Essays

Wild On The Prairie: Birds

Magoosh the Roadrunner (Part 3 - Click here for Part 2)
June 4, 2000

The grackles of doom bring terror to the neighborhood. Great-tailed grackles are avian Hell’s Angels with their long tails cocked with insolent attitude. A heavy metal Goth music swamps the mind as they wheel into view overhead. As minions of random death, their actions are incomprehensible. They jerk baby birds from nests and toss them to the ground to bake in the scouring gusts of summer’s heat.

Hatred is an easy emotion. Anger bubbles up at the sight of the helpless devastated and a country person wishes to grab the household shotgun and obliterate each grackle as it appears. The sound of a grackle is a slimy, sucky, and slurpy non-musical blackboard grating wreck-of-the-nerves noise. The hairs on a person’s back stand up and goose pimples pop up and an uncontrollable shiver shakes a listener.

What if the gut instinct is not followed? What if the grackle is not shot on sight? Is there an ecological role they perform?

“They are not native, they only moved here twenty years ago,” the local birdwatchers report. “The habitats they have established themselves within are not native either,” an ecologist answers. “The sewage water swamps, the ranch pond cattails, or the city run-off retention reservoirs full of reeds are not natural either. Nor are the forests of the city. If it were not for man, the grackles would not have come.”

The native habitat of Great-tailed Grackles is coastal swampland. Miles of swampy estuaries were once filled with alligators, grackles, mosquitoes, crabs, and red-winged blackbirds among other less common animals. Grackles had to compete with the blackbirds for nesting space in the cacophonous smelly maelstrom of life.

Much of the habitat has been destroyed over the last century because is so unwelcoming to human visitation and seems to be such a waste of real estate. Coastal swamps are filled in to build condos or deepened and cleared for marinas. Only recently has our society become aware those coastal estaurine habitats are where most near-shore marine fishes and shellfish are born and nurtured. By necessity grackles learned of new habitats, and began opportunistically adapting.

The drive for survival is an awesome force of life within some species. Remember the coyote – hated by every sheepherder and chicken farmer and shot at every chance for over a hundred years, and what has happened? Now coyotes have spread to almost every state in the continental U.S. and now live in the vacant lots of Los Angeles and a hundred other cities.

Grackles, Starlings, English Sparrows, Cowbirds, and Pigeons are other aggressive avian associates that swarm into spaces humans create for themselves. The natural world often creates a teeming landscape filled with millions to billions of a number of species. Think of the plains of Africa and its incredible diversity until recently, or think of the plains of the U.S. in the early 1800’s with millions of buffalo, billions of prairie dogs, and thousands of wolves, black-footed ferrets, and even bear. Now the natural world is filled with another teeming landscape – billions of humans with millions of birds serving as familiars in the new regime.

The word “familiar” is selected purposefully in the previous sentence. Witches and shamans sought to positively influence their agrarian or aboriginal society’s psychic wellbeing using sophisticated symbolic psychology. Their “familiars” accompanied them – think of Merlin and his owl, for example.

We modern humans create an environment that reflects our maturity as a culture. We are like teen-agers, wanting everything our own way, poorly disciplined in our urges, and not planning our next action with our society foremost in our mind.

We, as a society, are all witches, as they are usually portrayed and as most people believe, as creepy negative manipulators. Our familiars are grackles, starlings, English Sparrows, cowbirds, and pigeons. Ghettos, barrios, and slums are a true reflection of the maturity of our society.

To me, grackles represent the squalor of inner-city poverty, of trash blowing in the wind, of the endless strip-malls in endless cities that abut each other on both the East and West Coasts, the countless boring car chase scenes on TV and all the other negatives of urban life any person can elucidate without end when depressed and disgusted. Grackles represent lawlessness, not wildness.

This has all been a preface to a continuance of the story of Magoosh. I needed to provide some background. Twice in this column I have written of Magoosh, the roadrunner that began living at the Gone Native Arboretum last summer. This is another chapter of his story.

When we saw Magoosh, our spirits lifted. “HI, big guy!” we would exclaim, and we often went “BRRRT” at him so he knew we were trying to talk his language. He demonstrated a fearless friendliness to us. We were introduced and welcomed into a wonderful and unusual relationship with a wild creature. It has been an incredible experience.

In a recent Discover magazine, an author wrote of individual wild animals that visited researchers at various locations and developed personal relationships with individual humans. The creatures are not pets, but are emissaries from the wild. When an animal acts out of the norm the people watching and interacting with it are stimulated to think and redefine what that animal represents to them. The researchers reported epiphanies like those that we were blessed by. “It surprises me totally that some wild animals are capable of accepting a human as a neighbor,” Deborah said. “This is the first time that the natural world allowed me within, beyond being an observer.”

