Birds – Page 14 – Via Negativa

March 27, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Silver linings

The past two mornings I’ve awoken late, and haven’t gotten out onto the front porch until well past daylight. That’s O.K., though, because both mornings I’ve had the unparalleled pleasure of listening to a winter wren sing while I drank my coffee. It’s a liquid, seemingly endless burble — appropriate for a bird that spends most of its life as near to running water as possible. It nests in cave-like hollows under stream banks, especially under the boles or root balls of fallen trees, and probably the rotting end of the big butternut tree that came down a few years ago makes the stream below my front porch at least passingly attractive to winter wrens. (Ultimately, I expect this one to nest farther down-hollow.)

Winter wrens never used to breed here. They were, as their name suggests, winter visitors. But then in December of 1992, a big, wet snowstorm before the ground had frozen brought down over 100 trees in the deepest part of the hollow, many of them right on the banks of the stream. When we cleared the road — a multi-day task — we made the decision to let the logs lie down slope from the road, kissing off many hundreds of dollars worth of lumber. That spring, we were rewarded by our first-ever breeding winter wrens. It’s quite likely that these were the first members of their species to breed here since 1813, when the hollow was clear-cut for the first time. You need a pretty mature, unmanaged forest to get winter wrens. Our elderly neighbor Margaret McHugh, who died in 1991, mentioned at one point, ten years or so after the gypsy moth invasion of 1980-81, that the woods in the hollow was beginning to look awfully messy to her. “I don’t remember ever seeing this many logs on the ground,” she said — with great disapproval, of course. To most people, a dead tree is a wasted tree if it isn’t being put to some human use.

My father told the story of the winter wren at a big, statewide gathering of landowners enrolled in the Forest Stewardship Program that we hosted in the late 90s. “How do you put a price tag on the song of a winter wren?” he asked rhetorically, to great effect. Many of the other landowners shared our biocentric values, and were thrilled at this ready-made parable. But some of the foresters in attendance were clearly bothered. “What if you only harvested some of the logs? How many dead trees do these birds really need?” one of them asked. Well we did harvest some of the trees — the ones upslope from the road.

The return of the winter wren is just one of a number of positive changes here since I was a kid, and I thought it only fair that I highlight a few others after yesterday’s gloomy post. I spent today trying to throw together a sort of balance sheet — a quick-and-dirty assessment of major changes to biodiversity in Plummer’s Hollow from 1971-2007. There’s no denying the negative impact of white-tailed deer, earthworms, invasive plants, and poor land-use. In the last category, the near-clearcutting of the former McHugh tract destroyed 100 acres of the richest woods in the hollow (we were only able to acquire that property after the damage had been done). But other apparent disasters, such as the snowstorm I just mentioned, had a silver lining. The invasion of the gypsy moths in 1980-81, for example, killed a lot of mature oaks, especially on the drier ridgetops, but it created a lot of valuable new wildlife habitat. Red-bellied woodpeckers suddenly appeared and became year-round residents. My brother Steve began to notice more longhorned beetle species than ever before.

We have no shortage of interior forest-dependent bird species, including some that are declining elsewhere, such as cerulean and worm-eating warblers. There may be only half as many wood thrushes as there used to be, but we still have quite a few. And three species linked to more mature forest environments have become regular breeders in the hollow: black-throated green warbler, Acadian flycatcher, and solitary or blue-headed vireo. So the winter wren isn’t the only species that benefits from a hands-off management philosophy.

The Carolina wren is another avian newcomer within the past 20 years, though unlike its cousin, it prefers forest openings and dooryard habitat. The expansion of its range northward is most likely a response to the warmer winters associated with global climate change. A cold winter like the one we just had kills much of the Carolina wren population off, and it takes several years for them to rebound. Another southern species just getting established in our area in the last few years is the black vulture, which now seems to nest in the adjacent valley. We see them soaring up and down the ridge from time to time.

Common ravens were occasional visitors in the 70s; now they are year-round residents. Other breeding bird species we’ve confirmed in the last two decades include golden-crowned kinglet, black-throated blue warbler, and wood duck. And it’s hard for me to remember now, but wild turkeys were once scarce, too. Now they’re all over the place.

