Beverly Hills Declares War on Birds

Beverly Hills, home to generations of movie stars and other rich people, has declared war on songbirds. It may be part of a broader conspiracy. San Francisco, Santa Monica, West Hollywood and Los Angeles have piled on.

Woe betide anyone Beverly Hills or those other California towns who dares declaw a cat!  All those places have just passed city ordinances outlawing the declawing of cats.

From what I’ve read about the fearsome debate in California, which apparently revolves around a political dispute between local communities and the state veterinarian association, not one word has been raised in defense of song birds, the leading victims of those claws.

That’s not fair. If you are at risk of death from a cat’s claws, shouldn’t you at least get your own spokesman? I realize it’s Hollywood, so maybe the birds aren’t entitled to a lawyer, but surely a publicist at least? Or somebody from PETA?  (Well, maybe not PETA. I see that the president of PETA now demands that we call fish “sea kitties,” so I suspect that PETA may have a bias in favor of cats and a prejudice against birds, the largest population of wild animals on earth.)

We’ve written before about the songbird death rate caused by both pet and feral cats.  Let us hasten to add that, of all the options available to ease that slaughter, declawing your pet cats should be a last resort.  Far better to keep your cat indoors — with a scratching post — where coyotes, owls, cars, dogs, and other cat predators can’t get at them. Indoor cats live longer, healthier, warmer, and happier lives. Here are some other ideas.

And why doesn’t someone invent a way to simply cover cat claws with some kind of padding? Ballet dancers have them for their toes.

Birds used to have claws themselves, like this. No cat would mess with a bird like that.

The downside of criminalizing cat declawing is that people who want to keep their cats indoors may decide that protecting their nice furniture — and we assume the denizens of Beverly Hills have very nice furniture — from the claws of their pets is more important than keeping the cat indoors. Being law abiding citizens they will then condemn their pets to an outdoor life and their pets will set about killing wild birds.

Of course, this may be nothing more than a ploy by those California communities to pander to the cat tourism industry.  Big business, cat tourism.  People are always driving half-way across the continent or flying half-way round the world just to get a fleeting glimpse of a stranger’s pet cat.  Not at all like birders, who hardly ever go anywhere in search of birds. Cat tourists leave no stone unturned in the quest to see just one more pet cat.

But at least now we know the reason why, when you look at lists of the best places to go birding in the world, Beverly Hills and West Hollywood are not on the list.

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NBC and the Los Angeles Times reported the news about the ordinances, as did the Huffington Post. The quote from the PETA president came from this.

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Don’t forget to be a great citizen and shop at The Fat Finch this weekend.

The Language of Birds

The language of birds is very ancient, and, like other ancient modes of speech, very elliptical: little is said, but much is meant and understood.   Gilbert White – English naturalist (1720-1793)
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Be a Great Citizen

The world’s economy remains in trouble and all good people everywhere are asking, “How can I help?”

We’ve got the answer!

Spend money at The Fat Finch! Or, if you live close, come into the physical store, address below.

You’ll help the world’s economy, you’ll help keep us open for business in these hard times, and you’ll feel a sense of purity and serenity, knowing that you’ve done your bit to help the world.

Really.

No birds were harmed in the making of this blog post.

Prayer to the Snowy Owl

Out here, it’s the Season When Thunder Sleeps and the snows of winter begin to fall. Up north, in the Arctic, it grows dark.

But that does not mean all life, or even all bird life halts up there in the dark.  To remind us of that, here is John Haines’ wonderful poem about Snowy Owls:

Prayer to the Snowy Owl

Descend, silent spirit;
you whose golden eyes
pierce the grey
shroud of the world—
Marvelous ghost!
Drifter of the arctic night,
destroyer of those
who gnaw in the dark—
preserver of whiteness.

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The painting of the Snowy Owls is by Roger Tory Peterson.

Cats, Birds, and Bird Feeding

Recently, we had two customers in the store who are cat lovers.  Seeing the cat bib we sell, designed to passively interfere with cats’ hunting, one of them seemed offended that someone would put that on a cat and she remarked, “ Cats kill birds, it’s nature!”

Egyptian Cat Mummy

That’s wrong, at least in all the world except North Africa and the Near East.  Cats are indigenous there but nowhere else. In North Africa and the Near East birds have been evolving defenses against cat predation since the Pleistocene. Elsewhere though, cats are newcomers, brought by humans; instead of having hundreds of centuries to evolve defenses, birds have had only a few hundred years. Birds in places like North America have not had time to develop defenses against cats’ deadly effective hunting skills.

