One Wild Bird at a Time: Portraits of Individual Lives

by Bernd Heinrich

Overview

Unique encounters with wild birds from the acclaimed scientist and “a dedicated watcher happy to knock down the fourth wall of zoology” (The Wall Street Journal).
 
In his modern classics One Man’s Owl and Mind of the Raven, Bernd Heinrich has written memorably about his relationships with wild ravens and a great horned owl. In One Wild Bird at a Time, Heinrich returns to his great love: close, day-to-day observations of individual wild birds.
 
There are countless books on bird behavior, but Heinrich argues that some of the most amazing bird behaviors fall below the radar of what most birds do in aggregate. Heinrich’s “passionate observations [that] superbly mix memoir and science” lead to fascinating questions—and sometimes startling discoveries (The New York Times Book Review). A great crested flycatcher, while bringing food to the young in their nest, is attacked by the other flycatcher nearby. Why? A pair of Northern flickers hammering their nest-hole into the side of Heinrich’s cabin deliver the opportunity to observe the feeding competition between siblings, and to make a related discovery about nest-cleaning. One of a clutch of redstart warbler babies fledges out of the nest from twenty feet above the ground, and lands on the grass below. It can’t fly. What will happen next?
 
Heinrich “looks closely, with his trademark ‘hands-and-knees science’ at its most engaging, [delivering] what can only be called psychological marvels of knowing” (The Boston Globe).
 
“An engaging memoir of the opportunities for doing scientific research without leaving one’s own backyard.”—Kirkus Reviews

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780544386402
Publisher:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication date:	06/11/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	235
File size:	20 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

BERND HEINRICH is an acclaimed scientist and the author of numerous books, including Winter World, Mind of the Raven, Why We Run, and The Homing Instinct.  Among Heinrich’s many honors is the 2013 PEN New England Award for nonfiction for Life Everlasting.

BERND HEINRICH is an acclaimed scientist and the author of numerous books, including the best-selling Winter World, Mind of the Raven, Why We Run, The Homing Instinct, and One Wild Bird at a Time. Among Heinrich's many honors is the 2013 PEN New England Award in nonfiction for Life Everlasting. He resides in Maine.

Read an Excerpt

1
 
Flickers in the House
 
My summer spent observing birds seemed to be winding down. Most of them had found mates, made nests, and incubated their eggs; feeding the young was now their main preoccupation. I had finished a marathon observation of a pair of tree swallows. My phoebe had this year not attracted a mate. The blue-headed vireos’ story was finished for the year: one nest I was watching in a balsam fir tree had fledged four young; the other had been abandoned after a gradual decline in the number of eggs in the nest. The sapsuckers with their “super drum” on the apple tree had stopped drumming and were now incubating or feeding young. I was starting to feel relaxed enough to sit and write. But there are always distractions.

Next to the window of my cabin is a paper birch tree. It had grown at the edge of the old cellar hole with collapsing stone foundations that I rebuilt to put my cabin on. Each year it hosts aphid colonies tended by red ants that live in the cabin’s roof space. A highway of ants up and down the white bark attracts a pair of yellow-bellied sapsuckers. Just three meters from me as I sit on the couch writing, these beautiful woodpeckers unobtrusively and silently lap up ants.

Hearing a woodpecker tapping from the cabin wall opposite the birch tree wasn’t particularly surprising to me; I assumed one of the sapsuckers was temporarily distracted from the ants and had started sampling wood. Strangely, though, on several occasions when I opened the door to look I saw instead another woodpecker fly off: the northern yellow-shafted flicker. After a time I noticed a suspicious rhythmicity to the tapping. Flickers feed on ants, but as far as I knew, they foraged for them on the ground.