Many perennial wildflowers in the hollow have multiplied since I was a kid, probably a result both of maturing forest conditions and, in the last decade, of declining white-tailed deer numbers due to our successful hunter program. Purple trillium, Solomon’s-seal, yellow mandarin, pinesap, and mayapple are all more numerous, and wood betony and spring beauties have made their first appearances within the last ten and three years respectively. Some plants that used to be abundant when I was a kid virtually disappeared when deer numbers skyrocketed in the 80s and 90s, but are now beginning to rebound, including blackberries, raspberries, staghorn sumac, black elderberry, and Joe-Pye weed. The deer-sensitive red elderberry, never a common species in the past, has recently begun to appear all over the place in moister woods, and wild hydrangea and maple-leafed viburnum probably also owe their recent increase to the decline in the deer population.

The carpet of hayscented fern on drier slopes is a relatively new phenomenon here; I remember being excited by the first big beds of it back in 1978 and 79. Though native species, hayscented and New York ferns are behaving like invasives throughout Pennsylvania, spreading like wildfire and impeding the germination of other plants, including trees. A combination of deer herbivory and chemical changes in the soil (due mostly to acid precipitation) seems to be at fault. But at the same time, other, less aggressive ferns are doing well, too. Rattlesnake fern and cut-leafed grape fern both used to be rare, but they’ve become fairly common in the hollow now. It’s my impression that we also have a lot more cinnamon and interrupted ferns than we used to — both spectacular plants.

Where reptiles and amphibians are concerned, we seem to be doing O.K. Wood frogs have declined precipitously in recent years, but as I just explained in a post at the Plummer’s Hollow blog, that may be our fault for making their preferred ephemeral breeding pool a little too permanent, allowing predatory newts to gain a foothold. I’m not aware of any threat to wood frogs generally — though with so many other amphibian populations suddenly crashing around the world, one can’t be too sure. Eastern box turtles, on the other hand, are declining in many places due to habitat fragmentation and illicit collecting for the pet trade, so the fact that our population seems to be holding steady is very good news. We regularly find juvenile turtles, much to our surprise, because we have no shortage of mid-sized mammalian predators that like to snack on the eggs and young turtles.

Changes in mammal diversity here have been the most noticeable and dramatic in the past 35 years. Throughout the 70s, for example, there were no black bears on the mountain. We kept bees up until the mid-80s without a problem. Then the hives were destroyed by bears two years in a row, and we’ve had resident black bears ever since. In recent years, we’ve had two mother bears sharing this end of the mountain and raising litters of up to three cubs at a time. This reflects a state-wide increase in the black bear population, thanks to careful stewardship by the Pennsylvania Game Commission. Two other mammals are also much more common now than they used to be, bobcat and porcupine. Other than one, iffy sighting back in the 70s, bobcats were pretty much nonexistent here when I was a kid. But in the past three years, our hunter friends have begun seeing tracks, and two autumns in a row have had good sightings.

The porcupine population peaked about five years ago, I think, and started declining after that. Part of the reason for this decline may be the recent arrival of another species, one of the few that’s fast enough to flip and kill a porcupine: the fisher. This larger relative of the mink had been completely extirpated by trappers over a century ago, and was re-introduced first to West Virginia, then to north central Pennsylvania. We had our first sightings of a fisher in the hollow two years ago, which might seem like yet another vindication of our decision to foster mature forest conditions wherever possible. Fishers are supposed to be a mature-forest-reliant species. But apparently people are seeing them all over the place, and they are turning out to be much more flexible than the biologists had thought. In the second sighting in Plummer’s Hollow, a hunter watched one chasing a member of another species that’s new here, the fox squirrel. I can’t help wondering whether these big, slow squirrels will be able to hang on with fishers getting established — not to mention coyotes, which arrived on the mountain just a year or two after the fox squirrels.

The coyote is a new animal altogether, never resident in the east until the latter half of the 20th century. It’s not quite a substitute for the extirpated mountain lions and wolves, because it doesn’t prey on adult deer, but we’re still pretty excited to have it around. Eastern coyotes are larger than their western counterparts, having interbred with timber wolves in Quebec, but unfortunately they aren’t nearly as vocal. On rare occasions when I wake in the night to hear coyote song, I feel the way I felt this morning, listening to the winter wren: uncommonly blessed.

