A Spruce Tree Marks Its Centennial

When we moved to Duluth almost 40 years ago, I combed the streets within a mile or so of the EPA lab where Russ was working looking for an affordable house. The Peabody Street sign caught my attention because I loved the Mr. Peabody cartoons on The Bullwinkle Show, and even more because I loved White-throated Sparrows and their Old Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody song. In recent years, ornithologists have discovered that that song has evolved to celebrate the 2-syllabled Sherman rather than the 3-syllabled Peabody, but Peabody Street so far hasn’t changed its name in response. 

The house that caught my eye was the oldest one on the block, built back when the street was more of a dirt pathway, so it’s set more forward into the front yard than any of the other houses. It wasn’t that I wanted a small front yard, but I loved the bigger backyard, made even bigger because it was a corner house. The cross street had never been completed, making the backyard space wider. The City of Duluth owns the right-of-way, but in 1982, they gave us permission to build our cyclone fence within it. If in the murky future they ever decide to finish the road, we’ll have to pull the fencing closer to the house, but that won’t be happening in the foreseeable future. 

The large yard was one compelling reason to choose our house. Even more compelling was a grouping of four Norway spruces in the back of the yard. The dominant one was huge—one of the biggest trees in the neighborhood. 

More than a decade after we moved here, I got a phone call from a man in his 80s who had lived in our house when he was a little boy. He said his big brother’s best friend was the one who had planted those trees and several others in the neighborhood in 1919 or 1920 as a memorial to his big brother, who had died in World War I. Norway spruces, native to northern, central, and eastern Europe, are the world’s fastest growing spruce, of great economic importance in Europe. In the mountains of western Sweden, scientists have found a Norway spruce, nicknamed Old Tjikko, which is estimated to be 9,550 years old and is claimed to be the world's oldest known living tree. 

Over the years, I’ve done a lot of For the Birds programs about my backyard spruces. Trees have a long lifespan, but as with all of us, including that ancient spruce in Sweden, their lives do eventually have an endpoint, and backyard spruce trees where summer temperatures are increasingly climbing into the 90s don’t have nearly as long a lifespan as those in the mountains of western Sweden. We lost two of the smaller spruces over the years, and then the biggest one toppled in a fierce storm in July 2016. 

The last one is still standing tall and firm. Since I’m not even sure during which of two years it was planted, I obviously can’t be sure when it hit its centennial, but it’s over a hundred years old now. 

One of the first years we lived here, I started my year list on January 1 with a Great Horned Owl sitting atop the spire of the big spruce. Many times over the years a Northern Shrike has used that spot as its vantage point for hunting in my yard. A great many winter finches have dined on the cones of all four trees, and this year the only times I’ve had White-winged Crossbills in my yard, they’ve been eating spruce seeds on the one remaining tree in that stand. 

We also have a few smaller Norway spruces in our yard, one close to my new home office window. Since moving into this different room this year, I’ve photographed lots of great birds in that tree, including both kinglets, Fox Sparrows and juncos, and Black-and-white Warblers. A Blue Jay fed its baby up there. And my dear little red squirrel climbs up to harvest spruce cones and sometimes a bracket fungus. 

Norway spruces were planted in the United States in huge numbers in the 19th and 20th centuries, before foresters and children appreciated the importance of fostering native species. In the coming year, Russ and I are planning to start several new trees in our yard, but we’re going to be focusing on native species. So when we start a spruce tree, it’ll be a white spruce, the species that actually belongs in northern Minnesota. Our dear remaining spruce trees, from my grand 100-year-old one to the smaller ones near the house, will live out their lives in peace, attracting White-winged Crossbills and myriad other birds, and filling me with joy. 

 

Some Good News!

The very first thing I learned in my very first wildlife management class in college was that individuals don’t matter. Conservationists must look at animals within populations and communities to help them. Focusing on individuals would lead to what they called the Bambi complex, which from the disparaging and disgusted way they spat out the word “Bambi” I knew was a very bad thing indeed.

