A Lesser Who Is So Much More-er: Part Two
Now we get to the 'Dad' part
“…There was some magnetic pull around this lone hackberry tree, thirty feet above a dusty, gravel road, backstopped by a bumpy two-track and surrounded by sagebrush and cheatgrass.
“I smell a nest.” I thought…”
Continued:
Once that little lightbulb switched on, once all those subtle little hints began to settle in, stacking atop one another, my inner ten year old began to yell-whisper in my ear, “I’m telling’ ya, there’s just gotta be a nest nearby.”
I walked slowly and as nonchalantly past the hackberry tree as possible, studying every branch and craning my neck to peer into the deep shade within. I squeezed past my trusty, old, turn of the century rig parked at the base of the two track just twenty or so feet beyond the hackberry and just far enough away from a five foot sage brush that I could squeeze past if I smeared my butt against its dusty fender and door.
Once I reached the gravel two lane, below I walked maybe fifteen feet, upriver and leaned hard toward the sandpaper-leafed tree towering above me, looking hard, then practically fell into a roadside, sage brush bush, this one so dusty from passing, billowing car wakes that I nearly choked at the cloud of fine grey dust that exploded when I grabbed a branch to steady myself. But in that same moment, voila’, an abandoned bird nest, down in the heart of that sagebrush, dusty and weathered, used and then discarded, almost certainly from last year, uncovered momentarily by my frantic rearrangement of woody branches.
Too big for a goldfinch, I thought as I studied it. And probably too big for a Lazuli Bunting (based on previous, close-up observations and a treasured, collected nest hanging just outside my office door). Much too neat for a Mourning Dove nest and definitely too small for a Robin. Probably a Song Sparrow, I decided, sorting quickly through the list of possibles, but what a crazy, dusty place to build a nest.
Oddly enough, there is safety for little songbirds in nesting near busy trails and even profoundly dusty roads. Traffic; a two-edged sword, to be sure. Yes, there is the noise and the dust, but there is also the steady stream of distractions, passing cars and trucks, billowing dust and noise to provide cover for parents, both while building the nest they don’t want anyone to suspect, and then while they’re away hunting for food, and even more importantly, during the hundreds of comings and goings from the nest with food for their little ones. Tasty, tasty little ones. Crow candy. Magpie munchies. You get the picture. There are always hungry eyes watching, looking for a pattern and a meal. I suspect the odds of not being discovered and not being raided are much, much higher in proximity to places, busier and thus more intimidating for potential sleuths and marauders.
After snapping a few quick phone pics of this tired old nest, I remembered to look up.
It’s a little embarrassing to admit that some part of me is always holding out for that choir of angels to appear and swell suddenly into a hearty “Hallelujah!” I think it, but of course it never happens. It didn’t happen this time either, but I did notice, well, just maybe, what kinda-sorta looked like an amalgam of sticks and grasses, the teensiest little hint/glimpse of a deliberate looking weaving, a break in the pattern on an outreaching branch maybe eight feet directly above me. A nest!
Please let it be a nest!
I walked backward across those two lonely lanes worth of crunchy, washboard gravel to study the subtlest of subtle anomalies from a greater distance and different angle. Nothing particularly obvious, but I was able to mark which branch of the many that held what seemed like a ‘maybe,’ and then plotted a course for my eye to trace again and again as I walked all around the tree, hoping for some better glimpse, for some coming and going of parents, or some other confirmation of my ‘birdy’ hunch.
I squeezed past my parked rig, once again and slowly walked up the two track until I was just beyond the tree, then traced the arrangement of branches I’d viewed from the other side and below, and began to narrow in on my target. Closer. Closer. I raised my binoculars. Ok, that’s the branch. Uhhh, I think. And out, out… Umm… is that? I mean… does that look like a… Could that be it?
I started to sit down to wait, but thought of the parents, how intimidating it would be to come back from foraging to find some gigantic human monster sitting in the dirt just a few feet from your babies. Good grief! I’d hate that. So I walked another ten feet up the two track and sat down in the dirt to wait from a less traumatic distance. There was plenty of time to let them get used to the idea of me. No need to create a crisis.
I could hear them off in the weedy meadow, below and well beyond, those misleadingly named, ‘Lesser’ parents, keeping track of one another as they foraged and flew, as far as a quarter mile away, singing identical little checkin-in snippets of song, keeping track of one another’s progress. Minutes passed. Then more. Then, somehow it had been more than an hour.