A part of what surprises people is their own receptivity. Modern-day humans aggressively blunder through the natural world. The critters and plants respond defensively and bite, scratch, claw, sting, and poison. As a result, the natural world is seen as an adversary, something to be controlled forcibly. A different way can be learned by watching, listening, and analyzing. Wild creatures strain to be as aware as possible, to know what each sound means, be it near or far, loud or soft. Wild creatures have a holistic perception of their surroundings.

Compared to wild creatures, modern-day humans are totally self-absorbed and self-centered. Our society is built upon that ideal of supreme individualism. We have created a Golden Age. Our technology is powerful beyond any illusory magick ever conceived, but our society does not teach us of the magic and wonder possible by becoming receptive to our surroundings.

Magoosh opened our eyes to possibilities. The natural world can reach inside we humans and bring us to a marveling stillness, full of heartfelt aching awe. At the beginning of this section, an astute reader would have immediately noticed its tense. One day the Grackles came and screeched in the tree tops, and soon smashed eggs and baby birds were tossed to the ground. We reacted with anger, and rocks were thrown and firecrackers popped to scare the grackles. One grackle must have been injured, for we found it dead, floating in the pond facedown. We had killed in an anthromorphosizing self-righteous selfishness. “ We were defending the other birds, ” we told ourselves.

The next morning we found Magoosh dead on the County Road a quarter mile away from the house and his and Lozen’s nest. On his daybreak hunt a driver purposefully ran him down. (He was too smart to be run over by accident.) The death of this wild creature affected us deeply. We cradled his limp form lost to death’s finality and carried him to a place of burial. We honored him using Native American sensibilities by burning a smudge stick on his grave.

Lozen had to take over all the duties of the nest, so we decided to help her. We set pit-fall traps and caught lizards, and placed dog food and a lab mouse in a big tank under her nest. Lozen rejected our offerings. She sneaks away the back way when we approach the nest, and if she sees us on the trail she immediately darts into the brush. Her shyness heightens our memory of Magoosh's friendliness, and makes his loss even more poignant.

Roadrunners symbolize something else to me, now. Roadrunners represent perception shifts. As a person matures, often something happens that totally reorganizes their perception of the world. People that once seemed unfeeling suddenly are perceived as disciplined, for example. Sometimes learning comes hard in a struggle, and the new results are resisted.

I think I must use a story to illustrate the process.

I stretched out in the shade of the nogalito, looking down the draw. My eyes were at the level of the dry gravel streambed, so that the straight run of the draw seemed to extend a great distance. Heat waves helped the illusion, for after a certain distance, the image of everything beyond melted.

I was not really looking at anything. I had been pouring water on my head, flapping my shirt to speed the drying of the sweat. I rubbed at the sting of sweat salt in my eyes. Heat is inescapable, not like cold. Clothes can warm any cold. Nothing stops heat.

Finally I began to cool. I idly stared downstream. A dark four legged animal materialized in the heatwaves. The image twisted and shimmied until I could not tell if the animal was still, or moving toward me. I tried to focus my eyes better.

After a minute or two I could discern between its movements, and those of the heatwaves. No cow or horse was supposed to be in this pasture. Was it a deer? A javelina? Why would it be out in the heat of the noon?

The heat on my skin and the contortions of the image gave startling birth to the illusion that I was inside of a fire, looking out.

The image waited, except for the quavering of heat. I waited. Everything seemed to wait. I glanced away, to the sky. The glare of the sun normally washes out the blue sky in midsummer.

My eyes returned to the image. It separated, became two shapes that danced in solemn rhythm, bowing and promenading. In my mind refrains in a minor key revealed an interior fear. I watched the images dance, turning this way and that, hopping into the air, and then returning to the earth as if sinking into jello. Was it two bears? Two mountain lions? Fear rippled through me.

The two figures became Chihuahuan ravens, suddenly snapping into focus as they launched themselves into the midday glare out of the mirage. The leading raven carried a bloody morsel in his beak. Squawking and furiously trying to steal the meat, the second raven herded the first swiftly out of sight.

By the force of his personality, Magoosh redefined wildness. Wildness is not the fear that causes non-domesticated creatures to run at the sight of a human. Wildness means living up to possibilities. Fears limit most creatures, as well as we humans. Magoosh transcended a roadrunner’s normal fear. Can we overcome our fears? Can I over come mine? I may be able to take another baby step forward someday, thanks to Magoosh. I hope I can honor his memory by doing so.