To this day, many wildlife biologists are still decrying the Bambi complex. Precisely during the BP oil spill disaster, some birders started ridiculing the value of wildlife rehab, talking about all the resources used to save just a handful of creatures when that money and expertise could be better used in restoring damaged habitat and protecting undamaged habitat. Ironically, a huge chunk of the money used for wildlife rehabilitation comes from donations from individual people—money that would not necessarily have ever gone to habitat protection. Why do people give them money? It’s virtually always inspired by the story of one particular individual animal. And by taking an interest in that individual, a generous donor also becomes receptive to what that animal will need when released to the wild, and quite possibly start wanting to protect habitat for it. We simply don’t feel emotionally tied to populations, of people or of animals. To paraphrase Joseph Stalin’s words, when one man dies, it’s a tragedy. When millions die, it’s a statistic.  

For over a decade, one individual bird has captured the imaginations of millions of people, bringing awareness of the difficulties her entire species faces and garnering support for important projects to keep her whole population thriving: Wisdom the Laysan Albatross. In 2002, when my ornithological hero Chandler Robbins was on Midway Island in the Pacific Ocean, he started musing about the banded Laysan Albatrosses nesting there and how old they might be. So he recaptured some to check back on their band numbers, and one turned out to be a female that he himself had banded back in 1956. As a nesting adult when he captured her that first time, the youngest she could possibly have been was five years old. That means that the very latest Wisdom could have been hatched would be the beginning of 1951, the year I was born, and so she was at least 51 in 2002, making her older than what scientists had estimated the maximum age for albatrosses, 30 to 40 years. Because of her advanced age, she was nicknamed Wisdom.

I'm looking way, way older than Wisdom, and certainly beyond making babies!

She made national news in 2011 when she was a minimum of 60 years old, which is, I think, when I found out about her and first I talked about her on For the Birds. This was well after my own menopause, and I can’t say how much I loved knowing that there is at least one lovely wild bird out there who is not just thriving but still successfully raising young when she’s older than me.

She returns to Midway every year, to the same nest site. I usually see the news about her arrival in November, but not this year, and by Thanksgiving, I was feeling uneasy as I checked the Midway Atoll website every day. 2020 has been a uniquely terrible year, and as December started without a word, I was starting to grow resigned. But the lack of reports must have been due to procedural changes for the human staff on Midway, not the albatrosses, who have no clue about Covid-19 and were conducting business as usual without press releases.

Finally, on December 3, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service got the word out that Wisdom and her mate had indeed both returned to Midway—she was observed on her nest on November 29, and wonder of wonders, she has produced another egg. If you see me walking with an extra spring in my step in the coming days, you’ll know why. Wisdom is just a bird, and just an individual bird. But her making it through another year out on the open ocean and returning to breed reminds me that exceeding expectations and probabilities may not always be likely, but is always at least a possibility. 

The Desert Island Hypothetical

Over my 45 years of birding, people have occasionally asked me what bird I’d most long for if I were stranded on a desert island. I’ve always answered the Black-capped Chickadee or the Blue Jay. “But wouldn’t I get bored?” Hardly. As a child, I read Little Women at least fifty and quite possibly a hundred times, and I’ve always liked listening to the same songs over and over and watching my favorite movies again and again. 

A lot of birders need more novelty, or at least diversity, in their bird sightings than I do. I may be luckier right now, when we’re hunkered down during a once-in-a-century emergency, but overall, it’s the birders who thrive on novelty and diversity who do better on Big Days and Big Years than someone like me. I’ve been known, on an actual Big Day when every second of seeking out new birds is critical, to stop for 15 or 20 minutes just to watch Bank Swallows excavating holes in a bank, or even just a chickadee hacking out a cavity. I didn’t cover nearly as much ground on my 2013 Big Year as I’d originally planned—at the end of 2012, Russ’s mom came to live with us, reducing both our discretionary income and the amount of time I could spend away from home. If I were the kind of person who needed to maximize my bird numbers out of competitiveness or a yearning for more, I’d have been disappointed, but me being me, it wasn’t that big a deal—my Big Year was one of the most wonderful, rewarding years of my life just the way it was. 

