Private Lives of Garden Birds [Hardcover]

Calvin Simonds (Author), Julie Zickefoose (Illustrator), Scott Shalaway (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 16, 2002

Brimming with stories, practical wisdom, and expert guidance, the updated and expanded third edition is for bird lovers, for nature lovers, and especially for families who want to know their feathered neighbors better. Combining scientific insight and careful personal observation with a delightful and witty narrative style, Calvin Simonds gives enthusiasts a peek into the world of eleven favorite North American birds: swallows, blue jays, chickadees, song sparrows, house sparrows, phoebes, mockingbirds, crows, red-winged blackbirds, and robins - with an all-new chapter on hummingbirds. Simonds teaches readers how to really observe birds - how to interpret the "caws" of crows, recognize blue jays from their facial expressions, understand the flight patterns of swallows. Readers will be enthralled as they eavesdrop on a group of sparrows trading songs in a "hootenanny," feel the firm, dry grip of a chickadee's claws on their fingers and tramp through a summer meadow to visit a phoebe. Idiosyncratic and ever-interesting, these are the birds that brighten our lives as they dart and dawdle in our backyards, gardens, and parks.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Calvin Simonds is the pen name of a naturalist, professor of Ethology, and writer. He is the author of The WeatherWise Gardener and (with Phebe Leighton) The New American Landscape Gardener, as well as articles in Horticulture, Country Journal, and Harvard Magazine, among other publications. Simonds lives and watches birds on his farm in Massachusetts.

Julie Zickefoose is a widely published natural history writer and artist who also presents nature lectures throughout the United States. Her illustrations have been seen in The New Yorker, Smithsonian Magazine, Bird Watcher's Digest, and other publications. She lives in Ohio.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Blue Jays - The Family Reunion at Your Feeder

My neighbor up the hill and I have had an argument. She is anti-blue jay and I am pro-blue jay. This argument distresses us both, since we have seen eye to eye on so many other issues. I am in favor of organic gardening; so is she. She is against nuclear reactors; so am I. When the town votes to widen a road, we both vote No. When the town votes to establish recycling, we both vote Yes. But I'm afraid if we were asked to vote on whether or not to create the blue jay, we would definitely split our votes on this issue.

In fact, the blue jay may be the cause of our falling out. She said I encourage them. She said the word "encourage" with a kind of venom I thought would be reserved for somebody who kept rats as house pets or planted dandelions as a cover crop. She calls blue jays "bandits," and her feeders are of a specially constructed sort that are supposed to snap shut if anything heavier than a grosbeak treads on them. I scatter cracked corn and sunflower seed on the snow outside my study window in hopes that birds that don't object to my close scrutiny or the rattle of my typewriter will rummage through it. The blue jays are among the quickest of birds to accept the terms of this arrangement and so may be found flocked about my study window on any winter's day. So you see, I don't actually encourage the blue jays. I just don't discourage them.

My neighbor from up the hill said that blue jays are thieves and brigands just like crows. Technically, she was correct. The blue jay is a crow - or a member of the crow family, at any rate - along with ravens and magpies and some other birds of dubious reputation. To be a member of the crow family is to keep bad company, taxonomically speaking. In Australia and Scotland crows are said to pluck out the eyes of lambs, and herdsmen can show you enucleated carcasses to prove it. All over the world crows of various sorts are blamed for depredations of songbird nests. "Crested crow" is the translation of the Latin name (Corvus cristatus) given the blue jay by the artist-naturalist John James Audubon, and his drawing of jays shows them jovially dining on the eggs of a partridge.

But the blue jay's reputation as a nest robber is much overstated. Jays eat comparatively small amounts of animal matter of any sort, preferring nuts, seeds, and small fruits. In some parts of the United States they eat and store acorns, and in the old days they made good use of the chestnut groves that covered the eastern part of the country. Jays regard the eggs of songbirds more as a delicacy than as a staple. So even though I had to concede to the lady that the blue jay is like a crow, I didn't have to admit he was a thief.

"Nonsense!" said she. "Any fool can see that the blue jay is a thief because he wears a mask!" I told my neighbor that the next time she has a jay at her feeder she should look closely at its facial markings. They consist of three parts: an elaborate "moustache" over the beak; an irregular black line that frames the face, rather like a black scarf worn loosely about the shoulders; and a line that connects the scarf with the moustache through the eye. Each jay has its own distinct markings. The line through the eye may be thick and unbroken or faint with gaps in it. The moustache may be a delicate line across the bridge of the "nose" or it may be a heavy blotch that covers most of the jay's face. Usually the moustache has two or more prominent barbs that point upward on the forehead of the jay like worry lines, or downward from the corners of the mouth like frown lines.

To my eye, these facial markings give each blue jay a distinct expression. Last winter I set about trying to learn to recognize my jays as individuals by the expressions on their faces. I had seen a television program in which individual elephants were recognized by their ears; why not individual blue jays by their expressions? For a while this project seemed to go quite nicely. One jay who frequently came to my snowbank had particularly prominent frown lines at the corners of his mouth, so I called him "Sad." Another had very dark worry lines between his eyes, so I called him "Grumpy." A third had very delicate, precise markings that gave him a carefree, youthful look, so I called him "Chipper." But one day I made a discouraging discovery. "Sad" was sad only when he faced to the right. When he faced to the left and I saw the other side of his face, he wasn't even glum. In fact, to my great distress, I discovered that "Sad" and "Chipper" were the same bird!