So, it is not “nature” nor is it “natural” for cats to be killing birds in North America, South America or Europe. Humans interfered with nature when we brought the cats.

And have we brought cats.  In the United States alone more than   150 million cats are alive as you read this, their ancestors brought here by humans. More than 82 million are kept as pets and the number of feral cats probably exceeds 70 million. And all of them are killing birds whenever they get the chance.

Here is the grim fact:  Cats kill millions of birds every year.  Pet cats don’t kill them for food, they kill them because cats are hunters.  Their hunting instinct is independent of their urge to eat and they hunt whether they are hungry or not. Feral cats kill many more.

Kitten Eating a Rabbit

We’ve written in this space before about the well-intentioned efforts of cat lovers to trap, neuter, and return feral cats.  (TNR) Now comes yet another piece of scientific evidence that it doesn’t work.  Biologists recently studied a feral cat colony in Tucson, Arizona, and discovered that local coyotes were eating them. And, another anecdotal piece of evidence arrived in our in-box:  At one feral cat colony in Southern California, coyotes discovered the cats and killed most of them.  Then, the coyotes kept coming back to eat the cat food set out by the people maintaining the colony.

We doubt that our customer who thinks that cats are just being true to nature when they kill birds would be as blase if a coyote kills one of their pet cats.  But, just as cats hunt birds, coyotes hunt small mammals. And the coyotes are indigenous.

Bird-Saving Cat Bib

Because this slaughter of birds by cats is human-caused, we ought to do as much as we can to lessen the impact on wild bird populations.  Here are some suggestions:

1.  Keep your cats indoors.  This is the most humane solution, indoor cats lead longer and healthier lives.

2. Hang birdfeeders out in the open and far enough away from trees so that cats can’t hunt them from underneath or inside  a tree.

3. If you live where cactus grows, surround the birdfeeding station with cactus.

2.    The best recent invention we’ve seen for preventing cats from killing birds is a catbib.  Invented by a backyard, bird-feeding, cat lover, the CatBib (a thin neoprene bib) disrupts the cat’s hunting skills, without interfering with any other kitty activities. It acts as a barrier between cat and prey by getting in the way just as the cat strikes out for the bird. Because birds see in color, it also functions as a colorful visual warning to the birds. Birds can see the cat coming. The best part about the catbib is that it doesn’t interfere with the cat’s ability to eat, drink, run, etc. and enjoy being outdoors. Cat owners who have used it report great success. (By the way, bells on cat collars don’t work. Cats can creep along stealthily and hunt without the bell ever ringing. Like we said, they are great hunters.)

And everybody should neuter their pet cats. Over time, that would even help reduce the number of feral cats.

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Full Disclosure: Until a few weeks ago, when his time to die finally came, we had shared fifteen years of our life with a cat.  Waldo wasn’t much of a hunter in his final years because his eyesight faded and he was content, as an old cat should be, to sleep in warm places. And we had him pretty well trained to stay in the front yard and out of the back yard where the bird feeders are.  But he no doubt killed many birds in his younger days and we didn’t always follow our own advice of keeping him indoors.  We miss him, but we’ve decided to forego further cats. Responsibility for ameliorating this human-caused slaughter of birds starts at home. Besides, our next door neighbor has upwards of ten cats so, anytime we want to hold a purring cat, we can go to her house.

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The latest TNR study, Observation of Coyote-Cat Interactions” by Grubbs and Krausman is in the July 2009 issue of the Journal of Wildlife Mangement.

The number of pet cats in the U.S. comes from  “Market research statistics – U.S. pet ownership“. American Veterinary Medical Association. http://www.avma.org/reference/marketstats/ownership.asp. Last visited November 10, 2009.

For more on feral cats see,  Mott, Maryann (2004-09-07). “U.S. Faces Growing Feral Cat Problem“. National Geographic News, http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/09/0907_040907_feralcats.html. Last visited November 10, 2009.

The photo of a feral kitten eating a rabbit is by Jake Berzon and the Egyptian cat mummy photo was taken by E. Michael Smith.

Off the Subject

We’re off the subject of birds today in order to bring you this photograph:

The Gamma Ray Sky NASA Photo

That is a visible light rendering of the gamma-ray sky, stitching together an entire year’s worth of observations from the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope.  One measurement made with that telescope proved, yet again, that Einstein was right that the speed of light is constant, no matter its color, its energy, its direction, or how you yourself move in relation to it.  After traveling 7.3 billion years, gamma rays of differing energies and wavelengths made it to earth within nine-tenths of a second of each other, precisely as predicted by Einstein’s theory.

