Don't Have a [Brown-Headed] Cowbird, Man! The Brood Parasites of CPTC

Some Careers that Involve Cowbirds: DNR, Fish and Wildlife; Parks and Rec, Architecture, Bird Removal, Biology, Field Data Collection, Ornithology, Lab Tech, Tech Assembly, Mapping and Surveying, Habitat Restoration, Photography and Journalism, Conservation...and quite a lot of basically, art forgery because making fake bird eggs for museums and science exhibits is amazing.

Hooboy. There was a time when I went to the Flett marshlands before work to relax. I'm not sure I know what that word means now. On the far edge of the wetlands where Bridgeport Way can give you an occasional nice view of the Red-Tail Hawks, a pair of Canada Geese were herding their three goslings down the sidewalk on their way to a paddle. They made it, which never fails to impress me.

Other things bounding into creation: BUGS. and BLOOMS.

Bugs. Oh, good grief. We've got an astounding crop of Western Thatcher Ants in the Uplands right now. Just...astounding. This monster is half the size of President Taft's bathtub. That's big.

If you happen to be a Northern Flicker and reading this, PM me for the coordinates and happy chowing, I promise I won't let the crows know.

We need both bugs and blooms in massive numbers if we're going to have healthy chicks in the nests. Healthy chicks means healthy everythingelsethateatsbirds. So here's a quick cap of what's new on the blooming scene (hyperlinked for your edification) besides the:

California Poppy

California Lilac, (which does have some native PNW here, but go to this link and see the blurb about Jersey Tea, the East-Coast variant we found blooming in the Flett uplands last week)

Bicolor Lupines, and, that pesky

Herb Robert

(other blooms in the uplands will be for another article, and the Villain of June, Poison Hemlock, will be approached with a full HAZMAT suit).

Fringecups (Tellima grandifloras) are in bloom! Don't want invasives? Let these take over your shady yard. They're native to WA State and hardy enough to thrive in extreme if magnificent ecologies like 'Alaska' and 'California'. If you are one of CPTC's Enviro-Sci students, your POJAR guidebook will tell you the Skagit peoples used it for medicines.

For the sunnier areas, you can do a lot worse than our native, wild cucumber the Oregon Manroot (Marah oreganus). The 'manroot' part comes from its ginormous taproot, which can weigh more than three. hundred. pounds. You'll find them growing over and on top of Himalaya Blackberry and English Ivy. Try not to get rid of them if they pop up in your yard. They are wildfire ecologists and do fantastic work in helping the Pacific Coast recover from volcanic ashfalls. And wildfires.

One of the marsh standbys--the Red Osier Dogwood! Now that's a wetlands shrub supreme! The 'osier' actually means 'willow' as in basket-making. The small, creamy flowers are a heavy source of food for our native pollinators and the leaves are a fantastic place to provide shade for birds and mammals alike.

Pacific Crabapple. I have a lot of favorites, but this one stands out. What's not to like about a crabapple tree native to the PNW and it likes wet soils?

In all of this the marsh is singing like a gigantic mosh pit and someone took away the synthesizers. If you're one of those people who makes lists in your spare time, you won't have to plumb through the current 560+ species list of Washington State insects...which is good. Most of these look like your garden-variety Nematocera, the rather...large...family that includes gnats. The critters down here at the Flett are probably males, swarming for the convenience of the females. When they're ready to mate, they go to where the action is, and the males have to put up a lot of work to be noticed. Safety in numbers and all that--there's a slight downside and they can be lost in the crowd.

One of the birds taking advantage of this insectivorous windfall is the Brown-Headed Cowbird.

They like the open spaces, the between-zones around the Flett Pump Station and the thickets/hedgerows ringing the marshlands and retention ponds. There's plenty of water, places to hide, things to eat, and...places to nest. That is, where other birds nest. When a nest is left bereft of adults long enough, a gravid female cowbird flies up, performs an incredibly fast egg-laying, and flies off cackling at a job well done. Soon an entire generation of strange red-winged blackbirds emerge, and, until those adult feathers pop out, they can literally be lost in the crowd. You need to practice to pick them out from every other overblown, fat finchish or sparrowish brownish-yellowish bird.

You can't say 'the face that only a mother could love'. Mom in this case has no choice because all her other precious babies had mysterious tragic accidents, leaving her with his freak of nature that has her questioning her husband's honesty at the genetic counseling office. Pesky Hedge Fund Manager Cowbirds, anyway...

