[Granville-Hough] 15 Jun 2009 - Birds 15 Jun 2009

[Trustees for Granville W. Hough]

In Sullivan’s Hollow, Birds of a Feather do Flock together.

In a recent weekly discussion with my sister-in-law Dorothy 
Neville, she mentioned the mocking birds, cardinals, and blue jays had 
returned to her East Texas back yard, even though the apartment managers 
would not allow her to feed them anymore. I noted that we now had so 
many crows that the mocking birds and doves we used to have in Leisure 
World are seldom seen this year.

Then I began recalling our friends and neighbors, the bird families 
which shared our working and living space on our Hough family farm. 
English sparrows, a hated European species, had invaded Grandpa 
Richardson’s farm, and other species had been forced to leave there. But 
on our Hough farm we protected and shared our grain and fruit with the 
natives, and they thrived. Other farms throughout the area had similar 
arrangements.
My favorite was the Purple Martin. We had two Martin poles near our 
garden, and the martins were in exclusive command there. They knew their 
duty was to eat the insects in the family garden, and they worked hard 
at it, morning till night. Each martin pole had three or four cross arms 
about four feet long, each arm pointing in a different direction. At the 
end of each cross arm, we hung a nesting gourd, usually about eight 
inches in diameter, but shaped like a big pear. On one side we cut a 
doorway hole and we drilled a drainage hole or two in the bottom. We 
grew the gourds for that and other purposes.
Each fall the martins migrated to I did not know where, but we could 
then replace old gourds, and make sure we were ready for the next spring 
when they would show up for work. In the spring, when we heard their 
welcome chirps, we knew it was time to plant the garden. They would 
check out the new gourds, and then select their new home for the season. 
Then they were ready for real family business and brought in materials 
for their nests at the bottom of the gourd. Then their chicks had to be 
conceived, laid in eggs, hatched and fed, taught to fly, and how to 
clear the insects out of the garden. Then off they went for winter 
vacation. (I now know that purple martins wintered in the Amazon River 
jungle. They have been equipped with small light-weight devices which 
give their daily location and other information. On their migrations, 
they fly 200 to 300 miles daily)
As I said, they were my favorite bird. They did their duty and did not 
complain. We did not use pesticides in our garden. Our purple martins 
kept insects down to a tolerable level. I do not know when they moved 
into our poles. Perhaps they came from Mr. Jim Meadows’ garden after 
brother Harold built some inviting nests. Brother Clifford told me later 
that purple martins disappeared when pesticides were put into general 
use after WWII. That’s too bad. They weren’t smart, but I thought they 
were one of God’s gifts to farm folks.
The mockingbird which nested in a water-oak in front of our house used 
to wake us up at dawn with a bright and cheerful song advertising his 
nesting site and potential as a father. Eventually he would find an 
attractive young taker and they would furnish entertainment all summer 
with their songs and growing-up antics of their chicks. A Baltimore 
oriole couple had a good nest in another oak tree and each year had a 
family there. Their nest was like a sock, tightly woven with string, 
small flexible roots, etc; and it was used, year after year. The bullies 
of the front yard trees were the blue jays. Their raucous cries were 
like those of crows, which we did not often see. Crows tend to flock and 
eat corn, scratching it up after it was planted and eating it after it 
had ears of new grain. Everybody shot them and they did not become 
reestablished until chicken and cattle raising days after WWII. Around 
the hogpens and along the fence rows, we had mourning doves and 
bob-white quail, both ground nesters. It was our childhood ambition to 
imitate doves and bob whites well enough for them to answer back when we 
called. Sometimes there would be a response, but we were never sure 
whether we had just interrupted a conversation or were starting one.
 From the hollow to the east and the Meadow to the west, we would hear 
the evening calls of of Whip-poor-wills and the swoops of bullbats when 
they dived into swarms of insects, huge mouths wide open. They were on 
the job, consuming the pests we wanted destroyed. Sometimes in the 
Meadow we would see swamp species which had made their way from Clear 
Creek. I once saw a beautiful Kingfisher with a minnow he had just 
caught. The red-headed woodpeckers and yellow-bellied sapsuckers lived 
in the still-standing “doughty” long leaf pines. When the timber cutters 
found a tree so infested with insects that it would not make lumber, 
they left it standing, and they sometimes lived for 50 years. 
Woodpeckers worked on these lonesome pines incessantly. They gave a 
staccato drumming sound, not for somebody’s pleasure, but to get that 
worm under the bark. Sapsuckers were another species of the woodpecker 
and seemed to eat different insects. Looking 75 to 100 feet up from the 
ground at a sapsucker at work, it looked as if he were just interested 
in sap, but actually he was eating insects with a long tongue. There 
were many other more shy birds like cardinals and brown thrashers which 
stayed in the woods and looked after the berries and wild fruit. From 
our front porch, we would see a rare humming bird harvesting nectar from 
our flowers.
One of the thrills of boyhood came each fall with the flyby of wild 
geese from Canada. Domestic geese in the community had kyniptions of joy 
and would have joined had their wings not been trimmed back in 
anticipation of their reaction. The flocks would be so large you could 
not finish counting them as they flew over. Sometimes the flocks would 
come down for a day or two at a lake or stream. I am told they still fly 
by but in smaller numbers. Other kinds of migrating birds would drop in 
on us for some time, then move on. Dueward reported that one species 
adopted winter quarters at a grove of black locust and pine we had set out.
Of course there is life, and death, on the farm and in the wild. Our 
guardians of the after world were the turkey buzzards. Their home roost 
was on Cohay Creek about 7 miles away. They were awkward on ground but 
majestic in the air as they floated upward on the rising columns of warm 
air. They could seem to go for hours as they rose slowly and drifting 
along, sampling the air for any hint of carrion. God gave them an 
extremely keen sense of smell for carrion, and they searched the terrain 
for any windfall. Once they detected a whiff, they glided downward to 
check closer. If one column went down, other columns as far as five 
miles away would flap over to check what was going on. You quickly got a 
cleanup crew of dozens of hungry birds. They were all well-trained and 
would not touch a living animal, or one which was still moving. We once 
played a trick on our local guardians and hung a dead chicken with 
hay-baling wire to a high limb in a tree. The dead chicken would swing 
back and forth in the slightest breeze. The buzzards just sat there on 
the ground and in nearby trees, just watching the chicken swing back and 
forth. When it finally decayed enough to fall to the ground, the 
buzzards quickly consumed every morsel. We assume that’s how it was; 
because when we got back to check, there was only a swinging wire and a 
few feathers on the ground. Another trick we played on them was to use 
our sling shots and shoot at them in the air. Sometimes one would 
suddenly flap and move further away. We always thought we must have 
touched a feather.
Of course we had hawks, owls, of different kinds, as birds of prey. Both 
hawks and owls would make prey of small chickens, so we discouraged 
them. We liked to hear the nightly hoots of the great owls and the 
frightening screeches of the little screech owls
Perhaps our success with birds on the Hough farm was the fact that we 
fed our chickens, hogs, and other livestock in the open and birds were 
welcome to come in and clean up the remnants of food. We also had fruit 
which could be eaten on the ground, and even a few bites might be 
sneaked from an orchard tree or vine. We also did not burn our woods and 
had more wild fruit than most farms.