Watching Cardinal Rearings—Part 1

There’s something special about cardinals that allows me to follow the local pair and observe the rearing and dispersion of their youngsters each year. It’s because—unlike other birds—I can distinguish cardinal individuals. The father is bright red, year round. The mother is a dull red, with lots of brown mixed in. There’s no confusing them! They are also the only bird around here for which I can distinguish mature from young. For most songbirds, the kids—by the time they’ve left the nest—are about the size of their parents and their coloring is virtually identical. Cardinal youngsters may look a lot like their mom, but can easily be distinguished from her by their gray bill. Mom’s (and dad’s) is a bright yellow-orange.

There’s one final special quality of our cardinals: they are the sole pair here, year after year. They remain monogamous and dad will not allow any other male cardinal to set up shop within his fiefdom. We often see other species of birds in small flocks, so telling one pair from another in that bunch is well beyond my current observational skills.

These unique qualities of the cardinal help me keep tabs on the local family. It’s a wonderful gift to be able to get to know the individuals of this crew—and not have to feel that all cardinals look alike. What helped me even more this year is that I finally discovered the location of their nest, so I could monitor mom incubating her eggs and then watch both parents feed the little ones.

All year round the cardinal parents are daily clients at the bird feeder. They particularly favor the big fat sunflower seeds that I keep well stocked. They are usually the first to come in the morning and the last to visit at dusk. At times in between I rarely see either one, except when the male perches on some exposed vantage point and lustily fills his domain with song. This pair has also been in residence for half a dozen years now, so their normal skittishness is beginning to fade, as they get more comfortable with our presence. (In fact, most of my watching is done from the outdoor tub, so maybe they’ve caught on that a naked human is not going to give chase.)

This year I was rewarded with being able to watch them raise three broods! This is uncommon—one to two broods are typical of cardinals. I’d like to believe that their plentiful diet of nutritious sunflower seeds makes them healthy enough to go for that third brood.

The show got off to a start in April. The pair usually come to the feeder about the same time each day, but then chomp away with little conviviality between them (sort of like human families eating TV dinners in front of the tube). They even appear to ignore each other, much as other feeder birds do. In mid April, however, cardinal mealtimes became far more congenial. They’d fly together to the feeder, but she would simply sit there, as if unable to figure out how to eat, and quietly chip at him. He would fill his bill and then affectionately sidle up to her as she opened her beak, and he’d tenderly French-kiss her, stuffing her bill with sunflower bits. They’d repeat this romantic food exchange a few times and then fly off into the dusk, wing-to-wing. How sweet! How attentive! Fade camera… Hollywood style.

A week or two later I spotted mom sitting on the nest. She was obviously incubating, as she’d leave the nest for only brief periods. Dad would fly over to her a few times a day and feed her, bill-to-bill. In early June I heard two birds peeping and squeaking and looked up to see two cardinal fledglings (those gray bills!) uncertainly balanced on twigs near the feeder. They fluttered and peeped, shaking their wings, as if working out the kinks in wing muscles that were being tested for the first time (or maybe in excited anticipation of the hoped-for meal). Dad appeared and began filling his beak and crop with sunflower seeds. Then he flew up to his babies, one of whom squawked loudly and urgently, as they do in the nest. It got fed first. Dad then flew to the other youngster and stuffed its bill. He made two or three more trips to satisfy his voracious kids.

More on brood number one next time…

Black-and-white Warbler

Why Do They Do That?

I have written before about what happens after I learn something new: it makes me aware of just how little I really do know and it always seems to raise three more questions for every one that it explains. It’s sort of like the Pandora’s Box of knowledge—once you open it, just hold on for the ride.

For many of my questions, I realize that continued observation will likely bring me an answer. I may watch a bird do something that puzzles me and understand that if I just keep watching some more, I’ll come to know why it behaves as it does. This is the essence of scientific research: if you doggedly stay with it, keeping your mind open and all senses alert, the answer will most likely come to you.

For other questions, however, I feel confident that someone has already discovered answers and has even recorded them somewhere. This is the promise of human knowledge: we document our revelations and pass them on to countless others. My challenge in this case is finding out where the findings may be recorded. That’s the prime reason why I so highly value the Internet—it contains a stunning amount of knowledge.

But for a few of my questions, I doubt that either searching the records or additional observations on my part will bring me answers. These are questions for which there may be no answer, or questions that I’ve framed so poorly that I need to understand more so I can even ask the right question, or maybe questions that are so silly, I’d be ashamed of having anyone know I even asked them. You may have heard someone say (attempting to reassure another person), “There are no dumb questions.” On the contrary, I’ve formulated more than a few obtuse questions. I’m not sure but that some of the following examples may fall into this latter category.

First, here’s an example of one for which I later did find an answer: How is it that a woodpecker can bang his beak so hard against a tree and not suffer brain damage? (Sort of like a washed-up boxer being unable to assemble an intelligible sentence.) Years later I read that a woodpecker’s brain is surrounded by a cushioning fluid that protects it’s brain. Aha!

Here are a couple that continue to puzzle me: How does a firefly keep from temporarily blinding itself when it flashes? If I were to switch on a bright light in the dark, my slowly-acquired night vision would immediately be destroyed, and I’d blindly stumble around for a few minutes until I recovered. That temporary blinding could be fatal for the firefly. In a similar manner, how does a cicada not deafen itself? From 50 feet away he hurts my ears; I’d hate to think of the pain I’d feel if I held him in my hand. How does he tolerate his own noise?