As far as the Outdoor Lab work goes, CPTC's students and instructors keep regular tabs on the wildlife (both flora and fauna) observed and does level-best not to get involved (more on that later, hoo boy). Most of us are not properly authorized to get involved, and it is important to collect proper data first. If an injured bird was found we would know who to call. Same with a dead one (that's a whole separate adventure). But if a bully shows up to cause problems? The closest I've ever come to that is get out of the car for a photo, and the action inspired a Great Blue Heron to fly off because it was hunting little baby ducks. It later took a consolation prize of a half-foot rageribbon called a Northwestern Salamander.

A lot of CPTC's actions for the sake of the Flett Creek marshlands are combined short-term (removing Scotch Broom) and long-term (planting natives to replace Scotch Broom). It is rarely glamourous (unless you have a completely messed up impression of those of us who set leech traps). Birds benefit either way, but how they benefit can be sometimes misleading. Large numbers on one population may mean something bad or good for other wildlife populations...or it may mean nothing at all. Kathy Smith will tell you it's all about population growth. Lest I get too involved in explanations, I'll encapsulate it with a term most native Washingtonians can understand: Boom or Bust. In the old days that applied to the Gold Rush. Now it is all about real estate, which is creepily apropos because...real estate is why Brown-Headed Cowbirds are such a hair-ripping problem today.

Originally these birds were not a problem. They followed the gigantic herds of bison across the Great Plains, sweeping up the clouds of insects and stray seeds and grains they found. But then the settlers happened to the Bison, and cattle replaced the bison. Cattle kinda need...more maintenance than the bison. They aren't allowed to roam across multiple state lines. So you got North American's largest ambulatory megafauna population out of the picture and replaced it with a domesticated version and what happened was the landscape had to be graphically altered in order to keep the newcomers for a solvent market. One of the first things that went good-bye were controlled burnings that benefited the native birds that were not the cowbird. And a switch to static populations. The cowbirds have no real pressing need to go anywhere, so they tend to stay in the same spot over and over. Thus, each successive egg-laying of a cowbird means more cowbirds, and many, many less of the other birds.

To encapsulate a sorry state of affairs, What Brown-Headed Cowbirds do to make us all cuckoo is impact the species of other birds that are laying eggs at the same time. Many of these birds are in sorry straits after a few generations of coming up with Cowbirds.

Oh, dear. Inadvertent Toying With Elder Gods of English again. 'Brown-Headed Cowbirds make us cuckoo' ...PM me if you can identify that sentence as a Tom Swifty or a Croakerism. Robert Coston, looking at you and are you still giving your employees at the library Demotivator calendars as gifts?

Back to cowbirds. They are good at what they do. They...recon. They study. They watch. They take notes. They case da joint and plot and scheme and they hatch (ouch) cunning plans to jump into an unattended nest and lay their own egg and then murder the other eggs by drilling holes in the shells before flying into the figurative night with a cackle worthy of Decarabia, Demon of Singing Birds.

Brood Parasites are most famously the common Cuckoo, from which we get the word 'cuckolded', a rather nasty word for a husband unaware that his wife has given birth to a child that is not his. It is also an unfair term all around because...what choice did Mom Blackbird have in this matter?

ScienceMag.org managed to write a pleasant article about this unpleasant practice and I didn't feel the urge to go meet the cowbirds with a double-ought afterwards. Writing at its finest!

Sadly, the writer may win awards, but this bird may hope for little more than the Nobel Puce Prize... (Photo below, Creative Commons Media)

Crime may pay in some cases, if you are willing to work for it. Cowbirds have to plan like an Alcatraz paperboy. They hover and stalk and watch from the thickets with increasingly urgent senses of timing as they wait for that magic moment when the nest is left unprotected. I have no idea how they can hit the pause button on their egg-laying, but...needs must?? Everything is at stake with this tactic. Lay the egg too soon? Rightful nest owners will go 'no way' and push it out, which puts them at risk of an all-out turf war because cowbirds harbor grudges against their reluctant hosts and will wreck revenge and destroy the nest.

If the cowbirds lay the egg too late, it won't hatch in time and the host birds will think it a dud and roll 'im out. Cue possible campaign of revenge again. Cycle repeats. Cycle repeats. Cycle repeats. And below the nest on the ground, a happy red fox says to the other, "I have no idea what's going on, and the selection is limited, but a free lunch is free!"

It is encouraging to report that parasitized species are capable of learning. Down in Oz, the aptly-if-alarmingly-named Screaming Cowbird is too good at its job. Harassed birds learned to change their nesting habits to make future generations of Screaming Cowbirds a little less of a sure thing. At the very least, a wee bit...quieter?