A day later, on June 8, I got out of bed at 4:30 a.m. to write up some raven observations from the day before. A little later I heard the same rhythmic tap, tap, tap, tap, tap from the same cabin wall. Surely the noise would stop soon. At 6 a.m. it still had not let up, but my patience had, so I gently opened the door to peek around the corner, and again saw a flicker leave. This time I noticed a small hole almost through the wall’s outer pine boards: the flicker had apparently been making a nest hole. But the outer and inner cabin walls are separated by a ten-centimeter gap, so if the flickers (I assumed it would be a pair) penetrated the outer board they would meet a bottomless space, with no place to put their eggs.

The next morning at 5:10 a.m. I heard a rustle on the wall, then a light tapping changing to vigorous hammering, which continued nearly unabated for two hours, finally stopping when a second bird arrived. A period of silence was followed by five separate soft, second-long drumrolls, probably some sort of signal. Then total silence. Had the pair gotten through the outer board?

The hole was now nearly large enough for them to slip through, and I was afraid that when they discovered the empty space they would leave and make a nest hole elsewhere. The opportunity to have flickers nesting in my cabin was too good to pass up. I had to do something to help make it happen, and I had to do it without the birds noticing me, in the few minutes they were away.

The potential nest site was too high for me to reach from the outside, but I calculated where it would be on the upstairs bedroom wall. With my chainsaw I removed a section of the inside wall covering its anticipated location. I fixed boards to the bottom and sides below the entrance hole to create a possible nest cavity, cushioned its floor with sawdust and woodchips, and had barely swept the sawdust from floor, bedding, and clothes and settled in downstairs to wait when the tapping resumed.

By midmorning the flicker was in the house, or to be exact, in its east wall. By afternoon I heard scratchy noises there but no more tapping. The scratchy sounds plus occasional very light and brief tapping continued into the evening and resumed at 5:10 the next morning, and again continued for two hours and stopped when a second bird flew to the wall. As before, I heard the signal drumrolls, which sounded like fingers running over the teeth of a comb. Then all was quiet. I was happy: I knew now that the flickers would stay to nest.

At this point I was not yet living full-time at the cabin, and left it for a few days. Returning on June 16, I was eager to see if I could call it not just the Tree House, as I had until now, but the Bird House. It was the latter! As I walked toward the cabin, a flicker flew out of the hole in the wall. I rushed upstairs, removed the loose panel I had left over the cavity, and looked into the nest. To my joy, on the sawdust and wood chips lay a clutch of seven pearly white eggs.

Flickers normally take about two weeks to excavate their nest cavity, and the male does most of the work. However, the female “decides” when to lay and how many eggs. Apparently the time until egg laying is not measured from the beginning of nest-hole construction, because this pair had a suitable nest cavity in only three days and egg laying began then. The trigger for the physiological changes of egg production and laying thus appeared to be related to timing of nest-hole availability.

My flickers stopped at seven eggs, a normal clutch size. But that number is below what the species can produce. Flickers are, like chickens, indeterminate egg layers; removing one egg from the nest while leaving at least two in it induces the female (provided she has enough food) to replace the egg. In one case a flicker kept laying until she had produced a total of seventy-one eggs, all the time apparently “thinking” she only had about five — not yet a full clutch.

I found the flickers’ incubation time peaceful and satisfying. It was a comfort at night to think that a flicker was sitting on her seven eggs about three meters from me, sheltered from the weather. On nights when the pounding of the rain got louder and louder until it became a roar, I felt good that both of us were high and dry.

One early morning after the rain stopped I heard a soft rustling from within the woodpecker hole, then some brittle scratching sounds and several fluttery vibrations. Something was happening. Listening closely with my ear to the wall, I thought at times I was also hearing faint whispering and cheeping-churring voices.

At first light I looked into the nest and saw a heap of tiny naked pink bodies, with empty eggshells scattered among them. The babies made a scratchy-sounding purring noise, except one that made high-pitched peeps.