March 18, 2007 by Dave Bonta

The Owl

A large owl glimpsed
in flight at the edge
of the spruce grove,
wings clipping against
the locust saplings as
it drops from its roost
& glides down the hillside
through trees as brown
as its feathers, a glare
off the snow & above,
the deepest blue:
I think of it again
just as I’m falling asleep.
The wind is shaking the house,
& I am wondering if this
is what it feels like
to be happy.

March 12, 2007September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Turdus migratorius

The owl grips a thin branch of a walnut tree overhanging the driveway and regurgitates a large mass of hair and bones in the shape of its gizzard.

When an Owl is about to produce a pellet, it will take on a pained expression — the eyes are closed, the facial disc narrow, and the bird will be reluctant to fly. At the moment of expulsion, the neck is stretched up and forward, the beak is opened, and the pellet simply drops out without any retching or spitting movements.

I find it there the next morning, frozen solid. Tiny pelvises and femurs, jaw bones and vertebrae, and somewhere the miniscule bones from the inner ear. The owl doesn’t retch, no — owls are silent creatures, and besides, this is more like a turd, albeit one that travels in the wrong direction. I can imagine it making a quiet little blog.

“Look for antennae,” says the note beside me on the table. It’s in my own handwriting. I scratch my head.

Nope, nothing there.

I was listening to robins singing this morning while I drank my coffee. Despite their Latin name, Turdus migratorius, American robins are year-round residents throughout much of their range. They roam around in the winter in large gangs, foraging for wild fruit (Hercules’-club, sumac, fox grapes, etc.) and generally avoiding areas with heavy snow cover, so it’s common not to see them for a month or two at a time. And the wimpier ones do fly south, so I guess that’s how people started thinking of robins as the archetypal harbingers of spring. I liked what David Lynch did with that notion in Blue Velvet: at the end of this very strange movie about a small-town psychopath, a mechanical bird lands on a branch and the college-kid hero says, “Oh look! The first robin of spring!”

Although actually I prefer Gary Larson’s twist on the spring arrivals motif: bird bath in the foreground, typical Far Side fat kids with their eager faces pressed against the picture window, and their mother saying, “Look children! The slugs are back!” If you grew up in a family of nature nerds as I did, trust me, that’s hilarious.

Yesterday, I got into a pointless argument with a friend about whether it was possible to be mildly obsessed. I said I thought mild obsession was the only kind I’ve ever experienced. Full-blown obsession is entirely too much effort.

Take these robins, for example. When they start singing, it is a sign of (very early) spring, because it means they’re starting to pair off and defend territory. But birders like to interpret their song as: “Cheerily, cheer up, cheer up, cheerily, cheer up.”

Yeah, right. Much more likely, they’re saying, “Look at me, look out, look out, look at me, look out!” There’s an obsessive quality to their singing that just isn’t captured by the first interpretation.

There are at least two different web-based businesses built around the sale of owl pellets. I had no idea they were such a hot commodity. At Genesis, Inc.,

All of our owl pellets are from the Common Barn Owl (Tyto alba) and come from various locations. The majority come from the Pacific Northwest and are of the Highest Quality in the United States. Each pellet is inspected for quality and size. They are then heat treated and wrapped in aluminum foil. You can order 3 different sizes. The “SOP” are under 1.5″ and are usually between 1.25″ and 1.5″ in length. The next size are the “BOP’s”. These Owl Pellets are 1.5″ and larger. The BOP’s can contain pellets that are well over 2″ but will never be smaller that 1.5″. The BOP’s are the same pellets we fill our kits with and are the most common ones to order. The BOP’s are a great choice! If you can afford the price, the “JOP’s” are excellent! These owl pellets are 2″ and larger (may be limited to stock on hand).

The purchase of Owl Brand Discovery Kits help support humanitarian efforts around the globe.

