Stray Feathers From a Bird Man's Desk

by Austin Loomer Rand

Every now and then in our press appear blasts against crowded living conditions in our cities, and the tenements where people are crowded together. Often there is the implication that this type of thing is unnatural and abnormal. And yet when we look about us in the bird world we see that gregariousness is a common trait. We have only to remember the great flocks of starlings and blackbirds in the autumn, or the massed flights of water fowl. Not only in traveling and in feeding, but also at nesting time birds may gather together, and some birds nest in such close association that the term "apartment houses" or "tenement" is really applicable.

The martins' house on our lawn with perhaps dozens of closely spaced rooms (some houses have as many as two hundred rooms) is a case in point. The neat martin house, made of boards, is a man-made thing, but even before the white man came to this continent, and before the Choctaw Indians hung up groups of hollow gourds for the martin colonies to use, the martins nested in colonies. Even in recent years certain colonies we might consider unprogressive have been reported as using such diverse nesting situations as among the boulders of a lake shore in Minnesota, and the closely spaced woodpecker holes which riddled a dead pine in Florida. And probably it was always thus. The martins liked company at nesting.

CLIFF DWELLERS, TOO Perhaps it would not be proper to consider a colony of bank swallows, each with a separate burrow in the same small cut bank and roofed with the same few square yards of turf of mother earth, as a real apartment house of cliff dwellers. But the term has been used in connection with a West Indian woodpecker, where a dozen pairs were nesting in a single dead tree, and "the trunk was a veritable apartment house." A similar situation exists with the naked-faced barbet of West Africa. This bird too makes a hole in a dead tree for its nest, like a woodpecker, and colonies of thirty to fifty birds may be found nesting in a single dead tree, while other dead trees nearby, apparently equally suitable, are untenanted. Colonies of hundreds of nests of cliff swallows, the nests touching and overlapping, may be under the eaves of a single barn, or as they used to be and some still are, on the sheltered side of a cliff. But as these birds had nothing to do with the making of the roof, perhaps these too do not deserve to be rated as apartment houses.

In southern South America there is a monk parakeet that makes a real tenement. It nests colonially in treetops, and the nests of sticks are placed so close together that they merge and form a single mass, up to nine feet across, in which each parakeet has its own nest. Similar to this is the palm chat. This West Indian bird is small and thrush-sized, dull in color, brownish with a streaked breast, nothing remarkable to look at, but it carries amazingly large sticks, little thinner than a lead pencil and as much as two feet and more long up to the top of a palm tree, and there it makes its bulky community nest.

BUILD NESTS CO-OPERATIVELY These stick nests, which may be four feet and more across, are conspicuous and regular features of the landscape in Hispaniola. The colony consists of four to eight pairs of birds, and each has its own apartment in the bulky structure, and its own passageway to the outside. But in the parts of the community nests that hold the individual nests together and cover them there are roughly defined passages running through the interlacing twigs of the top of the nest so that the birds can creep about under cover. Apparently some of the work is carried on in common, for as many as half a dozen birds may be working close together, pulling and twisting twigs more firmly into place.

The social weaver is the most advanced apartment builder. It, like the palm chat, has little of distinction in its appearance, being mostly dull brownish with a black face. But in its home country, the savannas of Rhodesia in southeastern Africa, its huge community nests in the savanna trees may be seen from afar. The largest Friedmann saw when he was studying the bird there was about 25 feet by 15 feet, by 5 feet high, and contained about 95 nests. And this might have been still bigger, for part of it had broken the branch on which it rested and fallen to the ground. Sir Andrew Smith, the early ornithologist of South Africa, has written that when these birds start a colony they first of all make a roof of coarse grass. The group to which the social weaver belongs gets its name from the remarkable ability some of them have of weaving their nesting materials. But the social weaver neither plaits nor weaves its roof. It puts the roof together in the form of a well-made hayrick with a fairly definite thatching arrangement so that the water runs off. This is a community effort. Under this roof each individual pair makes its own separate nest. These apartment houses are used year after year, but last year's chambers are not used, new ones being made under the roof each year, and so it grows bigger and bigger until the weight of the mass may break the branches and cause a part or the whole to fall to the ground.

BIRD HELPERS AT NESTING TIME [Ref]

In many a well-run American home the children have definite responsibilities, the older children may help look after the younger, and even grown-up relatives may stay as part of the family group. As in so many cases there may be found parallels to this in the bird world.

The ani, the curious tropical American cuckoo that makes communal nests, is gregarious and the young of the first brood become part of the parent flock. Two more broods may be raised during one season in Cuba, and the young of the earlier brood may feed their younger brothers and sisters of the later brood. The same has been recorded for many other species in the wild: in eastern bluebirds, mountain bluebirds, wheatears, long-tailed titmice, barn swallows, coots, rails, and gallinules young have been recorded as feeding still younger birds. In captivity this habit has been seen a number of times. Young birds hardly able to feed themselves may help feed still younger individuals of the same or other species, and a nestling crowned hornbill has been seen to offer food to its nestmates. This tendency to feed nestmates evidently appears very early in the life of the bird, as Dr. C. O. Whitman, who worked intensively with pigeons at the University of Chicago, recorded a hybrid dove only twelve days old that fed its nestmate.