The desert island question is just a hypothetical, and Peabody Street is hardly a desert island anyway, but if I had to be stuck in one place over so many months, my two avian choices, around every single day, have definitely made this strange time much more bearable. The chickadee certainly lacks brilliant color, but more than makes up for that in adorableness, and the Blue Jay combines vivid blues with a perky crest. How could I get bored looking at either?

The chickadee’s Hey, sweetie! song may lack the syringeal complexity of a Winter Wren’s or Hermit Thrush’s, but simplicity has its own loveliness, and the chickadee song has the advantage of being heard year-round. Yes, like wrens and thrushes, chickadees sing the most songs from April into June and are hard to hear from October through December, but I’ve heard chickadees singing at least occasionally during every month of the year, long after Winter Wrens and Hermit Thrushes have flown the coop. And both chickadees and Blue Jays make a wonderful assortment of companionable vocalizations year-round. If anything interesting was happening, those two would alert me to it. 

If that hypothetical desert island lacked all human companionship, I wouldn’t have to befriend a volleyball named Wilson, not if there were chickadees or Blue Jays around. Both not only take an interest in people; they make actual eye contact and would definitely reduce loneliness.  

During this pandemic, a lot of people are growing restless and bored, and it’s easy to understand and sympathize. But I like that in Hogfather, Terry Pratchett has Death say about human beings, “Do you know, that in a universe so full of wonders, they have managed to invent boredom.” As much as I love the freedom to go where I want, exploring this universe so full of wonders, I’m pretty much satisfied, and never bored, even when I'm stuck in one place with just a few of those wonders. I hope you’re finding as much joy and wonder in your own small world. 

Gratitude: 2020

This has been one of the hardest years of my lifetime for a great many people. It started out bad for me. On January 3, I had a heart attack. On my very first venture out when I was feeling up to it, on January 12, Russ drove me to the Sax-Zim Bog to see a Barn Owl—the first one I’d ever seen in Minnesota, much less in St. Louis County. I was thrilled to see it, but then that very day the poor thing died, too far north of its range to survive. 

And then on February 26, my Uncle Bill died. We made our one and only road trip of the year to attend his funeral in Chicago on March 6, when the pandemic was already taking a horrific toll in Italy but not quite kicking in yet in the United States. By the end of the month, it was starting to rage in New York City, where my daughter Katie lived. She was pregnant, so I was doubly terrified for her, and incredibly sad because as things were shaping up, we knew visiting them be impossible during the pandemic, Russ and I both being too high risk what with our age, both of us having had cancer, and my two heart attacks. Then my son Joe got furloughed from his job at Disney World. He’d still be on medical insurance but with no income for months, and no way he could come home to Minnesota for the duration. Yes, this was a terrifying and difficult year.  

But by late March, living in Brooklyn was getting too much for Katie and Michael. Both of their workplaces were fine with them working from home, even if that home was in Minnesota, so at the end of the month, they packed up and drove from New York to Duluth. Working out the logistics for travel was tricky—they’d absolutely have to stop for one night, but one of their friends offered them a safe place to stay north of Chicago where no one would be home. The most dangerous parts of the trip were stopping for gas and restrooms and walking their dog, but they worked out safe protocols. 

When they arrived here at the start of April, they quarantined for two weeks. It was hard on us only being able to see each other through the window, and harder on their poor dog Muxy who just could not understand why she couldn’t see Pip or go into the back yard—two weeks seems way longer to a dog than to a person who understands what’s happening.  

But ever since we pulled down the plastic barrier to the hallway, we’ve been one household. The only change in our household composition since April was when Walter arrived on the scene. 

