Turf Wars, Songbird-Style

Turf Wars, Songbird-Style

In springtime, everything in nature loves a wall. 

By Margaret Renkl NY Times

Contributing Opinion Writer

NASHVILLE — I was eating lunch on our front stoop last week when a flock of European starlings descended all at once, covering our yard in a commotion of strutting and whistling and picking and whirring. The spring wildflowers were all bloomed out, nothing left but greenery, so my husband had mowed the meadow in front of our house into some semblance of a suburban lawn. A freshly mowed yard means fewer places for insects to hide, and the starlings got busy gleaning and digging.

I am no fan of European starlings. I would like European starlings just fine if they had stayed in Europe, but some foolish Shakespeare aficionados, determined to introduce into this country every bird ever mentioned in Shakespeare, released 100 starlings in New York City’s Central Park during the 19th century. The more than 200 million starlings in North America today descended from those first 100 birds.

Starlings compete for nesting cavities with native cavity-dwellers: bluebirds and tree swallows, woodpeckers and chickadees, wood ducks and tufted titmice. There’s a pair nesting in a woodpecker’s hole in a tree in front of my neighbor’s house, and three pairs nesting in the hollow window frames of another neighbor’s house. Every time I pass by them, I glower out of nothing but old habit. A 2003 study disputed long-held assumptions that starlings displace native birds. “Only sapsuckers showed declines due to starlings,” according to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology; “other species appeared to be holding their own against the invaders.” But long-held assumptions are hard habits to break, and I have never warmed to these gregarious birds.

The bluebirds that have chosen the nest box in our front yard share my dislike. The male bluebird set up an angry clicking from his perch in a nearby maple as soon as the flock landed in our yard, and when one of them had the nerve to peer into the nest-box hole — which is, by design, too small to admit a starling — he immediately dived at the intruder’s head, startling it so thoroughly that it fell to the ground before it could stop its headlong tumble and fly away.

The rest of the starlings were unperturbed by this spectacle, but the female bluebird inside the box was drawn to the fray, peeking out of the hole of the nest box as her mate staged unceasing guerrilla raids on the intruders from a low-hanging branch in his lookout tree.

As soon as a starling bent to stab its bill into the soil, the male bluebird hit it in the head from above and was gone again before it could discern the source of its torment. Divebombing one starling after another, the bluebird carried on his relentless territorial campaign. Finally, through no signal that I could discern, the starlings lifted as one and disappeared into the sky. The bluebird, badly outnumbered by larger birds, had successfully driven them all away.

Matters always get tense during nesting season. “The dawn chorus” is what we call the springtime music that fills the trees at break of day this time of year, but it is nothing like a human chorus. Birds sing to attract a mate, and they sing to establish territory. And that territorialism is deadly serious.

While the bluebird was successfully repelling the flock of starlings, I later discovered, a tiny house wren was pulling all the moss and all the speckled eggs out of the nest box on the other side of the house. Instead of a chickadee’s mossy nest, that box now holds a house wren’s nest of sticks. Audubon still lists Tennessee as uncommon breeding territory for house wrens, but they have nested in our yard for at least five years. Every year they wreak havoc on the chickadees, and often on the bluebirds, too.

I can hardly fault them for doing exactly what the bluebirds are doing: staking out a claim and defending it against encroachers. I tell myself, too, not to fault the red-bellied woodpecker, which this year has taken an inexplicable interest in my safflower feeder, for driving away the rose-breasted grosbeaks that have finally arrived here on their long migration north. I wait for the grosbeaks every spring, and I buy that expensive safflower seed for two reasons: 1) starlings don’t like it, and 2) grosbeaks do. And now this furious woodpecker keeps driving them away.

I can’t help thinking about these avian territorial disputes every time the president of the United States weighs in on the subject of immigration. The president is determined to “defend our border,” as though we were under some kind of military siege, never mind that the boundary he’s so eager to defend was established by actual bloodshed — the blood of human beings who were here first.

Just as there are enough insects in my yard for both starlings and bluebirds, enough safflower seeds for both the local birds and the wayfaring strangers, there is plenty of room in this country for the people who already live here, as well as for the refugees who are desperate to come in, but the president’s base doesn’t believe that. Those poorer voters — whose anti-immigrant anger is energetically encouraged and exploited by the president’s wealthy constituents — are still howling, “Build that wall!” even as they continue to vote for politicians whose policies add to their own impoverishment — suppressing wages, gutting public schools, blocking access to health care, increasing gun violence, poisoning the places where they live.

Nevertheless, they direct their anger outward. Every newcomer is an alien competing for resources, and resources are already hard enough to come by in their own lives.

This is an argument from analogy, of course, and arguments from analogy inevitably falter because they’re reductive: The analogues are never perfectly equivalent. Human beings aren’t birds. We are capable of understanding and accepting logical arguments. We are capable of acting on moral and ethical imperatives. But springtime is a reminder that we — all of us, liberals and conservatives alike — are also creatures subject to the same atavistic impulses that drive the natural world. And when it seems as though there’s not enough to go around, nature will always have the upper hand.