How Many Grackles Does It Take to Be an Expert?

Because I happened to see a common grackle in my back yard several years ago--the only grackle ever sighted in Southern California, or, for that matter, anywhere west of the Mississippi River--I have been regarded ever since as something of a bird expert.

Like most reputations, this one is quite fraudulent, but also, like most, whether good or bad, it is impossible to get rid of. Because of that one fortuitous sighting, my knowledge of birds has been falsely regarded as profound, if not mystical.

Consequently, I receive numerous letters from readers asking me questions about birds they encounter in their back yards. Only the other day I received one from Mrs. Gerd Abegglen, of Downey, who said she has an Audubon warbler that drinks from her hummingbird feeder, and she wonders whether this behavior is unusual for a warbler.

I haven’t the slightest idea about the behavior of warblers, but I suspect that nothing a warbler or any other bird does is unusual. Birds are creatures of instinct, and they don’t do unusual things.

Mrs. Abegglen also said she has a pair of large black birds that eat her bread, first taking it to the birdbath to soften it up. She thinks they are ravens, but she isn’t sure they aren’t crows. She asks “How do you tell the difference?”

The only way I know to tell a crow from a raven for sure is that ravens quoth “Nevermore.”

I recently received an inquiry from G. M. Bryant, of Yucca Valley, asking about his road runners. Bryant said he had been feeding two road runners that seemed very tame, but suddenly they disappeared. He wondered if I could tell him why.

Wisely, I sent his letter on to my friend, Henry E. Childs, the birdman of Upland, retired professor of ornithology at Chaffey College and an ornithologist of note. (It was Childs who debunked the myth that the swallows return to San Juan Capistrano every March 19.)

Childs not only was able to reassure Bryant that his road runners’ departure is only seasonal and that they will return, but also provided him with a number of curious facts about this bird.

He noted that road runners are members of the cuckoo family, but unlike the notorious European cuckoo, they do not lay their eggs in other birds’ nests to be hatched. (This nefarious bird sometimes kicks some of its victims’ own eggs out of her nest, so she will not notice the greater number and be suspicious.)

Childs also said that male road runners do most of the incubating at night. “(Males) maintain their regular body temperature while the females goof off and lower their body temperature sharply, a remarkable sexual difference which I didn’t know but which I learned because your letter got me into the literature.”

Childs is not infallible, though. He disagrees with my argument that our scrub jay, the bird so many of us here have in our back yards, should be called a blue jay, since it is (1) blue, and (2) a jay. Childs says the blue jay is an altogether different bird, which just shows that you can know too much.

We here in Los Angeles have a great many more birds than most people are aware of. Recently, Kimball L. Garrett, ornithology collections manager of the Natural History Museum, said that 108 different species have been seen around Exposition Park and 445 have been seen in Southern California. Garrett, by the way, gave credence to my grackle sighting by observing that “over time, if enough people are looking, you can find everything.”

One result of my sighting is that the bird walk at Descanso Gardens is named the Jack and Denise Smith Birdwalk, after me and my wife, on the second Sunday of every December. As usual, we attended last December; but I tend to get more involved in conversation with other birders than with actually watching for birds.

Consequently, I was astonished when Karen Johnson, our leader, announced that we had sighted no fewer than 44 species on our two-hour walk, among them the green-backed heron, the yellow-rumped warbler, the rufous-sided towhee, the belted kingfisher and the lesser goldfinch.

Funny. The only ones I actually saw were a sparrow, a scrub jay, a crow, a mourning dove and a duck.