The sounds they made were the weirdest, most otherworldly I’ve ever heard, and the most improbable. If I had to describe them I’d say, “Just like you’d expect baby pterodactyls to sound, only cuter.” And for that matter, the little pink bodies with their tiny heads on long snake-like necks probably didn’t look much different from reptiles either.

In order to watch the birds from up close without their knowing, I covered all the windows to darken the bedroom and inserted a pane of glass into my viewing hole. Later I sometimes removed both the board and the glass and set up my camera in front of the nest to take pictures. At first the parents seemed not to notice that the back wall of their nest was missing, but then they inspected the cavity from top to bottom as though looking for something. They also hung by their feet from the lip of the cavity and looked around my room. I sat frozen in front of them in the dark.

Table of Contents

Introduction vii

1 Flickers in the House 1

2 A Quintet of Crows 17

3 Getting to Know a Starling 27

4 Woodpecker with a Drum 37

5 Barred Owl Talking 53

6 Hawk Tablecloths 69

7 Vireo Birth Control 75

8 Nuthatch Homemaking 83

9 Blue Jays in Touch 91

10 Chickadees in Winter 107

11 Redpolls Tunneling in Snow 125

12 Tracking Grouse in Winter 135

13 Crested Flycatcher's Nest Helpers 145

14 Red-winged Blackbirds Returning 155

15 Phoebe Seasons 165

16 Evening Grosbeaks 177

17 Audience to a Woodcock 183

Acknowledgments 191

Further Reading 193

Appendix 203

Index 205

Editorial Reviews

He can certainly tell a story when there is one but is often content to retain the meandering form of the journals he culls, supplementing his entries with his own sketches, drawings and paintings.

From the Publisher

The clearing and woods around Bernd Heinrich's Maine cabin were his research center. As he studied, the author got to know birds as individuals. He could recognize the twang of a particular blue jay, for example. Narrator Rick Adamson brings a clear, interested voice to stories of starlings grooming themselves or woodcocks standing up to predators. He reads with a sense of innocent wonder. That's maintained even as the author proves to be an expert who does bird autopsies and collects grouse scat. The audiobook covers all aspects of bird life. The author's story of following sapsuckers through the woods may bring a smile, but the slow attrition of an egg brood in harsh conditions makes for a sad puzzle. J.A.S. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

JULY 2016 - AudioFile

2015-12-17
An eminent biologist shares the joys of bird-watching and how observing the anomalous behaviors of individual birds has guided his research. Heinrich (Emeritus, Biology/Univ. of Vermont; The Homing Instinct: Meaning and Mystery in Animal Migration, 2014, etc.) smoothly describes how studying the daily lives of birds in their natural environments allows him to experience their world vicariously. Now retired and living in a cabin in the Maine woods, he devotes himself to closely observing "his avian neighbors, visitors, and vagrants, and keep[ing] daily records throughout spring, summer, fall, and winter." Every year, he welcomes a pair of broad-wing hawks who feast at a vernal pond populated by frogs, spring peepers, and salamanders while refurbishing their old nest. Unusually, they provide a fern cover on the nest, which they update on a daily basis after their chicks hatch. Heinrich also includes anecdotes from an earlier time when he still lived in Vermont. Awakened one morning by the loud drumming of a male woodpecker on a nearby apple tree, the author wondered if perhaps he was seeking to attract a female. Surprisingly, when a female was drawn to the sound, he stopped drumming and flew away. The same behavior was repeated the following day. The author's observations led him to conclude that the bird's drumming was not part of a mating ritual but rather a noisy advertisement of his nest-building skills. Vireos nesting near his cabin allowed him to observe how they deliberately reduced the number of eggs they were hatching to accommodate the reduced food supply after an unseasonal freeze. Heinrich explains that bird-watching has been an important part of his life since he was a boy on his family's farm. When he was 6, they moved from Germany to Maine. Finding familiar birds nesting "immediately made this place our home," he writes. An engaging memoir of the opportunities for doing scientific research without leaving one's own backyard.

Kirkus Reviews