It amazes me every time, that uncanny sixth sense of ours—that atavistic tickle somewhere deep in the amygdala, that irrepressible suspicion that invariably catches us by surprise, that overwhelming feeling that someone, or something, is watching our every move, carefully, quietly, with who knows what intent.
As I sat staring at the computer the other day, trying to navigate to the far end of a sentence, a black-capped chickadee landed on the windowsill a foot or so beyond and to the left of my computer screen and let out a chickadee dee dee call with what sounded like at least eight dees, as a pair of red-breasted nuthatches rocketed by and vanished in the woods, followed a moment later by a pair of chickadees. The chickadee on the windowsill zoomed away a fraction of a second later, and the seemingly trivial incident recalled a research paper I had read a few years ago.
The amount of dees at the end of a chickadee dee dee call correlates, and very precisely, with escalating levels of danger, with the result that when some lumbering human approaches the feeders to fill them a sentinel chickadee will add a dee or two to the end of its call, the better not to get its colleagues overly excited about an extremely minimal threat, a slow, clumsy creature that can’t catch anything other than a cold. When, however, a formidable predator, like a house cat or a hawk shows up, the first chickadee to notice will hold forth with a fusillade of dees.
I found the research particularly fascinating because it noted that nuthatches obviously knew how to interpret chickadee calls and responded appropriately to their interspecifics’ warnings, which, as an evolutionary adaptation, makes perfect sense. Even I, after all, realized over the years that animals tend to broadcast alarm, discomfort and anger, so why shouldn’t nuthatches perceive another species’ warnings?
Gradually, it dawned on me that both feeders I can see from my window had no customers, and that an otherworldly quiet had descended on the clearing around my house (friends and neighbors have chided me for dignifying the space by calling it a yard).
So I abandoned my opening restrictive adverb clause and walked about the house checking feeders, of which I have eight, only to discover that none of them had any customers, even though the entire morning had seen all manner of avian traffic.
A fox or a fisher, I wondered, maybe a sharp-shinned hawk? I knew I’d never spot one even if I looked right at it.
In the bedroom, which has views of three feeders, I noted the absence of birds and went over to the window to check the outside temperature, and, boy oh boy, did my amygdala start twitching big time.
I made a point of standing perfectly still, doing nothing sudden, and then gradually looked out the window on the other side of the bed, where I encountered the patient, unperturbed, murderous gaze of a gorgeous barred owl, tawny brownish almost to red, ten feet beyond the window five feet from me.
The owl looked suddenly down and to its left, where about eight feet away a chickadee had landed on the edge of a feeder; it nailed a seed, looked quickly around and zoomed off. The owl looked back at me, and I slowly turned and walked into the other room to get my camera, instinctively realizing I would have to shoot right through the glass as the bird would surely leave if I opened the window.
As I focused on it the owl stared directly into my lens and I wondered if it could see my eye on the other side of the reflex mirror. After I took a few photos the owl bolted and flew straight at a large maple twenty feet from the house in an attempt to take a white-breasted nuthatch, which quickly and calmly hopped to the other side of the tree, far too quickly and nimbly for the barred owl, which banked off and disappeared into the woods.
A moment later a chickadee let out call with one dee, and I decided to go back to my desk and make that adverb clause non-restrictive.
John Thaxton writes the “Birdwatch” column for Adirondack Explorer