from the April 20, 2003 Newsletter, issued from near
Natchez, Mississippi:
COURTSHIP SHENANIGANS
The other day I focused my binoculars on a pair of Cardinals foraging at the edge of the
lawn at the hunters' camp. The very instant the bright male found something in the grass
and tilted forward to retrieve it, the female swooped to beside him, squatted low,
quivered her wings and gaped her beak wide open exactly as a nestling might. The male then
fed her what he had found. This went on for several minutes, the male constantly dropping
this and that into her gaping gullet.
Finally there came a moment when the begging female bumped up against him almost
aggressively, but this time the male just sort of threw up his wings as if his nervous
system had short-circuited and he unceremoniously flew away. The female must have had her
eyes closed because she remained crouching, wing- quivering and gaping for a second or two
before she shut her mouth, stood erect, looked around... and in her body language I could
read volumes.
from the October 13, 2002 Newsletter, issued from near
Natchez, Mississippi:
CARDINAL ANTING OR APHIDING
While my breakfast baked over the campfire I vacantly eyed a male Cardinal on a limb
inside the nearby Waxmyrtle tree. The bird seemed to know exactly where he wanted to go.
When he got there he immediately bent over the branch's side, with his beak quickly picked
something from the branch's bottom bark, opened one wing and appeared to smear in a
single, jerky movement whatever he had removed from below the branch under his wing! I
couldn't tell if he was rubbing the wing's inner surface or the tender part of his body
usually covered by the wing. This whole process took only three or four seconds, then
immediately he repeated the entire process, this time beneath the other wing. During a
minute or so he alternated between wings maybe ten times.
When he left I went into the Waxmyrtle to look at the spot where he had been. I found a
densely populated colony of perhaps a hundred giant aphids, some of them the size of BBs,
others tiny. Had the Cardinal been preening beneath his wings with the juices of smashed
aphids? Certainly these aphids were turgid with sweet sap sucked from the Waxmyrtle's
limb, but I've never heard of birds smearing sugar-water over their feathers.
Later in the day I returned to the same spot. This time only half a dozen aphids were
present, but now so were several very large, slow-moving ants of a kind I don't recall
seeing here. Ants are known to move about colonies of aphids they milk for honeydew.
In bird literature there's a phenomenon known as "anting," where birds have been
observed placing ants on their bodies for unknown purposes. A good guess is that formic
acid from the ants' crushed bodies repel external parasites.
I'll bet that I'd witnessed the Cardinal "anting" with ants tending the aphid
colony. I think I almost made a splendid observation, but I was unable to see the whole
thing.
There's a page about bird anting (and smoking) at http://birds.ecoport.org/Behaviour/EBanting.htm.
from the April 14, 2007 Newsletter, issued from Jalpan,
Querétaro, Mexico:
MEXICAN CARDINALS
Some mornings a Cardinal sings in a Sweet Acacia right outside my casita. The
song is indistinguishable from how it sounds up north. The liquid CHEW-CHEW-CHEW-CHEW
stirs up childhood memories of my mother in spring-green Kentucky grass hanging big white
sheets on the clothesline, the sheets flapping and snapping in chilly, moist April wind as
"Red Bird" calls from the Flowering Peach tree. And I remember what a sight a
Cardinal was singing in a dark green, Mississippi magnolia. CHEW-CHEW-CHEW-CHEW and I look
at the parched, wrinkled skin on my hands and arms and wonder how I got from there to
here.
Cardinals down here are the very same species that are so common and eye-catching in
Eastern North America's woods and suburbs, and the US Desert Southwest. The Northern
Cardinal's distribution extends deep into Mexico all the way along the Gulf Coast to the
Yucatan and northern Guatemala and Belize. It's an unusual distribution that must hint at
something in the species' evolutionary history. |