Here is a highlight of just a few of the projects that you have helped OBDK participate in:

Funded 9 short term missionaries to a children’s home in Mexico

Promoting humanitarian outreach through our corporate structure

Participated in building hundreds of wells in Africa

Sponsored, coached, and managed more than 50 Little League players

All through the sale of barn owl pellets. Amazing.

I saw something on a tech blog the other night that absolutely horrified me. At the top of each post, right under the title, there was an extra line displaying the word count, followed by an estimate of how many seconds it would take someone to read the post.

I mean, blog.

March 7, 2007 by Dave Bonta

The descent

Yesterday morning, I found myself drawn to the abstract geometries of frost. It was time to stop spinning stories about what I was seeing and just shoot. The descent beckoned.

[Click on photos to view larger, jpeg versions.]

Hundreds of spam comments come into Via Negativa every day, all but a tiny fraction going straight into the virtual trashcan (i.e. my Akismet spam blocker). Sometime last night, the 100,000th spam comment arrived. I awoke to snow, and the first red-winged blackbirds of spring.

January 22, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Snowbird

It’s beginning to look and feel like January at last. We’re getting snow in small increments, here — ideal for preserving the tracks of small birds and mammals. The above tracks were probably made by a slate-colored junco, AKA snowbird. Juncos forage extensively on the ground, looking for seeds and insects, and in breeding season they nest on or very near the ground as well. The Wikipedia claims that juncos will sometimes eat their own droppings, then eat the droppings that result from that, and so on — an ouroborus-like exercise in self-consumption. It’s the rare being that can eliminate elimination altogether, like the mites that live in your eyelashes. Demodex mites lack an excretory orifice of any kind. They spend most of their lives head-down inside hair follicles, like shy woodland creatures living in hollow trees. Sometimes they emerge at night and walk around on your skin while you’re asleep.

Click on photo for larger view

Much as I like looking for tracks, what I’m really attracted to is untracked snow, which offers a vision of the world free of mark or blemish. Maybe that’s what motivates the coprophagous slate-colored junco, too: an aesthetic preference for a clean slate. Or at least a clean plate.

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Thanks to Ambivablog for originally bringing demodex mites to my attention.

November 29, 2006September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Twelve reactions to a wood duck box

1. If there were enough hollow trees, we wouldn’t need to build bird boxes. There aren’t enough hollow trees because the forest is too young and/or too intensively managed. One biologist I know, who used to work for the state, told me that the more conscientious foresters were always asking him, “How many den trees should we leave per acre?” But he refused to give them an estimate. “As many trees as you can leave, wildlife will use them.”

2. Whoever made this box seems to have had a barn in mind: red paint, corrugated steel roof. “No room at the inn…”

3. One always sees wood duck boxes near the water’s edge. Seems logical enough, except that wood ducks often nest up to a mile from the water. When they are less than 24 hours old, the ducklings climb out of the nest, using the long, sharp claws peculiar to their species, fall to the ground and follow their mother on foot to the nearest swamp, pond or stream, never to return to their nest.

4. Two years ago, one of our hunter friends saw a female wood duck going into a hole in a chestnut oak right on top of the ridge, about three quarters of a mile from the nearest body of water. This past spring, a different hunter was amazed one morning to encounter a wood duck leading her ducklings right down the middle of the Plummer’s Hollow Road. If she had nested in the same tree as the year before, the ducklings’ journey would’ve been over a mile long. I suppose that would be like taking a toddler on a ten-mile hike — on an empty stomach.

5. “The mother calls them to her, but does not help them in any way. The ducklings may jump from heights of up to 89 m (290 ft) without injury,” says the Cornell Lab of Ornithology page. There’s a heart-warming children’s book in all this, just waiting to be written.

6. Nest predators such as crows, raccoons and skunks tend to follow forest edges, including riverbanks. Raccoons are major predators on wood duck boxes such as the one in the photo above, which is not protected with metal flashing or placement on a pole over deep water, as some conservationists recommend. I wonder if their vulnerability to edge-dwelling predators is part of the reason some wood ducks nest so far from water? Or are they forced to nest farther away simply because they can’t find anything closer?

