded turkey vultures—the black-headed vultures’ westernmost winter range includes AZ, and the southern states. But I guess one could’ve been blown a bit off course. Or maybe he was slumming it in CA. Admit it, we have way better beaches and way better carcasses too.

The other day I saw a massive turkey vulture flock funneling in an updraft over the pastures west of Petaluma. Always love seeing them swirling like WB Yeats’ Pern in a Gyre during the fall migration. It’s more like a congregation or perhaps a reunion as they don’t ever leave the Northbay. We used to lie down in the middle of the field and play dead to see if they would come closer. They never did, even if we didn’t bathe for a couple of weeks, we just weren’t stinky enough.

For the the record, our red-headed turkey vultures will also eat live meat. They are opportunists, not pacifist garbage-men. I once witnessed them descend upon a wounded fawn that some asshole hit with his fancyass Porsche right in front of Rancho Nicasio—and he drove off without a backward glance. Vultures have way better table manners than he did—even if they did tear out the fawn’s still beating heart. He was a goner, and we all knew it. I sure didn’t want to do the coup de grace.

A little known fact, baby red-headed turkey vultures have dark colored heads. Check out my photo of Junior perched between both his parents munching on a carcass in San Antonio Creek. Very different than black vultures. Sleeker heads and necks. They are very loving and doting parents. You can see from the photo that our turkey vultures are not really black. I love the blue black iridescent breast and neck feathers juxtaposed against the two-tone brown wing feathers.

Black vultures are definitely smaller and strange looking with their wrinkled cowls like Anubis escaped from the underworld. Check out this link for their range, and also how they look so different in the sky. I don’t think I’ve ever knowingly seen a black-headed vulture. Apparently they will hang out with turkey vultures, because turkey vultures have an acute sense of smell. Better than theirs. So I guess they’re carrion opportunists.

Check out this photo of the white underwing of the condor I was mentioning earlier. And this is why they significantly stood out in my childish memory banks. They were so unlike turkey vultures, and they were massive in the sky. You could actually hear them soaring in the wind.

A turkey vulture with a massive wingspan.

Black morph hawk (photos)

I disturbed a hawk who was eyeing the La Franchi freerange chickens in the field across from the Nicasio Reservoir. Somehow I don’t think the Alsatian guard dogs will be able to keep this fellow at bay. What kind of hawk, it’s like a Mexican hawk, brown all over. Cooper’s hawk comes to mind. Not a red tail. Darker. Not striped, so not a red shouldered hawk, more like a red tail hawk, but melanistic. There are several dark hawks along Nicasio reservoir. I have many photos of them. He was upset with me because I was too close to him—and his  coveted chickens....he turned around on his post to give me a baleful stare. If looks could kill. I was shooting from inside the car but clearly that didn’t fool him. He stood his ground. Geoff Davis said, Yearling redtail—only ONE stripe on tail feathers, immature and hungry and been wet. I thought maybe his fishing expedition failed, and he was trying his luck in greener pastures.

Night heron on the Petaluma River, photo

Night heron. He’s no singing canary. I told him not to give up his day job. With a voice like that, he could wind up in Sing-sing. The song of his people is somewhere between an Edgar Allen Poe inspired death rattle, and someone being vigorously strangled. Looks can be deceiving. He’s got a long neck stuffed underneath that feather ruff. Like a jack in the box. Otherwise, he’d starve to death as his beak couldn't reach the ground.

• NOTE: THIS POST ALONG WITH 12 OTHER POSTS WAS ERRONEOUSLY REMOVED BY BLOGGER FOR VIOLATING COMMUNITY STANDARDS ON 5/14/21. It was reinstated as a draft the next day. I am still pissed off.

Rescuing a Towhee Chick

 

Found this little towhee fledgling scurrying up the driveway like a mouse

A bird in hand is worth...? I found this little towhee fledgling scurrying up the driveway like a mouse. I was going to head out to do some shopping. I completely forgot to do my errands, as I played nursemaid to this chick. No milk, no TP.

No tail feathers, a suggestion of wings, orange ass coming in nicely.

Note to feather-brained self: don't jump from the nest until your feathers have fully fledged. He was reunited with his ma in the lemon tree. Lots of squawking going down. They had much to say to each other. I'm sure scolding was involved.

