[Granville-Hough] 15 Jun 2009 - Birds
Trustees for Granville W. Hough
gwhough-trust at oakapple.net
Thu Jun 15 06:19:30 PDT 2017
Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2009 08:02:44 -0700
From: Granville W Hough <gwhough at oakapple.net>
Subject: Birds 15 Jun 2009
In SullivanÆs 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
RichardsonÆs 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 MeadowsÆ 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. ThatÆs too bad. They werenÆt smart, but I thought they
were one of GodÆs 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 ôdoughtyö 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 somebodyÆs 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 conniptions 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 thatÆs 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.
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