Being a physicist after Einstein must be like being a poet after Shakespeare, a landscape photographer after Ansel Adams, or a painter of birds after Audubon.

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The photo and information is from today’s New York Times Science section.

Songbird Creation

Modern science tells us that birds evolved from dinosaurs.  Other stories are told too, such as this one from the Navajo creation story which tells about the creation of the smaller birds.

It is said that Monster Slayer went to his mother Changing Woman to ask where he would find the Bird Monsters. (Tsé Ninájálééh) At first, his mother refused to tell him, fearing that her son would be killed by the awful bird-like monster that lived in those days on Tsé Bit’a’í, the Rock with Wings, now called Shiprock in northwest New Mexico on the Bilagáana maps.  But Monster Slayer was insistent and eventually she told him and he set off, intending to kill those monsters.

The bird monsters had two chicks and, like all bird chicks everywhere, they were ravenous and kept their parents busy all day, every day just feeding them.  But their parents brought only people for them to eat.  The two adult bird monsters flew over the land, grabbed living people, flew back to Rock with Wings and then dropped the victims from a great height onto the huge rock where their chicks could feast on the bodies.

Which is why Monster Slayer set out to find and kill them.

Finding them turned out to be easy. The male monster bird saw Monster Slayer coming from miles and away and, after making three passes at him, grabbed him in his huge talons, flew high above Rock with Wings and dropped him on the rocks far below.

But Monster Slayer came prepared.  He had an eagle feather his father had given him and he used it to float gently down to the rocks.  Once there he cut open a bladder of blood from a different monster he had slain so blood flowed over the rocks as if Monster Slayer had really died.

Satisfied that his chicks could now eat their latest meal, the male bird monster flew off in search of more food for them. But the chicks were in for a surprise.

As they approached Monster Slayer, he leapt up and demanded that the baby bird monsters tell him exactly when both of their parents would return and where they would land on the Rock with Wings.  Terrified, the chicks told him.  Their father would return with the next male rain and their mother with the next female rain.  They also pointed out exactly which rocks their parents would land on.

Soon a male rain came with its lightning, thunder, wind, and hard rain.  The male monster bird returned as foretold by his chicks and Monster Slayer killed him by hurling a lightning bolt right through him.

Later, a female rain, with its soft, gentle, quiet rain arrived; the mother monster bird arrived, and Monster Slayer killed her too.

The baby chicks started an awful howling, fearing that they were next.  But Monster Slayer saw that they were still little and could be turned into useful birds and so he made one into an eagle and the other into an owl.

But now it was late afternoon, the sun was declining in the west, and Monster Slayer was stuck high up on the Rock with Wings with no way to get down.

Just then he spotted Bat Woman walking on the ground by the great rock and he called to her, asking for her to help him down.  But Bat Woman did not want to help because she thought of herself as being very ugly and she did not like for others to look at her.

Eventually though she agreed to help Monster Slayer down based on his promise to her that she could have all the feathers from the male Monster Bird with which she could adorn herself and become beautiful.  So Bat Woman helped him down, though not without trouble because Monster Slayer kept ignoring her commands to keep his eyes shut.

After he was down, he gave her all the feathers which she put in her basket.  But she did not want Monster Slayer or anyone else watching her put the feathers on and become beautiful so she started walking off toward a field of sunflowers.

Monster Slayer warned her not to go that way but she ignored him, just he had ignored her when she told him to keep his eyes shut.  As she walked, something fluttered in her basket but she kept going, right into the field of sunflowers.  Suddenly birds of all kinds started flying out of the basket containing the feathers of the monster bird.  When she realized that all those birds were coming out of her basket, she tried to stop them but couldn’t.

Finally she gave up trying to keep them in the basket, set the basket down and just watched as all those birds flew away.  “They flew away as wrens.  They flew away as warblers.  They flew away as sparrows. They flew away as titmice.”  All of them flew away until her basket was empty.

And there she sat, in the middle of the sunflowers, “. . .as ugly as she ever was and as ugly as she would always be.”  Which is why, it is said, that bats are still ugly and fly only at night so no one can see them.

And that is where songbirds came from.

We leave it to you to speculate on this question: How did this creation myth, which was told long before modern science discovered that birds evolved from dinosaurs, know about the Monster Birds from which, according to modern science, all songbirds derived?

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The entire story of the Navajo creation story about small birds can be found in Zolbrod, Dine Behane: The Navajo Creation Story, UNM Press 1984, pp 230-241.

The photo of Shiprock is from the NPS, the bat from the USGS, and the feathered bird monsters from the Dinosaur Museum.