Katie and Michael have done all their own shopping by mail and with curbside pickup. Russ still goes into our grocery store every week or two during their early morning “senior” hours, always wearing a mask, always following the one-way aisle arrows, and always keeping his distance from other shoppers. When packages arrive, they are quarantined in the basement for 6 days unless it’s something urgently needed or perishable—then it’s sanitized first. Mail that must be opened within 6 days goes into the oven at 150 degrees for an hour first. I’ve been amazingly lucky to live with people who are not only committed to doing things the safest way possible but who do the hard research to decide what protocols are safest.

Everyone seems to realize that I’m the over-friendly Joe Biden-type person of the family, so if I need to drop off something at the post office or anything like that, one of them does it for me. I went to cardiac rehab up until April, and then for a brief time in September and October until state and local case numbers got scary again.  

Now I’m back hunkered down at home, doing aerobic exercises just about every day on my own. I’m very grateful to Jane Fonda and to the fact that I’m missing whatever boredom gene there might be that makes most people get tired of doing the exact same thing day after day—I have probably done the aerobics part of the Jane Fonda Complete Workout a thousand times over the years and yet never seem to mind doing it yet again, day after day. Thanks to cardiac rehab’s phone visits through summer, including a consultation with their dietician, and to Jane Fonda, I’ve lost more than 15 pounds since my heart attack and am probably in better shape right now than I was in years. They also designed exercises to help me build up my upper body strength and balance to get my body ready for helping with a baby. 

I’d been getting my hair colored since my 40th birthday, but with the pandemic, the gray grew out millimeter by millimeter, and when cases were still low in early October, went to my hairdresser, who is diligently following all the best practices; she cut off all the brown. My haircut will grow shaggier for the duration, but at least I’ve lost the sharp color demarcation.

I went birding at Park Point once in early August, and although I ran into one other birder, I remembered to socially distance and wear a mask. 

That still felt risky to everyone, including me, so when I went up to the McQuade boat landing to see Smith’s Longspurs in September, and when I went to the Sax-Zim Bog for World Birding Weekend in October, Russ came along. Otherwise, I’ve not been more than a block or two from my house at all, and I’ve spent more than 99 percent of my time since March in my house or my own backyard.  

My son Joe is back at work, but this has been a horrible year for him. It was hard enough to endure so many months with no income, but he also lost his wonderful cat Boots who was a part of his life for over 15 years. I’m filled with gratitude for technology—thanks to Zoom, we can at least see our son, and he can see and hear his baby nephew. Virtual visits are not nearly as wonderful as real-life visits, but they’re much, much better than phone calls.

Ironically, despite how horrible 2020 has been and how much I miss my firstborn son, it’s also been one of the best years of my life. I had my cataract surgery last December, and because those cataracts were congenital, my vision has never been clearer or colors more vivid in my life. 

All my speaking gigs for the year were cancelled, which was disappointing not only for missing wonderful travel and birding opportunities but also because those are my primary source of income. But that gave me the motivation to develop new skills, and I’ve been doing presentations via Zoom since summer. I’m extremely grateful for the many wonderful people whose financial support via Patreon and direct donations is making this possible.

Even as I’ve missed traveling and seeing the assortment of birds I’d be enjoying in a normal year, I’ve found unexpected birding delights here at home. For the first time ever, all spring and summer I made almost daily recordings of my backyard birds. Some of them turned out beautifully, and are lovely to listen to now as winter settles in. Normally when I am home in spring I’m so busy catching up in between trips that I don’t pay close attention to my everyday birds. This year I got to closely watch three families of chickadees, two families of Blue Jays, and one family of crows, all for well over a month after the young had fledged. The crow and jay parents came to rely on me to give them peanuts, and that meant they approached very close for photos. 

I’ve long read about how some Blue Jays go through a bald stage during the summer molt and my own education Blue Jay Sneakers always molted all her head feathers at once, but I never took photos of her during that time. This summer, I got wonderful photos of one Blue Jay parent before, during, and after that bald stage, and got lots of photos of the parents feeding their fledglings. My crows raised four young, and the family of six came regularly when I whistled and put peanuts in my tray feeder. 

