AVIAN RAGE – Nose to Beak With Killer Robins

HOW I GOT THE POINT
The way Nature has hard wired all living things to survive and reproduce never ceases to amaze me.

The other day, while working on the deck, I heard a scream from just outside the back door of our neighbor’s house. I called her, but she didn’t pick up. So I walked over and, not seeing her, rang the doorbell.

Just then I heard a robin chirping—not in its usual lilting spring voice, but in an excited, scolding tone. I turned around and, before I could even get my hands up, the bird flew right at my face and drove its beak into my forehead. Then its mate swooped in and barely missed me.

PHOTO: David Wildeman

Besides a rush of adrenaline, the first thing that went through my mind was, Aha! So this is why our neighbor was screaming. I’d forgotten about the nest. The robins built it on top of the utility box just two feet from her door. And we’d been keeping an eye on the blue eggs and then little heads inside as, each day, a few millimeters more of them became visible over the nest’s thatch-and-mud rim.

     Would you stand up to a one-hundred-foot-
     tall, one-hundred-ton alien creature?

A BEEF WITH A BLUE WHALE
As I dabbed alcohol on my small wound and our neighbor tended to her skinned knees—she’d dropped to the ground trying to escape the robin’s clawing and pecking at her scalp—I couldn’t help but marvel at the fierce protective instincts of those birds, each a mere one-thousandth of my weight, risking their very lives to protect their young.

Such instincts are, of course, the rule, not the exception, in the animal kingdom. I was aware of several defensive strategies birds use, including deception (think the injured wing distraction), posturing and even filching protection by building nests near those of other, more aggressive species. And, though I’ve been buzzed by birds before, I’ve never actually been hit.

What about you? Any bird war stories to share?

PHOTO: Alma Alexander

                Might our once-keen instincts 
                have dulled from lack of use?

Do you think every human parent would stand up to a one-hundred-foot-tall, one-hundred-ton alien creature (an animal of about the size of an adult blue whale, as big to us as we are to a robin) to try to save her/his child?

Or might our once-keen instincts have dulled from lack of use? Could they have gotten buried, over thousands of generations, in so many layers of cultural teachings and pretexts that, while those practices may suit today’s generally privileged, sheltered lives, the kind of involuntary, blind fury shown by those robins would be impossible?

Something to think about as we embrace summer and the amazing, complex dance of life that swirls around—and within—us. Keep your eyes open…and your head down.

Snapshots from Zihuatanejo - Humpback Tale a Fluke?

In what surely must be among the strangest whale photos ever shot, a mother humpback whale and her calf frolic in the Pacific north of Ixtapa. I watch both breach a dozen times. Between the electrifying leaps, both casually wave their fins and then smack them down on the water.

But then, in an instant, there is this curious study in the unison of opposites. The calf's smooth, jet black body completes a fluid leap, just as the cow raises her gnarled, graffitied flipper as if to show her approval.

Both forms, with little evident splash, look for all the world as if they'd been copied and pasted onto an empty sea. In perfect alignment, they appear to be the same size, but somehow it all looks impossible. It is not.

WHAT WHALE? Observing the Invisible

Nano-scientists are studying and even making things out of sub-atomic particles too small to see, even with a microscope. A little closer to home, I can tell there’s a big carp darting away from the bow of my canoe or a hungry smallmouth hunting for supper even when the water’s too murky to see them.

How? The same way those scientists keep track of those quarks and fermions; the same way you know about the wind even though it’s invisible and you’re inside your house where you can’t even feel it.

 Often the best—sometimes the only—way of seeing something is by the effects it has on something else. In the case of the wind, I get my clues from the trees, a flag or a leaf tumbling across the yard. With the carp, the giveaway is the subtle bulging of the surface where the water’s displaced by the fish’s movement. And you know bass are hunting when you see schools of shiner minnows breaking the water’s surface in flight.

This method of “indirect observation” has worked well for me in locating sloths in Costa Rican forests and tracking whales in the Sea of Cortez. Again, the animal may be all but invisible, so the trick is not to look for it directly. You look for the other things that give it away.

     With this expectation, it’s like the 
     mother of all Where’s Waldo pictures.

For sloths, it's the distinctive cecropia trees whose leaves and resting places they seem to prefer. And I try to find subtle breaks in the pattern of dark, narrow branches and the light spaces between them.

For the whale, the giveaway might be its “fluke prints,” the surprising, wave- canceling circles caused by the upflow of water from the creature’s up-and-down tail movements.

Indirect observation involves a subtle shift in one’s mindset. If you’re looking for a sloth, you’ve set your unconscious visual filter to rule out anything that doesn’t have brown, shaggy fur and four legs. With this expectation, it’s like the mother of all Where’s Waldo pictures; let’s say it’ll take you a while.

But if you switch the filter to a coarser mesh, that is one set to look for more generalized information, like breaks in patterns, you improve your odds considerably. If you’re bird watching, this means adjusting your eye-brain filter to focus not so much on spotting the birds themselves, but on noticing movement. It’s a pretty fine distinction, but it works.

"I believe only in what I do not see." Gustave Moreau (French, 1826-1898)