Night Crane

A cold front passed through three days ago, leaving us with three crystal-clear autumnal moonlit nights which, if you were warmly dressed, were well-suited to sitting out in the back yard, listening to the trumpets of evolution. The Sandhill Cranes are migrating and this year many have chosen the night flight, probably because the winds aloft, swirling around a departing low pressure blow in the right direction.

And the sunrise this morning brought hundreds more, flying right over the house. One group was accompanied by a hawk, soaring just below them, perhaps catching a ride on their wing-waves.  Being cranes, they appeared utterly unconcerned about the hawk and the hawk seemed only to be interested in tagging along for a bit.

The crane migration, along with hummingbirds, thunderstorms, and Border Collies aging, mark the passage of time for us.  When the autumn cranes arrive, we know that another summer died peacefully in her sleep. Surrounded by birds, we know that the cranes will come tell us when spring heads north again next year.

Happy Autumn to all our readers.

Navajo Condor

 

The Vermillion Cliffs

Long time readers of this blog are used to its author whining about not seeing a California Condor after several attempts at the Grand Canyon.  Another attempt, this time at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, failed last week.

But there will be no more whining about not seeing a condor.

After a trip through parts of the Navajo Nation and a side trip up two of the three Hopi Mesas (Old Oraibi and Walpi) and a night at the Cameron Trading Post, a backpacking buddy and I headed for the North Rim of the Grand Canyon for two nights and three days of hiking.  To get to the North Rim from the South Rim, if you don’t have the time to hike 26 miles or can’t fly, is a 200 mile drive.  The only bridge across the Colorado River leading to the North Rim sits at the head of Marble Canyon at Lee’s Ferry. (The Navajo Bridge) After crossing the bridge, the road skirts the Vermillion Cliffs before climbing up to the Kaibab Plateau, about 1,000 feet higher than the South Rim and about 5000 feet higher than the bridge.

View Looking North from Navajo Bridge

On the morning we made the drive, road work caused us to stop.  Only one lane of the two-lane road was open and traffic had to take turns using the one open lane.  I got out of the car to visit with the flag man who, in the course of conversation, told me that people had been seeing some condors on the Navajo Bridge.  He did not know a Navajo word for “condor” but that was no surprise: The California Condors are not native to Arizona or Navajo country.  But some condors are nesting at a site in the Vermillion Cliffs. He did know how to be polite to the woman who got out of her car further back in the line and demanded, “What are we supposed to do?  Drive around all these stopped cars?”

 

He was very polite to her but, after she stomped back to her car, did laugh when I asked him if he got a lot of stupid questions.  I thanked him for the condor information and it was our turn to drive through the road work.

 

The Shadow without a Telephoto Lens

Naturally, we stopped at the bridge.  Actually there are two bridges, a modern one that traffic now uses and an older one that is now reserved for pedestrians who want to walk out and look down on the Colorado River.

We got out and scanned the bridges and the cliffs and saw nothing.

Fortunately the woman who runs the visitor center at Navajo Bridge was on the foot bridge visiting with a man from the Peregrine Fund who is involved in the condor project.  They pointed to a shadow on the cliff face which resolved itself into the all-black shape of a juvenile California Condor.

Here, thanks to my friend with the better telephoto lens, is what we saw.

 

 

California Condor - Photo by Ron Koopman

Condors’ heads don’t start turning their distinctive red until the bird is about three years old.  Until then, their heads are black as you see in the photo.  This one may only be a year old because he still is not fully grown.

We stopped at the bridge again on the way home and my friend got a fleeting glimpse of one flying away, but the bridge blocked our view and I didn’t see it.

So now, all that is left for me to whine about is that I still have never seen an adult condor or one in flight.  Which means I’ll just have to keep going back to the Vermillion Cliffs and the Grand Canyon.  I hate it when that happens.

 

Early Morning

There were four of them and they came at dawn.  The sun had just crested the rim far to the east and our coffee was gone. The male was domineering; discontented with his women who were dithering along behind him, vaguely flirting with two males of an alien species.  The night had been clear and cold, punctuated by Orion and his loyal hunting dog Sirius, silently stalking across the night sky. A small ravine behind us plunged off a cliff into a 4000-foot abyss and before us a small group of baby Aspen trees stood before an old, majestic Ponderosa Pine like kindergarten kids in front of a beloved teacher.  We were all there together in a house made of dawn.

But the male was not a poet and didn’t care about the beauty of the time. Skulking in the grass, he began making mild threats.  When that didn’t work, he flared his tail.  But even that wasn’t enough, so he marched out, right out into the open, demanding that they come.  And so, without a backward glance, they left us.

Grouchy Blue Grouse Male