Are you calling me cheep? Cheep? Why I oughta...

 S/he's been playing Marco Polo with the parental-unit in the lemon tree all afternoon. Mother bird barks a shrill militant "Marco," and her offspring dutifully answers with a melodious "Polo"—somewhat like a raven's secret warble song.

Insert Beatles song here: "She's leaving home..." Methinks s/he will be spending the might alone in the tree. S/e was eating bugs earlier, preening, simultaneously stretching both leg and wing at the same time, like a very small ballerina dancing to Swan Lake on a branch.

Um, you're not my mother. Emits an ungawdly squawk of protest.

Maw, come back! Feed me. I'm so very hungry.

ENVOI: Two days later, on Bastille Day, when I finally got around to running my errands, I heard the towhee calling her one-note song. And no answering warble from her wayward chick. The yard felt emptier than usual. Sad to say, I found the chick, or his brother, squashed in the driveway, the salmon-painted curbs, insurmountable as the Grand Canyon to one so small.

She's hopping up and down the driveway, bobbing and weaving like someone at the Wailing Wall, she keeps calling out to him, he no longer answers, he lies so near her in the garden above the curb, but she can't see him, can't smell him. Meanwhile the ants begin their grim work, transforming the chick into another iteration of the self.

I don't think it was me who ran over the young bird, rigor mortis had set in.It may have been another bird, but I think not. I went back and checked, I was feeling so bad.... So, despite my best intentions, I guess I didn't interrupt its karma, I merely changed its delivery date. Then I got the news about Nice. It all fell into place and became a poem.

DEATH OF A SONGBIRD, BASTILLE DAY
Towhee visitor
Towhee in the KitchenKITCHEN CHICKEN

DUN I, IONA

DUN I, IONA
(after a translation from the Ohlone)

I dreamed you were a sliver
of light glinting on the curve of the sea
On the machair, the rabbits
cleansed their scalloped sand porches
while amid the lambs, the hares stood sentinel
I dreamed of you dreaming me
on the granite dome of Dun I,
at the center of the island
between a rowan and an oak
in a crevice at the well of age,
the falcon's eye, a distant sun
dancing on the edge of the world.

2/5/12

published in A MOUSE THE COLOR OF MOUSE ©2012
Poetry Inside Out, Center for the Art of Translation
Medusa's Kitchen, 2012

PROCRASTINATION

PROCRASTINATION

To begin the eleventh month
with a poem on procrastination

some 13 days after the fact,

November's poetry roll booty call

expressed in prime numbers

and how I'm late —always running
late for a very important date

but I was distracted by a murmuration
of starlings which led to a long blog

that spanned the bridge of time itself

like a black river of birds in the sky

followed by the poem nearly lost

but somehow, amidst all these fragments

something was saved.

Perhaps the flutter of birdwings 

in an abandoned house,

that thump against the glass—

a fallen bird, or a poem 

frightened to death before its begun.

I'll get to it eventually

but for now, this will have to do.

11/1/11

A FIFTH OF BEETTHOVEN

A FIFTH OF BEETTHOVEN

Yesterday I told my students a story
about Gustavo's crazy cockatiel,
how Kirk the musicman tried to teach it
the opening to Beethoven's Fifth
& how it couldn't get that last chord right,
no matter how much they both practiced,
how the note always fell flat, but the bird

would say entonces, or coño, and include
all the tape recorder clicks & whirrs.

Every time I went: DA-DA DAA Dum,
the class bird catcalled and wolf whistled,
dirty danced on his perch, bopped his head,

puffed out his orange cheek patches,
and crested like a Mohican. I was 

explaining how some words fall flat,

the poet's job to seek the music of words,

was a matter of practice, like doing scales.

Unfortunately, the bird got so worked up
he catcalled the entire poetry hour.

I was hoping he'd just take the Fifth
(or maybe down a fifth) and shut up
before I threatened to squeeze
his sorry yellow ass into a tequila sunrise.

4/4/2009

Medusa's Kitchen, 2010

animal poem

(Later I found out his name was Mo.

Mo the cockatiel, we were twinned names.)

