Essays

Wild On The Prairie: Birds

Cassin's Sparrows are the icon of spring for Llaneros
May 13, 2001

In February, the Cassin’s Sparrow offers the first of its melodies of boundless space. In the soft light of first dawn, as nighttime chill clutches its strongest, an ascending quavering song urges the sun upwards. The bird performs a songflight, rising with the melody. Then a descending trill arcs as does the bird, and it rests. The melody is the quiet breath of the earth at rest, its rhythm that of a meditator sitting cross-legged, deeply breathing calmness.

Within hearing range Cassin’s Sparrows sing from the cardinal directions. Theirs is the first song of the year. Their song brings the last year to an end, and promises another year. When I hear the first Cassin’s Sparrow song of the spring I honor it. I recite a prayer to life’s constancies. When I see the first flight song, I watch. The bird is claiming its homeland. With its song, I claim mine.

The song of the Cassin's Sparrow is a symbol of the hidden glories of the monotonous landscape of the Llano Estacado. A plainsman must be attuned to subtlety; the mind is enriched by the necessity to carefully observe and examine each nuance; otherwise the land is alien and harsh, implacable in its sameness. My heart joins the haunting melody of the sparrow’s song, ethereal with distance.

The drab plains show the limits of human endeavor. A person here is a dust mote, drifting in the hot searchlight of the sun that penetrates a house kept dark for a feeling of coolness. The heat, the drabness, the high sky-- all seem limitless. Dry times make the limitlessness even more far-reaching. The result should be a bleakness of spirit, even darker than that of a big city policeman who has seen far too much.

Instead, I find optimism. Farmers and ranchers must believe in the one of out three (or one out four) good years; years of adequate rainfall, without hail, floods, and early frosts. A plains dweller accepts the powerlessness of humans; everything is not humanly controlled. A solace of faith awaits. Little wonder that dominant religions have begun in deserts. The crucible of open space can be a forge. The limitlessness instills reverence. The reverence molds a plainsman to become indigenous, part of the landscape. Rain and the results of rain always come as if having never occurred before. Rain is always a blessing, a gift, a promise.

The first Cassin’s Sparrow song of the year is a blessing I eagerly await each year. The calm silent pause to listen to the song between house and work-bound pickup becomes a ritual -- the action a prayer.

Cassin’s Sparrows are secretive. The parents never fly directly to the nest, running to it through the grass when the observer blinks or is distracted. From the height of a human the prairie is almost two dimensional, but the Cassin’s Sparrow shows it has vast depths, partly unexplored by science. The wind may toss the grass stalks like waves upon an ocean, but between soil and seed is a secret world a human’s foot blunders through unseeing.

The Cassin’s Sparrow fears the periscope of the coachwhip snake. Coachwhip snakes lift the front third of their body to peer over the grass as they move, implacably watching and scheming. Is the flight of the male Cassin’s Sparrow as he sings a distraction to lead snakes away?

Cassin’s Sparrows also dread Roadrunners. Antediluvian, crest cocked, orange and blue warpaint gleaming on the skin above their eyes, tail lowered, body taut; roadrunners canter along rabbit and human footpaths. The sun brings forth a green iridescence on their back. They seize sparrows in the vise-grip beak and with quick strikes of the short serpentine neck, repeatedly splatter their prey lifeless on the hardpan soil, tenderizing the small bird into a shapeless feather-ball, before gulping it whole.

I am convinced the Cassin’s Sparrow often nests in Bush Muhly (Muhlenbergia porterii). This grass is a wadded and cast aside angel-hair net, forgotten under the multi-trunk mesquites of the dry Llano. I have never looked for a nest as an adult, knowing that to investigate destroys the integrity of the delicate soft bramble. Other creatures slip into the grass cloud at the approach of unidentified vibrations; lizards, mice, skinks, centipedes, scorpions, millipedes, and sepulgids.

Cassin’s Sparrows have no obvious fieldmarks. A birder’s jizz is a longish tail, a receding forehead, and the quick flip out-of-sight. Grasshopper Sparrows behave similarly, but have a short tail, and do not chitter unseen at a passing observer, as Cassin’s Sparrow juveniles occasionally do. Grasshopper Sparrows usually occur here, but in subtly different habitat, in shorter grasses, with almost no mesquite bushes present.

Both are drab little birds. Only their behavior and songs give color to the landscape. They are creatures of the grass, children of the ubiquitous wind. By necessity they are ground-dwellers; the wind buffets their flight, capsizing their equilibrium. To the leeward! To the leeward! Wind and danger keeps them behind the simplest of screening vegetation, camouflaged and protected.

With his song, the male Cassin's Sparrow enthralls the female. At first he has to chase her, to convince her to listen. Later she sits low on one of his singing stations (he never begins the songflight from the ground). She sometimes joins him in flight, flying in close tandem to heights greater than his usual. It may be that tandem flight immediately proceeds copulation (which almost always occurs hidden in the grass).

A Cassin’s Sparrow nest is a small cup of grass, lined with animal hair (or shredded grass if hair is in short supply). The parents forsake their nest with the slightest disturbance, disheartened, convinced of its inadequacy. Both parents feed the young, specializing in the grassland miller-moths and their caterpillars. The miller-moths sometimes number in the millions.

I have caught a quart jar full in a light trap in less than an hour in such population explosions. The millers rise from the grass to meet the dusk, like the dust-plume behind ranch pickup trucks. Most millers are dust colored, with gray filigree. Their caterpillars are usually gray. It may be that a goodly number of native plants each have their own species of miller, for despite their assembly line sameness, close examination reveals a baffling, dizzying diversity.

Late spring food of the fledged young sparrows is the tiny shiny pollen and seed beetles that are iridescent green or glossy black. Their one fourth inch green larvae can defoliate a square foot of foliage in a day (especially the foliage of evening primroses- which is tender enough for human consumption). Flowers full of nectar (like the sticky wax of the Lotebush (Ziziphus obtusifolia) tempt the sparrows as well.

After the young are raised, Cassin’s Sparrows are silent. They skulk, a quick flip from a nearby bush to further cover is the most they show of themselves. They do not respond to the birder’s back-of-the-hand kissing squeak. Only when predators (such as my faithful lets-go-for-a-walk cats) amble on the trails do they pop up, to keep apprised of more deadly sneaks. A month may pass without the sparrows’ presence being noted, but they remain, gleaning the prairie’s harvest, in competition with a more dominant life-form of the shortgrass, the harvester ant.

Cassin’s Sparrows run, walk, or hop about as their major mode of movement. Except for the songflight, and the quick flit of surprise, the sparrows are rarely visible. Immatures in late summer are shyly curious, sitting up a few times in innocent plain sight. On cold winter mornings Cassin’s Sparrows greet the sunrise to warm themselves for thirty minutes (but the same field will seem empty of the species at any other time of day).

Like many residents of the brushland and grassland Cassin’s Sparrows can live without water. They do sometimes drink, but rarely bathe, preferring dustbaths. Even with windmills and cattle tanks, surface water is not always within a sparrow’s territory, and they are faithful to their personal domain. Cassin’s Sparrows have had very little scientific scrutiny.

Other than my late mother’s (Frances Williams) ethological research published in Arthur Bent's "Life Histories of American Birds," the only other research seems to be that of taxonomists. This almost total ignorance of the species helps my mind see it as a symbol. It is another limitlessness. No one knows much about the bird – there it is! – a quick flit, and a song! Science only possesses a tail feather or two of the bird. Science has hardly begun to investigate the Southern Llano Estacado ecological processes.