Well-meaning humans can make things so much, much worse by removing cowbird eggs from the nest. The only really successful tactic is oiling the eggs, but...that's a lot of work! Removing the egg is technically easier, but...that never, ever ends well. As we said before, but in less graphic terms, Cowbirds have been reported to go Punisher on the nest that rejected their egg and turn the whole thing into a lump of shreds and confetti. At the same time, many birds can keep track of their eggs and a suddenly missing egg translates to an intruder alert. Entire nests are abandoned for good, which removes all of the young out of the equation. These Hedge Fund Managers--I mean, Brood Parasites--deal with every year's uncertainties by laying their eggs in different nests. It is not a guaranteed recipe for success, but arguably, better than nothing. Controlled burnings have proven a success in a few cases such as Michigan's Kirtland's Warbler, but burns are not something you can just march to the store and apply for. For every year cowbirds go without a natural check and balance, the scales sink against the favor of other birds.

This mess is largely of our own making. The cowbird upswing happened because we've changed much of the habitat out there and...cowbirds have adapted to said changes pretty dang efficiently. Cowbirds are the closest we'll get to Avian Borg. Remember all those nerve-wracking scenes in Star Trek: TNG where the third or forth onslaught suddenly stopped working? "They have adapted." Howdy-cow, YES. They adapt like gangbusters airdropped into a desert island with a crate of Jolt Cola and unlimited rust-free Swiss Army Knives. Cowbirds even grow at a staggeringly faster rate than other birds so they can hurry up and join their proper place in the Brood Parasite Niche.

We've also learned a hecka lot about cowbirds by sheer accident. One of the reasons why we know cowbird eradication is a lot of effort for a lot of mixed results was from a series of trapping and euthanizing programs by Fish and Wildlife. The trapping hinged on using traped, live cowbirds as decoys. Cowbirds are naturally friendly and gregarious to each other, so they'd go visit the singing relative and...bam. That seems like such a simple way of doing things, doesn't it? What can go wrong?

The short answer to that is...Nature Happens.

The local wildlife caught on that there were trapped, live cowbirds. So while Fish and Wildlife had some definite setbacks here and there, the parties that really considered the programs a resounding success were the raccoons, opossums, foxes, bear, weasels, owls, skunks, hawks, coyotes, and all the outdoor things with thumbs, talons, wings, claws, digging implements, teeth, jaws, and brains.

I have no idea what to do with that information, so...you do your best.

As you can tell, humans have been...wrestling with this problem of brood parasites for quite some time. And that's after they finally realized a unilateral Slash and Burn was doing nothing but make it worse for everything and everybody. With a healthy list of reservations on the side, science is marching slowly forward with this problem. Let me take a moment and remind you that scientists generally prefer to do the scientifically accurate thing, but when you aren't sure what to do because the outcomes are so dang confusing...sigh. There are times when activists, conservationists, farmers, biologists and half the living population for the Department of Ag feels trapped in a situation crawling with thatch ants. Nobody likes to just kill things because they're in the way (well, I hope that's the case)--not only is it a waste, it creates a need for a clean up crew.

From 30,000 feet it must look like something identical to the poor, damned souls trapped for all eternity (or 30+ years, whichever comes first) in the Orchestra Pit for Broadway's Phantom of the Opera. Oh, merciful Harmony, Melody, and Cacophony.

Humans don't really do well with Stockholm Syndrome when the other party is a wild animal, especially one as resilient and annoying as the cowbird. We prefer to keep our psychological disorders within our species, thanks awfully.

I think over in the UK, a subtle awareness campaign reminds us of the first priority:

Because nature needs its home.

Finally, a few weeks ago my daughter and I were birdwatching at the Flett, and we noticed something interesting. An immature cowbird was hanging around the Flett Chapter of Snide Starlings. That in itself was not unusual, for the two are often seen together at the food trough. But the young bird appeared to be getting food from the adult bird. Cowbirds are not commonly lain into starling nests but the behavior has been reported and recorded.

Recently a few students dedicated birding students from the University of Illinois posted a great Youtube film of their study with cowbirds. Cowbirds are recognized pains in the buttfeathers by several species--in the case the Yellow Warbler, and Red-Winged Blackbird.

The clip is less than 2 minutes and well worth the time to watch. They understood the warblers had a special call (a seet call) to warn other warblers that the cowbirds were around (hey stay close to the nest! Watch out!) and were curious to see if other birds recognized the seet. Cue some birding hilarity as blackbirds go aggro on the researchers, but as we are told with a laugh,

"nature...right in your face!"

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