7. Songbirds often have to deal with nest parasites of different species, such as cowbirds and cuckoos. According to the Cornell page, wood ducks can parasitize each other: “If nest boxes are placed too close together, many females lay eggs in the nests of other females. These “dump” nests can have up to 40 eggs.” Barnyard behavior, in other words. One wonders as well about the possibility of unnaturally ideal nest boxes producing local populations too large to be healthy, as has happened with humans ever since the growth of permanent settlements. “Disease and parasites are not usually important causes of death, although diseases such as duck malaria and duck viral enteritis are known to affect Wood Ducks,” says this page from a Canadian site.

6. Wood ducks are “easy to care for and breed and have been commonly bred on game farms and in zoos for decades,” according to the Game Bird And Conservationist’s Gazette.

7. Want to start your own wood duck colony? Unfinished lumber is best, says the Gazette.

A square plywood structure or hollowed log can be used, but our experience is that optimal success is achieved with an inside diameter of 9-12 inches. There should be an entrance hole of about 4 inches in diameter at the top. It is usually best to use rough-cut lumber for constructing the box so that the hen can more easily climb up and out of the hole. But whether smooth or rough is used, it is always a good idea to install a ladder on the front inside wall of the box to make it easy for the female to climb out. The front inside wall leading up to the hole should either be scored with a saw every one half inch all the way up, or cross-kleets nailed up this inside wall to climb on. Also a ramp that is scored or thin pieces of lath or other wood cross nailed on it for traction is important for helping pinioned birds get into the box, and this ramp should be placed from the entrance hole at about a 45 degree angle down to the water surface or ground for pinioned birds to climb up to the hole on. Several inches of nest material like wood shavings, grass, etc. should be put on the bottom for them to nest in.

“The hen.” “Pinioned birds.”

8. I wonder why captive ducks would need nesting material? In the wild, the female lines her nest with down plucked from her own breast.

9. Providing nesting boxes may not be the same thing as raising captive birds in a game farm, for their beauty or for canned “hunts.” But it does presuppose at least a yearly commitment to return, clean out and repair the boxes. I’m not sure we can ever rest easy about the long-term survival of a species so dependent on human goodwill for its nesting habitat. The best approach would be to let the forests mature, let nature take its course.

10. The wood duck’s closely related congener, the Mandarin duck, is very similar in ecological niche and behavior, including nesting habits. The wild populations have not been as fortunate as their North American cousins, however, and again, bad forestry is the culprit, according to this site:

In 1911, the Tung Ling forest, a Mandarin stronghold, was opened up for settlement and thereafter forests were cleared. By 1928 few sufficient breeding areas remained. The current Asian population may be under 20,000 birds. One factor that has helped the Mandarin to survive is their bad taste. These ducks are not hunted for food.

The wood duck, by contrast, has been heavily impacted by over-hunting in the past.

“Mandarin Ducks are frequently featured in Oriental art and are regarded as a symbol of conjugal affection and fidelity,” notes the Wikipedia. “In reality, though, the ducks find new partners each year.”

11. A webpage from Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources, which erroneously states that wood ducks may nest “within about a quarter mile of suitable brood rearing habitat,” adds this fascinating tidbit: “Occasionally, wood duck females will nest in chimneys.”

12. Though migratory, wood ducks “have a phenomenal ability to return to the same breeding area year after year,” says the Oakland Zoo. Their strongest commitment, in other words, is not to each other — as East Asian lore about the Mandarin would have us believe — but to place.
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Today is the deadline for the Festival of the Trees #6. Please send tree- or forest-related links to jadeblackwater at brainripples dot com for inclusion in the December 1st festival at Arboreality.

November 15, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Wild geese

My daughter — the one I never had — I’ve given her up for dead. Words in a dream. Whose? Pale gray skin rising out of sleep, this sky. One size fits all. Wild geese so low over the trees, you can hear their wingbeats.

Last night, my long-dead grandmother, impossibly wrinkled. We were standing in different lines; I don’t think she saw me. –Do you have anything to declare? –No, nothing. It’s true, she rarely did.

This morning, the smell of skunk goes well with coffee. The trees are bare now except for the beeches & some of the oaks, the big ones. Standing under them, I can’t snap a photo without freezing a leaf in mid-fall.