This unfortunate discovery underscores an important difference between blue jays and elephants. When you frighten an elephant, it turns and faces you and spreads its ears. You see all of the elephant's face and both of its ears. But when you startle a blue jay, it turns one side of its face to you. This is because birds and mammals "stare" at you in different ways. A mammal stares at you by examining you with both eyes and comparing the images it gets from its two eyes. A bird stares at you by looking at you with one eye and moving its head so that slightly different images are presented to that eye. It then compares these different successive images. The best time to identify an animal by its markings is when it is staring at you, because you have an opportunity to stare back. People who want to recognize an elephant by its face have to learn only one face. But people who want to recognize a blue jay by its "expression" have to learn two expressions. What is more, unlike the elephant, who stands still and gazes at you, the blue jay is constantly moving its head. Just as you get some detail of its facial markings in view, it shifts slightly and you have to refocus your eyes.

All in all, learning to recognize blue jays by their facial expressions proved to be too much for this organic gardener, but readers with quicker eyes, better eyesight, and more patience might find the attempt more rewarding. And blue jays, who see each other up close day after day, can surely use the facial markings - or "masks," as my neighbor called them - to tell each other apart. Now, even granting that the face markings on a blue jay look like a mask, to call them a mask conveys the wrong impression. Burglars wear masks to hide their identities. But the mask of the blue jay announces his identity. So my neighbor up the hill was surely wrong about the mask. Would a bandit ever wear a mask that made it so easy to identify him?

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Storey Publishing, LLC (September 16, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1580174701
• ISBN-13: 978-1580174701
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,440,425 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Essays that surprise and intrigue., October 17, 2003

By 

Jonathan S. Barker (Toronto, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Private Lives of Garden Birds (Hardcover)

I am not a birder nor much of a gardner, but I love this book. Birders and gardners I know also love it. The woman in the campsite next to mine in a Maine campground explained to me the lives of the osprey nesting nearby. When I tried to show her that I knew a thing or two about birds that I had gleaned from Calvin Symonds, she came back with "Oh yes, I have that book at home and enjoy rereading it." My mother who at 97 can still tell you the names of all the birds at her many birdfeeders keeps a copy of Symonds on the crowded table next to the recliner where she spends her days.

To understand what the birds around you are doing you need to see them, identify them, observe them over a period of time, and know how to interpret what you see. I often fail steps one and two and do even worse on steps three and four. Calvin Symonds moves through all four steps with grace and humor. He regards the everyday birds of his New England farm with such affection that he cedes his garage to swallows for four months every summer. He makes out the cacaphony of the blue jays as an animated assertion of family ties and draws useful life lessons from activity that many find annoying and even criminal.

The gentle expressive essays repeatedly surprise and intrigue me as they explore benieath the surface of what eleven familiar birds - from mockingbirds to crows - do. Symonds shows the reasons for their actions and describes the debates among scientists about how to explain what they observe. I hope one day he will extend the list of birds he has made familiar and fascinating to at least one non-birder.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Discover the Secrets, February 15, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Private Lives of Garden Birds (Hardcover)

When I discovered and read the book "Private Lives of Garden Birds" I felt as if I had been given a very special gift that enhanced and broaden my understanding of the nature that surrounds my everyday life. Like many, I love birds and enjoy observing them in my back yard and have often wondered what is really going on with all the fluttering and chattering. With this book, Calvin Simons has given everyone who enjoys birds a head start in understanding the dynamics that are being played out between the birds. All the social interaction, the whys and wherefore, and even the "hootenanny" is explained in a way that make you feel as if Calvin Simons is sitting with you in your back yard having a conversation about your birds.

I especially enjoy the layout of the book which gives each of the several birds described an entire chapter, allowing the reader to become very familiar with that species. After reading about a particular bird it is easy to focus on that bird alone and understand more clearly the dynamics and social interactions that are going on in your back yard.

After reading this book one cannot help but discover all sorts of secrets about the bird activities going on in the neighborhood. I learned that I had a Phoebe living near me that had previously gone unnoticed. This is a wonderful book to give as a gift to anyone who has a bird feeder because the fluid style of writing and clarity with which a complicated topic is explained, makes this book a pleasure to read.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars I recommend for rookie bird watchers, June 6, 2004

By 

RR "mustelaerminea" (Brooklyn, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Private Lives of Garden Birds (Hardcover)

By focusing on common birds (birds that are common in North America, that is), this book gives readers a very good chance of being able to go somewhere nearby and engross themselves in watching some of the birds they just read about. It is also a rather engaging, quick read and contains many interesting kernels of information. This combination makes it the most un-intimidating introduction to bird watching I have read. Wildlife watching is often frustrating, but searching for these birds is rewarding whether one lives in the country or the city. This is not one of those books that overwhelm readers with lists and pictures of species beginners will probably not see. Simonds' love of birds is apparent, even though he digresses a bit too much.

Although the book does contain an index, information would be easier to find if the chapters were subdivided. In addition, a few references are recommended in the last chapter, but I wished the book had a full bibliography.