I paid closer attention to my backyard House Wrens and Brown Thrashers than ever before, developed a friendship with a chipmunk, set up a few trail cams that got nighttime photos and video of a flying squirrel and a Great Horned Owl, and now I’m seeing a red squirrel—a very rare thing on Peabody Street. 

I’m not only lucky to have enjoyed all these avian and mammalian riches—I’m lucky enough to have the kind of personality that doesn’t require novelty to be contented and even outright happy. As much as I love travel, I find a lot to be joyful about even on days when I see little more than chickadees and Blue Jays. Many of my friends have a fundamental need to see lots of exciting birds, in lots of places, to feel contented. This has been a hard year for them. 

Meanwhile, I’m showing baby Walter birds and squirrels and bunnies out the window. He isn’t quite ready to focus on active tiny birds like chickadees, but does sometimes track pigeons and Blue Jays. Yesterday I was holding him at the window when a gorgeous red fox walked by. Walter is at that wonderful smiling stage now, and I can’t hold him or look at him without feeling rich beyond measure. 

And so this Thanksgiving, even as I’m sorely missing my son, I’m filled with gratitude for my whole family, for the wealth of birds and mammals visiting my yard, for the photos, video, and sound recordings I’ve gotten this year, and for the treasured listeners and blog readers who shared wonderful bird stories from their neck of the woods. Knowing how isolated my son and many of my own friends and relatives are, and having friends who have lost family members to this horrible disease, I know how exceptionally fortunate I am this year. Gratitude is baked into Thanksgiving, and I’m feeling grateful beyond measure. 

ALL Cats Indoors

 

On November 1, barely an hour before I presented my monthly Zoom presentation, about woodpeckers, I decided I should include some ways that we humans can help them. One of the ways is to keep cats indoors. Over my years as a wildlife rehabber, I had dealt with a few woodpeckers who had been injured by cats. They had all died from internal injuries or infections, but that was before I was taking many photos. So I posted a request on Facebook to a group of rehabbers asking if anyone had a photo of a cat-injured woodpecker—I'd need it within 10 or 15 minutes. Instantly people sent me several tragically gruesome photos. 

And these were just woodpeckers—had I needed photos of generic birds killed by cats, I'd have had dozens in five minutes!   

Cats kill roughly a billion birds of a great many species every year in the United States alone. Cat rescue organizations sometimes dispute the numbers, but that's tricky now that a great many different people, using various methodologies, have concluded pretty much the same thing. Some cat defenders say it doesn't really matter because the number of birds killed in collisions with windows is even bigger, as if doctors said it was perfectly okay to consume known carcinogens because heart disease kills more people than cancer.  

My cat Kasey had been part of an early trap-neuter-release program in Ohio, eating birds in my daughter's backyard until I brought her home in 2006. We had her declawed right away because our nine-year-old cat Miss Kitty had been declawed and would be defenseless against a well-armed, spunky young cat. We of course kept Kasey indoors, and overall she seemed happy, but she managed to sneak out four times over the years during construction projects or other hectic times, and even without claws she killed and brought home at least one animal, usually a chipmunk, all four times. Once, before we even discovered that she'd made it out, she'd piled up three or four animals on our back porch, including two little songbirds. The worst time was when we had filled a basement window opening with cardboard until the replacement window pane arrived. Kasey discovered it and was going in and out without us noticing. She managed to line up a dead mother deer mouse, her litter of 6 baby mice, and a White-throated Sparrow on our kitchen rug before we figured out what was happening. Cats, by nature, kill. And my sweet cat, in excellent health after regular meals and all the vet care we got for her when I brought her home, was in prime condition to do a lot of damage, even without claws. 

Foxes, hawks, and other natural, wild predators die out or move on long before their prey in a given area can be depleted, because they can’t afford to go more than a day or two without a successful hunt. Pet cats allowed to roam, or stray or feral cats fed by people, are not subject to these natural forces—they're subsidized killers. Like my sweet Kasey, these cats don't lose their killer instinct and their urge to toy with living objects just because someone is supplying them with food—those feedings actually put them in better shape to kill more effectively.  