How can we live without the unknown before us? Certainty is a nightmare. At least when I dream, I know I’m dreaming! But the bench looks better empty, I decide, & wander off.

November 9, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Landmark

The trees clack
& sway as I walk
between them. Cloud-
shadows race over
the ridge, making the sun
flicker like a movie projector.
It’s thirty years ago, or twenty.
It’s just last week. I hear
a harsh cry & look up.
Right overhead, a raven —
out flying, I’m sure, for the sheer
hell of it — kites sideways
& upside-down into the wind.
It keeps pace with me
for half a minute, as one
might navigate by any
predictable thing.

August 21, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Enigmatic

Lately I seem to be confronted by enigmatic signs. This morning while I was eating breakfast, for example, I noticed that one of the two cartons we bought peaches in, which originally held Xerox office paper, had “Thoreau” written on the side in magic marker. Perhaps someone connected with the orchard had previously used it to move or store books. But an entire carton just for Thoreau? He didn’t write that many books; it must’ve held mostly books about Thoreau. I’ll take the peaches.

Yesterday around lunchtime, a question mark butterfly landed on the screen of my front door and stayed there just long enough for me to snap three pictures from inside. Nothing too odd about that, except that the very same thing had happened two days before, around the same time of day. What might it mean?

Yesterday afternoon, a dry high blew in. By late in the day, that end-of-summer mood I tried to evoke with quotes from favorite poems yesterday morning had given way to elation and a distinctly autumnal sky. After supper, I grabbed my camera and headed up over the ridge to the west, escaping the long shadows that already reached as far as the houses. The wind blew steadily, making the shadows dance as I poked along through an open forest of very old, gnarled chestnut oaks and black birches. The thin soil and open rocks of the Tuscarora Quartzite formation support little else, especially since the loggers of a hundred years ago took most of the white pines, almost all of the hemlock, and all chestnut oaks straight enough to serve as mine timbers.

I soon came to the first of a string of small talus slopes — open rockslides of a few acres in size that start just below the ridge crest. Such rockslides are a familiar feature to anyone who’s ever hiked along a ridge in the western half of the Folded Appalachians. Logging and associated burning in the 19th century may have set back their colonization by lichens, moss and trees by a few centuries, but essentially these rock slides all date back to the last ice age, which ended 8,000 years ago. Though we’re well south of the southern-most extension of the Wisconsin ice sheet, periglacial conditions reworked local landscapes throughout the central and southern Appalachians, creating talus slopes, bogs, and a host of other unique habitats.

At the edge of the rockslide, I paused to admire some paper birches growing in a clump, as they so often do, re-sprouting from the same roots. I stood at the center of the clump, my feet sinking into a deep, spongy mound of rotted wood. The individual trunks might last little more than half a century, but I’ll bet this birch has been here in some form for a very long time.

I was just starting out onto the rocks, looking for pictures, when I saw something large and black out of the corner of my eye. A turkey vulture had landed on the other side of the rocks, about eighty feet away. The head was still half gray, which I guess — in contrast to human beings — would make it an immature. I froze and started snapping pictures, expecting it to take off at any moment. But it didn’t.

I eased myself down into a comfortable sitting position on the warm rocks. The vulture didn’t seem at all concerned about my presence. Its head swiveled slowly about, and from time to time it reached down to groom its breast feathers, but otherwise it seemed content to sit and face the sun, which was about half an hour from setting.

So that’s how I found myself watching the sunset with a turkey vulture. I shot its picture several dozen more times, of course, hoping that a few shots would turn out relatively unfuzzy (I wasn’t packing a tripod). At a certain point I realized it probably intended to roost nearby, though I didn’t see any other vultures around — they generally roost together, I had thought.

Since the air was now so clear, the light didn’t change much as the sun neared the horizon. The steady wind filtered out most valley noise except train whistles. As I watched the bird, I began to regret what I wrote a week ago about the ugliness of vultures. The wind lifted the feathers of its breast and nape, and the sun tinged them with gold. I saw its head from all angles as it looked about, and it came to seem as appropriate as punctuation at the end of a line of fine, dark calligraphy.