Journal entry, 4/21/92 housesitting at Simone and Toni’s, Bluebird morning

4/21/92 I am housesitting at Simone and Toni’s, it’s a blessed escape from the clutter of my house for someone else’s clutter. I’m escaping the distraction of my creepy new neighbor. So many wonderful places to write, but the dog won’t leave me alone. How I hate to be pestered in the morning. So I tossed the cat out. The dog circles me every minute in the house. Toni probably walks her each morning.

All the outside chairs face towards the house. I don’t want to look inward, I want the horizon. First year of decent rains after several seasons of drought, the oatgrass is reaching skyward. Too bad the hot tub is broken, I could spend part of each day submerged in this beauty. Yesterday I managed to complete my CPITS end of year report, divvying out matching money etc.

Yesterday I awoke to bluebirds banging on my window, striking the glass. All that extraordinary blueness of sky and rust colored bellies. I read once that most of bird feathers are optical prisms. It’s a question of refracted light, not a pigment. Their blueness is ethereal. I cannot imagine mere pigment entering into it. No matter what I did, those two bluebirds dove at the window. I darkened the blinds. Nothing worked. I realized that the window was a mirror and the pair were defending their territory against themselves. They were their own worst enemy.

I remember seeing bluebirds when I was young making that visual comparison with time. I used to confuse them with robins, both with their red breasts. I thought they were related, Or that they were the girls. Then came Rachel Carson’s silent spring.

And since then I’ve seen bluebirds twice in my life. Once, years ago in Chico, I rode horseback in a meadow on John Crawford’s red mare, Bluebirds swooping over me. another time out near Bridgeport with Lee Perron, we were hiking and came across a little upland meadow stretched between the framework of hills. The bottom of a gully, really, like those hanging basket lakes of the Sierras. And there they were filling the air with their blue loveliness. They took my breath away as they do each time I see them, because they have been such rare birds in my life. It’s like a glimpse back into my childhood.

I’m always searching for lost memories to mine, as if my inarticulate memories, layered beneath  years of time and neglect, held some basic truths. Finding that, I find a part of myself. I have no way of knowing which thoughts are pure, the innocent observations, without form or structure, or these gleaned from the nuances of an educated mind. Certainly they are more sophisticated.

But the purity of bluebird magic, that breathlessness occurs only in hindsight, using the sophisticated tools of language, I search for a way to describe what I must’ve felt that isn’t a cliché. Bluebirds reduced to cliché, associated with happiness, fill me with inexplicable joy and I don’t know why, other than the invisible link to my past, their disappearance for years, until I forgot I ever saw bluebirds.

It wasn’t until I was in my early 30s before I saw them again. 25 years I waited for them, I looked for them, not finding them anywhere. 25 years I searched for joy, and found other birds commonly filling the air. A bluejay is cousin to the crow, not a songbird. They knife the air with their coarse call, only in flight do they embellish and scallop it.

I do not know the song of the bluebird, but in my darkest hour, a student wrote a poem, the song of the bluebird to the explosion of the bomb, darkness is fleeting, light is eternal. How could she know of such things in fifth grade? Even she doesn’t know their song, though she writes of it.

The bluebird holds some evocative mystery, though its very name seems clichéd, but if we rename the bluebird, some of the mystery would be lost, we’d have to reinvent it. How did this bluebird become linked with happiness? its song, its color, its habitat, harbinger of spring, Sentinel of joy, diving at my window.

Arise, arise, it is day, don’t squander the preciousness of it, the metaphor seems to say. But it was really just two feisty birds defending their own turf from strangers. Territorial imperative and delusion, the urge to nest, the urge to mate, to raise young is of primal concern. Delusion and joy, seeking something irrefutably lost, was it ever there. Joy is subtle if you look at it head on, it disappears, only the absence of joy heightens it when it comes. Like those bluebird feathers, the illusion of blue, of joy as seen from the corners of the eye and never head on.

This morning I came looking for the bluebirds and found only a disappointment of barn-swallows instead.

Barn swallow (drawing)

MORNING COMES IN AWASH

Morning comes in awash

with sunlight the color of apples.

A bluejay banging away at the window

with a need to build her nest,

searches for a place to call home,

not remembering from day to day

that the window is still there.

Still, she comes

trying to find a way in.

Even if she could,

her chances are no better

today than yesterday.

Her instinct surely guides her,

and when she finds the right spot,

she'll know her need, while I

continue to stare out this window,

making no move at all.

4/18/1980
rev. 1984
Forestville