How does a whippoorwill ever tell if he has another competitor singing nearby, when he never shuts up long enough to listen? How does a plant decide when to continue growing upright and when to send out a lateral twig? Does a grasshopper or a flea ever get leg cramps and have to limp along, rather than jump? Or when they make one of their spectacular leaps, do they ever sprain an ankle as they land? Do they even have an ankle?

So many questions, so little time to answer them all.

Ants on Sweet Trumpet Vine Seed Pod

Past Mistakes

Every one of us can look back and recall times when we made choices that were not all that good—times when a choice led to subsequent problems and pain, or just wasted valuable time. (We each enjoy a preciously small amount of time in this existence, so why waste any of it?) The wisdom of hindsight tells us that we could have done better. So how do we deal progressively with these regrettable actions that we once took? It doesn’t help to dwell upon them because they caused us pain, or wasted our precious time, or led us down dead ends that got in the way of happiness.

It also doesn’t help if I bemoan my past poor choices or wallow in self-pity. It’s easy to become consumed with feeling sorry for myself or blaming others for what happened, or even disapprove of myself.

There is another reaction that I’ve sometimes had people suggest—a way that can help one to get past self-pity or blame. That is, to say, “Well, I didn’t do all that well, but I did the best I could at the time.” There may be truth in that sentiment, but it can also become a justification for what was simply a bad choice or a lackadaisical performance. Such a response can just help us fall into the same bad choice again, because it justifies coming up short. If I take this route, maybe I’m not wallowing in self-pity or blaming others, but I also haven’t learned much from the mistake; in fact, I may rationalize the situation so much that I don’t even see it as a mistake.

If I’m candid about my previous poor choices, however, I can admit to times when I simply didn’t do my best, or when I just made a dumb choice. If I go into it a little deeper, I can recall times, for example, when I made bad choices because my priorities at the time were poorly arranged. Can I be honest with myself and admit to those screw-ups, without either dwelling on them or dismissing them?

I got a nice suggestion recently from a passage in a book by Joyce Sequichie Hifler, A Cherokee Feast of Days. She writes about how we may look back and regret the time we wasted, “…wishing we knew then what we know now. But we did not know and life is not lived by hindsight. We did what we knew to do—sometimes with great ignorance.” And it’s not too late at all, she adds: “Many have started over and have had more happiness and contentment in a short time than is in all of what is known as the wasted years.”

I like the idea of simply accepting the mistakes and letting them go, rather than hanging onto them and thus continuing to waste time and continuing to stave off happiness. As Hifler says, we can begin again, despite our past mistakes. Each day is fresh. The challenge is to get past excuses and regrets, admit to messing up, and find self-forgiveness and self-acceptance. Tomorrow’s true happiness begins with today’s wiser choices; and they are best made when we’re unencumbered by dwelling on the past. It’s a key way that we learn and grow.

The Probing Proboscis

Is Beauty Truth?—Part 2

I believe that the previous posting describes Stewart’s restrictive use of the word beauty. And how about his use of truth? The meaning of truth is where philosophers can really wax endlessly. But let’s narrow the field (according to Stewart) by considering truth to mean physical reality. The main aim of the physicist is to discover nature’s story, to seek nature’s truth. While the mathematician plays with abstract (not necessarily real) concepts, a physicist plays with nature’s rules and behavior—looking to discover the reality of how the world works. Nature holds the truth and the physicist is attempting to uncover her secrets.

When beauty and truth are described this way, I think I see the crux of Stewart’s argument, because as it turns out, the mathematician’s beauty has often been the same as nature’s truth. Time and again physicists, struggling to grasp a given physical reality, have come upon a rule or law (not their law, but nature’s) that previously was neatly expressed by a mathematician who was completely unconcerned with the physical world. The mathematician may have thought the rule was her theoretical and beautiful insight, but nature was already operating that way. Beauty becomes truth.

Another way to view this situation is to note that nature consistently prefers elegance. Time and again physicists have discovered that Mother Nature takes the simple path. When physicists are bumbling about and, say, are positing two different theories of how things might work, they’ve often gotten closer to reality by choosing the simpler one. I’ve written before of how Kepler’s three elegant laws of planetary motion (expressed by three simple—and beautiful—mathematical equations) came to be seen as having far more truth than Ptolemy’s contorted and confusing model of how the planets were supposed to move.

Ian Stewart’s main point is that symmetry can demonstrate to us the equivalence of mathematical beauty and physical truth. I won’t try to describe his definition of symmetry—it’s a little too esoteric for me to try and tackle here. In a general way, however, when something possesses symmetry, we find it has a pleasing quality—for it helps our mind to more easily and fluently grasp it. Symmetry literally helps to smooth our mental processing. Symmetrical things, it turns out, not only appear to us as true, but it’s also pretty much the way that nature works: being both symmetrical and true.

So nature—by definition “The Truth”—is at root beautiful. A giant of pure mathematics and physics, Paul Dirac, once put it, “A physical law must possess mathematical beauty.” Ian Stewart wraps up his book Why Beauty is Truth with, “In physics, beauty does not automatically ensure truth, but it helps. In mathematics, beauty must be true—because anything false is ugly.”

Over the last 2-3 decades I’ve been privileged to become increasingly absorbed in local nature, as I’ve watched the flora and fauna surrounding me. In the process I have come to consider nature as something to be revered. The local creatures and plants have been teaching me their truths as they have been showing me their beauty. The more I learn, the more I can comprehend that the story of nature, at root, is elegant. The totality of it, however, is beyond mere human comprehension. I am in awe of it; I’m overwhelmed by its beauty. Is that not something divine?