I’m sure that more scientific-minded readers will fault me for anthropomorphism in implying that the vulture was there to watch the sunset. But no sooner had the sun dropped below the horizon than the vulture hopped off its rock, waddled into the woods and flapped up into the branches of a black birch tree. I took that as my signal to get up, too, and get off the rocks before darkness fell.

July 3, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Chicken

Why did the chicken cross the road?

Well, good lord, everyone knows that! Don’t they?

Fifty years ago, I imagine, free-ranging chickens were nearly ubiquitous along small country roads. The roads maybe weren’t in as good shape as they are now; farms were small and numerous just about anywhere agriculture was feasible; and farmers liked to hedge their bets with a more diverse array of crops and livestock than one sees nowadays. I wasn’t alive then, of course, but I’m guessing that back then, anyone who had ever gone for a drive in the country would have had ample opportunity to wonder why in the hell the chicken crossed the road. That joke must’ve actually seemed funny once!

I know because when I was a kid we raised chickens for a number of years. We always had a few bantams and araucanas, including one or two roosters, but the rest — twenty to forty, depending on the time of year — were hens of a hybrid breed known as Black Beauties. Even before we put up the gate at the bottom of the mountain, there weren’t many cars on our somewhat scary, mile-and-a-half-long, one-lane dirt road, and those that did venture up — the meter man, the game warden, UPS before all their drivers became too lazy or, uh, chicken — didn’t drive over ten miles per hour. So when cars rounded the guest house curve and began the ascent past the henhouse, the chickens had plenty of time to do what chickens always do when an automobile approaches: run directly in front of it at high speed. A chicken might be a hundred feet from the road, but as soon as she sees a car approach, she’ll start running. The goal is to get there in time to cross the road just inches away from the front tires, flapping her wings for speed and cackling madly. If the driver is alert and steps on the brakes in time, her game of chicken will end safely with no loss of life or radiator grill.

Chickens, it seems, don’t have a whole lot going on behind those beady little eyes. Except for bantams, who retain much of the canniness of their wild ancestors, chickens are remarkably easy to hypnotize. Sometimes, when the devil was casting about for ways to employ our idle hands, one of us kids would get a yardstick and some chalk and draw a straight line on the concrete floor of the veranda. Then we’d go catch a chicken, soothe her until she stopped clucking, and lay her down on her side with one of her eyes level with the line. For some reason, this is deeply entrancing to a chicken — kind of like putting a person behind the wheel of a car on a long, straight road. She can lie like that for hours, perfectly still while people, pets and other chickens walk all around her. Then all of a sudden you’ll see her get up, shake herself, and walk away as if nothing happened.

We also found we could hypnotize a chicken by holding her upright in one hand at eye level and staring directly into her eyes. In half a minute or less, she’d become sufficiently entranced that you could carry her out to the old stump we used as a chopping block, place her head between the nails and stretch out her neck to its fullest extent with no fuss whatsoever. Again, though, this didn’t work on bantams, who always seemed to be able to intuit our intentions, and had a special kind of call that they only uttered on the way to the chopping block. It sounded disturbingly like “Help, help, help!” The roosters knew what it meant, too, and would come running over and try to screw up their courage to attack, charging as close as they dared and making what were presumably intended to be threatening noises. But we kept the bantams for meat, not for eggs. And if you can’t handle killing, you have no business eating meat.

I should add that it was my father — a lifelong pacifist — who acted as executioner up until I was around 16 or 17, when he passed the responsibility on to me with considerable relief. In late summer and early fall, during the poultry killing season (we also raised muscovy ducks), Dad would kill two birds a week, and Mom would clean them, sometimes with the help of one of us kids. The scary thing about killing a chicken is how much it thrashes about after its head comes off. The chopping block was situated right next to an old road scraper — an attachment for Dad’s small farm tractor — and we took advantage of its curved blade to deflect the flying blood from our clothes. Dad taught me how to hold the chicken’s legs in the left hand, bring the hatchet down with the right, then quickly swing the bird up and over against the scraper blade during the one- or two-second lull before the convulsive thrashing began.