In the distance a chatty, Yellow-breasted Chat was commenting on all sorts of things I could not see and seemingly, working on his tight five comedic act. When he whistled three, loud, one-note chides in quick succession for the fourth or fifth time, I whistled back; same pitch, same cadence. He laughed. Or seemed to. Then he did it again. I responded again. He laughed again. Then he changed it up; just one note. I replied. Then three again. Followed by three from me. More Chat laughter.
We carried on like this for ten or more minutes and though he was way down across the road and hidden in some tree near the river, there was no doubt that he was conversing with me, and testing me, paying close attention to me and I’d swear, laughing each time I attempted whatever he asked, vocally, as if he’d fooled me into responding once again. It was so much fun.
Then, two little bouncy balls of feathers and wings came roller-coasteering in my direction, chittering and chattering along the way. A team. One disappeared into the tree and the other, flitted to a bare sagebrush branch just ten feet or so to the side of me. So much smaller than I’d expected. Thin and svelte, and fearless.
Papa Lesser studied me for a minute in silence and after I felt enough time had passed, I spoke to him, greeted him and assured him I meant no harm. Still he studied me, glancing occasionally toward the tree beyond …and then this miraculous little thing happened. He began to sing a calming, almost plaintive little, “Tseeeyyyoooo” toward the nestlings and they immediately began to rustle and cheep. There was something so mysterious about this particular little song; it felt almost like a lullaby, a comforting, higher note, lower note, “there-there. There-there”
“Food soon.”
The littles stirring in the nest and cheeping were confirmation that my hunch had been true. Papa continued to call out to them, long, patient pauses between verses without any discernable hint of concern or alarm while continuing to size me up.
Finally, he flitted off to the tree, landing on a leafless bit of branch, turning back toward me momentarily and then working his way quickly through the maze of leaves and twigs to his awaiting, hungry brood.
They rose up in unison, each craning toward him with open mouths and things to say, bobbing and begging. This behavior seemed to trigger something in him and he began to convulse, small, upward shudders, not unlike a cat ready to rid itself of a hairball, but much, much subtler. In a moment it became apparent that he was moving a crop (and perhaps stomach-ful) of seed slurry up from some, carried and partially digested place, past his ‘voice-box, song-box’ and into feeding position in his partially open mouth. You could see the sticky, seedy, almost paste…
I’d never seen this particular and strange little sort of miracle before. Never even seen pictures of it. Of course I’d seen other birds regurgitate a meal for their nestlings, but not quite like this. Goldfinches are pretty strict vegetarians, and unlike many other seed eaters, do not feed their growing babies insects while they’re little, before gradually moving them toward a seed, berry, bud diet as they mature. Goldfinch babies are vegetarians from the get-go, which makes it almost impossible for nest-parasitizing, Cowbirds to successfully trick goldfinches into hatching and doing all the work of raising their cowbird babies for them because those cowbird babies simply cannot thrive on a goldfinch baby’s all-seed diet, and thus expire within a few days of hatching. It also means that instead of flitting off to collect a quick beakful of insects to bring back and poke into hungry mouths, these diligent little goldfinches must gather an entire load of seeds which are then swallowed and partially digested before transport back to the nest and sharing. It takes a surprising amount of time.
I’ve watched nesting, Lazuli Bunting mothers and robins and chickadees, wrens and sparrows come and go with mouthfuls of insects in five to fifteen minute cycles, ranging in times, presumably based upon their luck on any given outing. By contrast, over about five total hours of sitting in the dirt near this wondrous, little, Lesser Goldfinch nest, waiting and watching, hoping to capture a few beautiful portraits and photograph the process of feeding that ravenous, red-mouthed, nestling crew, feeding cycle times ranged from approximately forty minutes to as long as an hour and a half between Papa flying off and Papa returning, which really kinda surprised me. Even hummingbirds who need to sip nectar from enough flowers and catch enough gnats to feed a pair of nestlings generally return to the nest within fifteen or twenty minutes, max. Obviously gathering that much nourishment takes a great deal of work, which then takes quite a bit of time to find enough seeds to make a meal for three …no, make that four (see second photo below), ravenously hungry nestlings.