When I was a rehabber, I spent a lot of time educating people about birds. I understand how widespread ignorance about the natural world is—I myself was valedictorian of my high school and graduated from college with high honors before I learned anything at all about birds, ecology, or the balance between natural predators and prey. And it wasn’t until I actually became a wildlife rehabber that I discovered that bird wounds stop bleeding so quickly that even very serious injuries aren’t noticeable at all without a close and careful examination. Where are people supposed to learn that bird lungs are set against the back ribs, beneath very thin skin? A single cat scratch or bite on the back virtually always damages the lungs. When people “rescue” a bird from their cat and set it free, that bird is essentially doomed to die from the injury hours or days later. 

This is, I think, the only photo I ever took of a cat-injured bird. A cat had ripped off the entire pygostyle—the tail bone—from this White-breasted Nuthatch, but the cat's owner thought because there was so little bleeding, it must have been just a superficial wound. She smiled and said, "Oh, well. Cats will be cats."

People who brought me birds their cats had injured invariably felt virtuous and righteous for “saving” the bird. They may have gone to some lengths to put it in a box and drive it to me, but almost every one of those cat-injured birds died anyway. Despite antibiotics and veterinary care paid for out of my own pocket, the internal injuries and infections were usually fatal. It was endlessly frustrating trying to explain this to people. One woman in particular brought me at least a dozen birds her cat had injured. I spent at least five hundred dollars treating just the birds she alone brought me, and because I’m not a non-profit, I was prohibited by federal law from either charging or accepting donations from her or anyone else for my rehab work, not that she even offered to cover my expenses. The financial toll was bad enough—as a stay-at-home mother, I wasn’t bringing in any money at all—but the emotional toll on me and also on my children watching these beautiful, doomed birds struggle to stay alive was far, far heavier. But that woman was utterly oblivious, driving away each time feeling smugly virtuous, thinking she had done the best she could for that poor bird, and never once seriously considering keeping her cat indoors. 

For some reason, a great many people seem to believe that because cats act so independent and self-sufficient, we aren't responsible for their actions. I’m a dog person, but the cats that I’ve allowed into my life and heart were dearly loved and cared for. When we take in a cat, its life and well-being, and also its actions, become entirely our responsibility. 

People with the means and will to trap and neuter unowned cats have the same moral obligations toward them that people who have dogs, other pets, or farm animals do: keep the animals safe and don't allow them to harm other people or creatures.

People once allowed dogs to roam as they still do cats. Now cats are the top rabies carrier of all domesticated animals, and many individual feral cats are extremely aggressive and dangerous to humans as well as wildlife. The last time Russ and I were on Jekyll Island in Georgia, we got up early to walk from our cabin to the beach along a boardwalk. A feral cat sitting on the guardrail hissed fiercely at us. The beach vegetation was too vulnerable for us to step off the boardwalk, so we had to walk single file against the opposite railing to get past it. That cat was a genuine menace.  

The tragic way America solved the dog problem was for just about every jurisdiction to start requiring owned dogs to be licensed and kept under the owner’s control everywhere except on the owner’s actual property. Animal control officers searched for and caught loose dogs; if no one claimed one within a specified length of time, it was adopted out or, more often, euthanized. It was a terrible solution, yet the only way to solve a terrible problem. It's genuinely shameful that dogs paid the penalty for people being so irresponsible in the first place. 

Now the cat problem needs the same horrible solution. Euthanizing unowned cats is sad, but not removing them from the wild causes orders of magnitude more death. Yes, cat lives are valuable, but so are bird lives. 

Imagine a doctor who keeps one patient alive by draining all the blood from 100 other people, and then boasts about saving that one life. That is what people supporting trap-neuter-release programs, or people intentionally letting their cats outdoors, are doing. Closing their eyes to avian suffering and death, to the tune of a billion birds every year, is unconscionable.