We never tried letting them go to see if they’d run around — it wasn’t worth getting dirt on the neck, Dad said. Besides, it would have seemed callous and disrespectful. We used the neck meat, of course. Everything but the feet and the head, which seemed to retain consciousness for ten to fifteen seconds after it tumbled to the ground, the beak opening and closing soundlessly a couple of times before the eyelids slowly closed.

The end was swift, and I’m sure the shock of it prevented much if any suffering. We told ourselves that these chickens had lived a good life, unconfined except by snow in the winter — and even then, they had the whole, dirt basement of the henhouse to grub around and take dust baths in. Our motives for this arrangement weren’t entirely altruistic, of course. Eggs and meat from free-range chickens simply tastes better, not only because the birds get plenty of exercise, but also because, dumb as they may seem by comparison with human beings, chickens are smart enough to do what few humans can: balance their diet on their own. Even in the dirt under the henhouse they evidently found enough worms, insect larvae and other invertebrates to continue producing eggs with deep orange yolks throughout the winter.

I don’t know what it is about a car that provokes such panic among chickens, but panic is never a rational response to danger, even among people. I’ve seen panic attacks at close hand, and they’re scary, and a little awe-inspiring. The mind seizes up somehow — a form of paralysis completely opposite to trance or hypnosis. Breathing and circulation go into overdrive. As the etymology of the word suggests, panic was once associated with the groundless terrors people felt when they strayed too far from the safety of home and village: Pan was the god of fields and woods.

And of course panic is contagious, leading potentially to pandemonium. When one chicken started racing for the road, half a dozen others would quickly follow suit, and a mad rush for the safety of the henhouse would ensue. In commercial operations, this tendency to mass panic can lead to large pileups in the corner of a chicken house and dozens of birds smothering to death.

Even small flocks, like the one we used to keep, are too large for the physical and mental health of the birds if bad weather confines them to quarters for too long. Chickens are social birds with a strong tendency to keep themselves in line with a pecking order. As with human dominance hierarchies, this “order” regularly leads to the death of its most vulnerable members. The skin on a low-ranking chicken’s feet might split from frostbite, and the sight of blood would provoke another chicken to begin pecking. Chickens like the taste of blood. Soon, the unfortunate hen would be surrounded by a mob of her comrades, fighting each other for a piece of her increasingly bloody body. I saw this happen a couple of times, and was able to beat them off, but knew that I was only forestalling the inevitable. During the bi-weekly replacing of the old litter with fresh hay from the barn, we would occasionally find the partially eaten corpses of missing chickens. I suppose we lost four or five chickens a year this way.

If having a pecking order leads to such brutal results, how and why did it evolve? The easy answer is that, in the case of most breeds of chickens, naturally evolved traits have been distorted by inbreeding and the selection for certain traits disadvantageous to the long-term survival of chickens. But of course many species of fully wild birds have informal pecking orders, too. And though many human societies are quite non-hierarchical, such societies tend to be those at the simplest level of social organization: small, nomadic bands thinly distributed across a landscape. With higher population densities and more sedentary habits, hierarchical structures seem like an almost inevitable development, absent some mitigating ethos strongly valuing individual autonomy.

My theory is that hierarchies are common among social animals because social animals have a strong need for security, and a pecking order happens to be one of the easiest ways of providing it. The individual chicken knows her place, and if the tensions created by rivalry for higher positions in the pecking order threaten the solidarity of the flock, then miraculously a chicken at or near the bottom begins to bleed around her toes. Presumably, the experience of participating in the elimination of one of its least desirable members generates the same kind of positive emotional feedback that the citizens of a modern nation-state get from invading a much smaller country or howling for the elimination of some undesirable minority.

But we have strayed perhaps a little too far from our original question, haven’t we? I don’t know if we can make it all the way to the finish before the next car comes, but let’s get a running start. Our goal, let’s remember, is the other side — or the Far Side, for you die-hard Gary Larson fans. (And has the chicken ever had a more sympathetic champion?) Cars don’t go as fast as they otherwise might because the road is rough, and the road is rough because the road scraper is currently employed for, um, other purposes. But let’s not talk about that right now — keep your eyes on the goal. We can make it! Do it for the flock.