(Listen to the radio version here.)
When I was in seventh grade or so, my dad took the five of us kids and his second wife’s little boy to Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry. We went in at the entrance by the agricultural exhibits, and I made a beeline for the big incubator where people can watch baby chicks hatch. One egg was in the process—I could see the tip of the chick’s beak working on the crack where it had pipped. Another egg, so far without any discernable pip, was rolling around a little. There were a couple of fluffy chicks walking about and one who had just hatched; the little guy was all wet, lying prostrate, head on the floor of the incubator, neck outstretched, its hind end still in the shell.
The other kids and my dad got bored quickly, but I was rooted to the spot. I couldn’t bear to leave until I was sure that the hatchling would be okay, and that the little guy working so hard to crack that shell would make it out of the egg. I begged my dad to let me stay there while the rest of them explored the museum. Neither museums nor children were his milieu, so I think he was relieved to have one less kid to keep track of.
They were gone for at least a couple of hours, and I was mesmerized the entire time. I got to see the exhausted little hatchling pull all the way out of the eggshell, dry off, and start walking about; the chicks from the two hatching eggs emerge and dry off; a couple of other hatchings from start to finish; and the first pips in a couple of other wiggling eggs. A museum staff person asked me a couple of times if I was lost or had gotten separated from my family; he looked a little skeptical when I said I was fine. I was used to doubtful and pitying looks from adults so that didn’t faze me. I was in heaven.
One of my defining characteristics from the time I was a little kid through this very moment is that when something catches my interest, I can gaze at it for hours. A long time ago, when I took the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Home Study course (which has since evolved to their Bird Academy), one of the assignments was this:
Spend at least 10 minutes (preferably 20) sitting or standing still at a natural area of your choice. To give yourself a new experience, it would be best NOT to choose your backyard. Then, write a short paragraph describing your observations of birds. Did you see anything that you have never noticed before? Did you enjoy your experience?
I spent those 20 minutes at my mother-in-law’s place in rural Port Wing, Wisconsin, on a January day when the temperature was 17º F and the northwest wind was blowing at about 10 mph. I saw only 3 species—two flocks of chickadees, one pair of Hairy Woodpeckers (during the time I watched, each time the female went to a new tree, the male alighted in the tree where she’d just left), and one Fox Sparrow.
I wrote:
I heard an unfamiliar high, soft, “whispery” call note that proved to be a Fox Sparrow. [My mother-in-law] noticed it on several occasions this winter, from her living room window, but it stayed > 60' from the house and feeders, picking up sunflower seeds on the ground. It only “scratched” once in the 7 minutes I followed it—stayed hunkered down between tree roots, with the trunk protecting it from wind, then ran to another base of a tree, sometimes picking up a seed en route but not stopping to eat till it came to another wind-breaking tree. I watched it eat 7 seeds; each one it “chewed” open on the left side of its beak. Do they exhibit “handedness”?
I’ve never figured out the answer to that question—I hardly ever see a lone Fox Sparrow here, and when they’re in a flock, often mixed with other sparrows, it’s very hard to track one individual for long.
The Fox Sparrow is a species I never rehabbed, so I never studied one at extremely close range. But I have been very aware of that “handedness” (would you call it “beakedness”?) in crossbills.
Every baby crossbill hatches with its bill straight, but as soon as it fledges and starts trying to extract seeds from cones, the lower bill starts crossing to the right or the left, whichever side the bird consistently faces toward the cone. It appears that the bird’s innate “handedness” is what makes the beak cross one way or the other.
To pry open the scale, the crossbill positions the crossed tip of its lower mandible against the cone to brace it as the upper bill slips under the scale. Then, with a twist of the head, the scale opens and the bird’s thick, muscular tongue pulls out the seed.
I’ve spent hours and hours watching crossbills, but I seldom figure out which way the lower bill crosses until I get home and can study my photos. I wasn’t even thinking about which way the bill crossed when I rehabbed an adult male Red Crossbill in 1997. (I produced a radio program about that experience. I can’t find the recording, but the transcript, which includes an actual reference to Donald Trump {yes, in 1997!!}, is here.)
That captive bird ate various seeds plus seeds from some pine cones that friends brought me, but I was too busy with kids and education birds to gaze at him and see that crossbill feeding technique in action. Indeed, I never saw exactly how crossbills work that crossed bill until I watched this short video, much filmed in slow motion, by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
The crossed-bill adaptation is so effective that crossbills can eat as many as 3,000 conifer seeds in a day. The bill isn’t nearly as efficient at opening other kinds of seeds, but for a few days in the 1980s, a male Red Crossbill brought a fledgling to the sunflower seed feeder on my front porch, cracked open seeds, and gave the little tyke lots of sunflower hearts. It was the only time in my life I’ve watched a Red Crossbill feeding a chick, and it wasn’t even feeding it the “right” food! Sadly, that was before I was photographing birds.
Watching any bird at length virtually always inspires questions—that’s the lovely thing about this kind of experience. Studying wild birds and museum specimens, ornithologists learned that about half of Red Crossbills have lower bills crossing to the left and half to the right, while in White-winged Crossbills, three times as many birds have bills crossing to the right as to the left.
This is the sort of detail I could miss even spending hours gazing at a big crossbill flock, but when I worked at Cornell, I checked out their museum specimens. Sure enough, 22 of 41 Red Crossbills in the collection crossed one way, 19 the other. But in White-winged Crossbills, a much higher percentage of birds have lower bills crossing to the right than to the left—in our collection it was 32 of 46 birds, or 70 percent.
In the past few weeks I’ve had a few opportunities to watch something specific in the natural world for long periods simply to savor and wonder, but oddly enough, these experiences involved insects, not birds—some Monarch caterpillars, chrysalises, and newly emerged butterflies; and of all things, a botfly larva. The caterpillar stories are at least tangentially related to birds—I took one in to protect it from my House Wrens along with two much tinier stowaways on the milkweed stalk. The botfly larva saga involved a chipmunk named Bizzy. But those are stories for another day.
Great as always, Laura. I'm no expert but it fascinates me to watch the chickadees, robins, and juncos at the bird feeder. My cat is fascinated too, which is why she doesn't go outside any more.