Diamond Panels

The Birds Around Us
Guided by Nature
As we learn more about birds, we find they are not quite the gloriously unrestrained being we had imagined them to be. They are bound by all sorts of natural laws. They go north and south almost by the calendar. They seem to follow certain flyways and routes between their summer and winter homes. A robin that lives in Connecticut this year is not likely to go to Michigan next year. Some behaviorists--Tinbergen, Lorenz, and others--caution us against saying that birds think. They tell us that birds are creatures of action and reaction. A night-heron newly arrived in the rookery performs a step-by-step ritual of song and dance. Leave out any one of the steps, and the sequence is disrupted--the reproductive cycle does not carry through to fruition.
We learn, too, that most birds have territories. The males hold down a plot of ground as their own--it may be an acre, or it may be 5 acres. They are property owners just as we are. Song, instead of being only a joyous outburst, is a functional expression--a proclamation of ownership, an invitation to a female, a threat to another male. Most thought-provoking of all is to discover the balance of nature: the balance between a bird and its environment, the interrelation between the hawk that eats the bird, the bird that eats the insect, and the insect that eats the leaves--perhaps the very leaves that grow on the tree in which the hawk nests. We learn that each ecosystem has a carrying capacity, and that predation harvest only a surplus that otherwise would be leveled off in some different way; hence, putting up fences and shooting all the hawks and cats will not raise the number of Red-eyed Vireos to any significant degree. Birds, then, are almost as earthbound as we are. They have freedom and mobility only within prescribed natural limits.
I have often likened birds to litmus paper. Their high rate of metabolism and fast pace cause them to react sensitively to anything in their habitat that is out of kilter. Thus, they are much more than cardinals, jays, or chickadees to brighten the suburban garden, ducks or quail to fill the hunter's bag, or rare shorebirds to be ticked off on the birder's list--they are indicators of the environment that send out signals that we must heed to ensure our own survival, as well as theirs.

Orthos' Guide to