Habitat for Wildlife in the City

A desert cottontail dashed frantically across the street. Where ever she stopped she seemed exposed and threatened. She seemed the perfect analogy for all of the native residents of our neighborhood this morning.

The warm days have brought an unseasonal beginning of spring. The cottontails are breeding. The reptiles and butterflies are emerging from their cool weather slumber. And the birds are heavily invested in nesting. This male Bewick’s wren is busily collecting food for a family of chicks.

But it is February. This morning city workers are drastically pruning streetside trees as another storm is headed our way. The sound of chain saws cuts through the afternoon air. It brings a feeling of angst and worry. Add in the gardeners with their blowers and electric pruners chewing through what was this morning’s safe habitat and you have wildlife scattering like frantic rabbits.

How many early nests in those trees are already occupied with youngsters?

How many overgrown shrubs are harboring hummingbird chicks just about to leave the nest?

A dead liquid amber tree on the corner died over the summer. It is slated for removal. As I walked by I noticed a woodpecker hole high on a main branch. A timid head peered out. Parent or chick? For cavity nesters, finding an appropriate tree can be nearly impossible.

For once the city is trimming trees in winter. But this year, the plants and animals have a different calendar.

The trees need to be trimmed and a dead tree at a major intersection is a danger. But we seem to have forgotten that plants have other reasons for existing rather than pleasing our eye. Plants provide food and shelter. Trees are bedrooms and nurseries. They are restaurants and hotels.

Take a look at your yard–your trees and shrubs, flowers and grass. If you aren’t providing habitat, you aren’t part of the real neighborhood.

Warblers and Weather

Something is in the air. It isn’t just autumn and it isn’t just smoke from the Station Fire. (Which is still burning in the Angeles Forest).

We are seeing a number of migratory bird species that we typically do not see in autumn:

• Cassin’s kingbird (previously 12/06)
• warbling vireo (previously 4/07)
• Wilson’s warbler (annually, February and May)
• black-headed grosbeak (annually, April to early August)

If it were just one unusual siting, I wouldn’t think much of it. A Wilson’s warbler arrived last week. After seeing it in the yard, I later found it sitting on the window sill. It seemed exhausted and gagging on our smoke-filled air. I easily scooped it up and brought it inside for a few hours. It was out of my cage in a moment, (they are smaller than you think), and it spent the day sleeping perched on a quiet bookshelf. In the late afternoon, we opened the window and gently shooed it out.

I was thrilled, this morning when three warbling vireos passed through the yard. They stopped for food and water. But it made me start to wonder: Why are we seeing these birds?

Would they usually stop in the Angeles Forest and they’ve found the habitat they depended on gone? All of the birds I have been seeing are species that have been here in our yard before, just at different times of the year. Are they individuals that remember this place?

But, none of these birds have been ash-covered. Two years ago following the large fires to the north of us, birds migrating south that stopped here were covered in ash, exhausted and hungry. Every time a new group arrived, we had a to clean the film of ash out of the bird bath. That isn’t happening.

When I looked at my past bird logs, I found that September of 2005 also had a variety of birds, migratory and non, that were unusual: a Costa’s hummingbird, house wren, song sparrow pair, brown-headed cowbird, a very late hooded oriole, and a black-headed grosbeak. The black-headed grosbeak made me wonder about the weather in 2005.

But the September weather in Woodland Hills in 2005 had a median low of 56˚F and a median high of 85.5˚F, while this year, 2009, the temperatures have been much higher: median low 62˚F and median high 95˚F. The winter of 2005 was cool, but dry. That isn’t what we are hoping for this winter.

Another marker of 2005 was that the white-crowned sparrows arrived very early. Rather than mid to late October, the white-crowns arrived on September 30th. It will be interesting to see when they return this year. 2008 white-crowns return

The meteorologists are predicting a wet El Nino year. Do the birds know better? Are we in for another cool, but dry winter?

Winter in California

Did I hear somebody say that we don’t have seasons in Southern California?

All right, we don’t experience days of freezing rain, but the main route into Los Angeles from the Central Valley and the Northern part of the country is closed because of snow. I stand at the base of the surrounding mountains and watch their rolling summits begin to shiver white. The air smells crisp with snow.

No, we don’t have subzero winds blowing off an icy lake, but soaking rains are making the hillsides soggy and unstable. Rain licks the trunks of oak trees and kisses the roots of the toyon–the “holly wood” for which Hollywood is named. Liquidy breath coaxes seeds that were liberated by fall fires and spread by Santana winds to burst forth in a green carpet of midwinter life.

It’s true the gray fist of winter never truly tightens, but it is winter here. It is just a different kind of winter than they feel in New York or North Dakota. This winter brings renewal. It sings in a loud wind-lashing voice. It flows down hillsides at flash flood speed and challenges the muddy slope to follow. This winter is a trickster; soft rain falling like a veil of mist lit by golden sunlight. Warm days chased by icy nights.

Summer is our extreme, our time of death.

California winter, embrace it for what it is–erratic changer of the land, unfettered rush of water, sprouter of the future.

California Autumn
Creatures of Summer