Strangely, I never did actually witness Momma Lesser feed the littles. I did notice her, after a minute or two of hushed awe that first time, when Dad checked me out while comforting the littles and then flew to the tree to walk-hop to the nest to feed them the first time. There she was on that bare piece of branch watching me like a hawk while he fed them, but I only noticed her there after a full minute or two of watching and trying to photograph him with the kids.
Then, after that first time, I never saw her close to the nest again and certainly did not see her feeding any babies. I’d hear her down in the field with him, their calls and responses moving in distance and direction over time, and had read that the parenting duties often fell to the males after nest building, incubation and hatching, so that females might, after handing off the parenting responsibilities to the dad, exit the picture to find another male to mate with and make yet another family with, and that this was one way, given the late start that goldfinches, relative to other birds (because they need the flowering plants to have bloomed and gone to seed before they can properly feed their babies), for them to fit two or sometimes three nestings into one season. Perhaps they were in the process of letting go before she went off to find another mate. I honestly don’t know.
Each time after Papa Lesser had distributed all the seedy goodness he had managed to gather between those wonderful, gaping mouths, he turned to consider me momentarily and then flitted of to a nearby branch to give his temporarily satiated nestlings one last calming, “Tseeeyyyoooo” and then he was off to the weedlot and river again, sending back brief little messages, presumably to help them understand his direction and distance, and to remind them that they were still center of mind for him. Or so it seemed.
It was all so caring and sweet. And more deliberately empathetic seeming than, I think, any other parent bird ritual I have yet witnessed.
And so I came away from an un-sought and unexpected discovery and several hours of sitting, cross-legged in the dirt and hot sun with an entirely new and enlarged sense of this littlest goldfinch, this so-called, ‘Lesser,’ feather poet with the giant, brave heart and the sweetest, most reassuring, “Tseeyyyooooo” lullaby offered unfailingly to his littles to assure and inform them whenever he was away.
I am humbled by all that I heard and saw, all that I was allowed to witness …and feel. I think I will never see a Lesser Goldfinch through quite the same eyes again.
There is so much more to the living world than mere cold calculation and survival, than hard-wired, animalian programming. There is, undeniably, caring and empathy. There is patience and diligence. There is grace.
And we …we are fools if we do not make room to understand, we are poorer when we do not make time and space in our attentions, first to notice and then to observe.
When a bit of magic comes tapping you faintly on the shoulder or whispers in your ear, consider erring on the side of magic …and intuition. Take a breath. Then another. Calm your mind. Ask what it is you are being offered and then, maybe wait for even the faintest of answers.
You may be utterly blown away …lifted up by some entirely unexpected enchantment.
They’re everywhere, you know and they are trying to get your attention.
Do them the honor, and yourself the favor of choosing to make room in your soul, time in your day …to surrender to whatever lesson or gift they, in whatever form they appear, have to offer you.
You’ll stop wondering if you’re a fool soon enough, …stop worrying that someone might hear you …talking to a bird, or a lizard, or a rock.
Laugh and tease with a Chat. Sit with a goldfinch family. Let the self-important nutjobs speeding past on their way to somewhere else wonder what the hell you’re up to, if they even notice. You’ll be in good company. And magic will learn your name, calling out to you more and more readily. You’ll learn to recognize its voice, feel its breath, even its hushed approach.
Ask me how I know.
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This kind of observation, this seeking the magical nest and finding, spending time...it's beautiful. I've never read or heard much about the nesting of Lesser Goldfinches, let alone the sweetest song-talk from daddy-Lesser. I loved every detail of the feeding ritual, the way his song-voice continued the reassurances, as it was such a long seed-gathering time. You know it's a special person, yeah, you, my friend, who will sit cross-legged in the dusty heat, respectfully giving space to these small gold ones, noticing every detail, capturing even the regurgitating motions of seedy-paste feeding. Wowzers---I feel like I've peeked into magic-land. These two episodes truly caught me up in delight; your amazing photos have been stared at again and again--- I am full of happy, all the way to the brim!
And oh, I loved that back-and-forth sassy whistle "chat" with the Chat!
Simply divine David. I, too, will never look at a Lesser daddy the same. The sweet reassurance just melts me! Can we open a school where Lesser Goldfinch dads teach young human men how to love and tend? Imagine how different the human species would be if we received nature’s infinite lessons you so gracefully and patiently welcome.