So it's spring again and birds are building nests and those people who can are buying houses, with a little bit of help from a colossal burst bubble. The two cutest chipmunks on the entire Eastern Seaboard are chewing their way through my 5-by-5-foot "garden" like little bright-eyed chainsaws, but I cannot bear to live-trap and relocate them because a few years ago when I live-trapped 14 chipmunks in a single month (believe it, it's true) and released them on a strip of prime grassy rodent real estate a couple of miles away along the river, I drove past their new digs one evening and saw an adult fox happily hanging out in this newly-populated chipmunkville, a spot where I had never, ever seen a fox in the five years since I had moved into the area, and believe me, I see plenty of foxes around. I could lie to you and say I couldn't sleep that night. But I sure as hell felt awful, like a cosmic interloper, a lower-grade version of the guy in the Ray Bradbury story who goes back in time and ruins the future by stepping on a butterfly.
So anyway, it's spring, time for all of we creatures to munch fresh crisp plants and be sociable. And one day about a week ago I'm watching two starlings stake out a corner of the gutter above my porch to build their nest, right at the top opening of the drain spout, which strikes me as suicidal given the rainy spring we've had but appears to make sense to the starlings and is I guess a nice round anchoring pocket for the bottom of the nest if they build it to be flood-resistant. They don't particularly seem to care that if their nest holds it will then back up the rainwater like a beaver dam and, as with some previous bird gutter tenants, send sheets of water cascading onto my porch in a downpour. Like Dick Cheney dodging the draft, the starlings have other priorities. It's spring.
So in the middle of these two starlings' house-hunt, I'm watching from my window when suddenly, on the lawn near the porch, a fight breaks out between two adult starlings. I can't tell if it's the two would-be mates, or two rivals vying for the right to the prospective partnership, or two altogether different starlings with their own bone to pick, because I know nothing at all about starlings except for 1.) the little bit I learned about their anatomy while stuffing and preserving a starling during a taxidermy phase in my adolescence and 2.) the factoid, from my days years ago working in horse stables where starlings were a nuisance, that live starlings don't like seeing dead starlings, which is why when we found a dead one we would hang it by its legs from a rafter in the shed row to scare away the others. I can't say whether this actually worked, but to us it was a sworn ritual -- kind of like the belief that hopelessly failed kings of American industry will become keenly globally competitive by being propped up and allowed to keep their jobs -- so it didn't matter.
At any rate, these two starlings are going at it, and I don't mean World Wrestling Federation whacked-with-a-folding-chair fakery. This bout has the look of a fight to the death. The two warring birds are all over each other, beaks serially knifing at each other's necks and abdomens, wings a slashing blur, one bird pinning the other to the ground and seemingly ready for the kill when suddenly things reverse and the first is then held down in the grass for a seemingly imminent lethal beak-slash to its vitals, but then things reverse again. I almost can't watch. I know that one way or the other I am soon going to be carrying away and disposing of the bloody bodily remnants of a onetime starling. I have spent time as a critter low on the food chain in the Alaskan tundra and I have had a very large gun pointed at my head in an alley in a big East Coast city and I am telling you: this bird fight is about the most vicious thing I have ever witnessed. It lasts at least a full minute, the all-out thrashing and stabbing, and I cannot believe both birds are even still alive.
And then, as if on cue, the two birds suddenly separate and fly away. Cleanly, briskly, with no apparent damage. I'm google-eyed in my upstairs window and I cannot believe it.
I learn later, when I look it up, that starlings, like the Pilgrims, are an invasive and aggressive species deliberately introduced here from England, in this case to control insects, but things haven't quite worked out happily. Starlings swoop in, sometimes in flocks of thousands that stymie entire towns and inspire desperate local anti-starling initiatives, and they physically attack and displace native birds, and they fight brutally and frequently with other birds (often woodpeckers, apparently) and among themselves for practically any reason: for food, for mates, for nests. Most of the fighting is by males (does this surprise you?). Anecdotal accounts and photos, e.g., here and here, portray starlings fighting, sometimes to the death, over suet and other food, and destroying the eggs of other birds. A Time article from 1930 bemoans the "plague" of bad-assed starlings that descended on Washington, D.C. that year. One monograph tells of starlings poking their beaks into small birdhouses to break the eggs and trash the nests of other species, even though the starlings themselves cannot use the birdhouses because their bodies are too big to fit through the holes. A 1962 article download from The Wilson Bulletin ornithology magazine provides an observer's incredible minute-to-minute diary, with hand-drawn action illustrations(!), of a full hour-and-15-minute blood match between two male starlings.
These birds are mean suckers.
As it happens, just a couple of days before I saw the starling brawl, I found two smashed starling eggs (they are blue like robin eggs, only slightly darker and smaller) on the lawn, not far beneath the sought-after gutter nest site and in almost the exact spot where the birds later fought. So there are all kinds of possibilities here: Rival starling attacks nest, trashes eggs, and tries to sidle up to the female to raise a new family in the same spot. (I'm not sure a female whose eggs have just been crushed would invite the egg-smasher over for tea. But I'm not a starling.) A fight ensues, and one of the contestants wins. Or: after the egg-fight an entirely new pair of starlings moves in to inherit the nest site. Or: the egg-smashers are actually the pair of crows who live around here, and the starlings fight over who now gets to squat in the gutter. Or: the fight has nothing to do with the eggs or the nest but is actually over the suet that I happen to keep in ample supply on my bird feeder year-round, mere steps from the scene of the combat. I know I'm spoiling the birds with suet in the warm months when there is plenty of natural protein around, but life is short and I figure raw natural selection isn't everything.
So in any case, in the wake of the lost eggs and within minutes after the fight, a male and female starling do in fact shack up in the gutter atop the downspout and immediately get to work building a nest, each zooming back and forth between the corner of the roof and some nearby pine boughs rich in dry needles and dead blown grass and leaves. A full beak on every trip. Upon landing, each bird disappears into the cup of the gutter, and there is an immediate brushy rasping sound which conveys, I'm guessing, their expertly weaving the nest material into position in their aluminum shelter. This goes on for a good while until, actually, I stop watching because I have work to do. As of this writing, a week later, the starlings have taken up full residence. If the two of them can defend their turf and build a domestic relationship of compatibility, respect, and active listening, they should be fine.
So what is the meaning of this story? Beats me. 1.) Our desires come in seasons and we are willing to fight for them. 2.) We need more women presidents. 3.) It's amazing and beautiful that parents manage to raise families at all. 4.) The gaggles of young heterosexual prom-gowned giggling clickety-heeled girly-girls and young acned grunting hooting hunching boyish-boys and young baseball-capped stride-swinging wise-cracking lesbian non-girly-girls and young sashaying, mutually-mocking, uproariously laughing gay boys -- all of whom, among many others, I see all the time at the hangouts where I write -- are all doing exactly the same obediently ritualistic thing. 5.) Animals are animals. All of us. 6.) I need screens over my gutters. 7.) It is good to spend as much time as possible watching things happen.
It's spring.
