This is our ongoing blog about a family of wild Shama Thrushes that lives in our yard in Maunawili,a suburb of Kailua, Hawaii. We are now in Year Two of Shama Dramas. We just started the blog so there are posts about the current chicks (beginning with the earliest posts) interspersed with memories of the interactions with the Season One Chicks, and their parents. Both Don and I are uploading so you will notice a difference in styles.
I wasn't going to add another mini-blog entry today but Susie says I should, after I related my experience just now in the back yard, small though it was.
This is earlier in the year, Bird feeding a Fluffbutt
This is a sleepy day for me; as a guy whose brain isn't well-suited to sleeping right I'm trying to bounce back yet again from another bout of far-too-little sleep days on end, which leaves me more hanging out than plotting and planning to save the world, and is probably what led me to make friends with the backyard dinosaurs in the first place.
here are some recent shots of Tawny
Not a lot of new chapters; Bird did take a soft live mealworm or two to the nesting box on the side of the house, and he really likes those. Having him do anything besides swallowing as many as you'll give him, immediately, means that there's at least one young chick needing soft food. He wouldn't give his mate one of the live ones. So there may be at least one hatchling. It hasn't rained a lot and the last hatching had no survivors, and we are fresh out of live mealworms which would help us pull them through... the reconstituted ones we have are good enough for chicks a week old but not fresh-hatched. So another casualty of the pandemic, though really it just means the reproduction rate is held down to what it would otherwise be, which is probably appropriate.
Anyhow, that's not what Sue asked me to write about.
Scruffy the baby bulbul has been showing up shaking his wings and cheeping to be fed outside the kitchen at the top of the stairway... apparently my grabbing him and getting him out of the house a couple days ago is water under the bridge. He's a homely little guy who will grow up homely, his only pretty feature a red butt, but the species has personality. As Samuel Jackson's character said in Pulp Fiction, personality goes a long way.
But that's not why Susie asked me to write today.
Tawny the fluffbutt, shot a week or so ago
We had Tawny hanging out in our upstairs kitchen and finally noticed him flitting about and clicking, doing his best to poop on things, so I got out some of our house special boiled chinese mealworms and he flew to my hand a number of times and got well-fed, then zoomed off to find shama adventures, and that's not what Sue felt was worth writing about either, since that's about a daily thing.
and another of Tawny from the same batch
No, it was just that to stretch my legs, and Muppet's, I decided to go down the cement stairs to the lower yard, where I hadn't been in a week or so, to see the quiet bower of Avo, Mango, and Breadfruit limbs which is so nice in the trade winds when it hasn't been raining. Muppet always has access but doesn't think the yard is entertaining unless a human is in it somewhere, upon which he ignores them and cavorts about, which he was doing. But as I stood at the base of the steps I saw Bird about 25 feet off the ground in the top of the neighbor's mango tree, surveying things. Not thinking it'd come to much, I held up my right hand with my index finger out and said "hey there, Bird", thinking it'd be cool if he came down. And darned if he didn't, flew about 40 feet straight to my finger and perched there with that perfect balance of his, long tail doing all the balance work. I admitted to him that I hadn't brought any treats. He looked at me for several seconds and then fluffed up his feathers and decided to stay with me awhile, breaking into a full melodious shama song, and he kept it going for 6-7 minutes which seemed like 20. I have no idea what goes on in his little pointed head; whether it was a comradely gesture, whether it's as close to friendship as a shama can get, or whether he was just telling the world that I belonged to him when I was down there, too. Probably the latter, but that sort of thing gets close to my original goal when I told Sue I was going to try to make friends with a shama... that "I want it to fly to me out of the trees when I call it, land on my finger, and sing me beautiful songs". Darned if that doesn't happen now.
Life isn't a disney cartoon, not even close. But there are moments.
Hi, DJ here. This is one of those Hawaii summer days with blue sky, little puffs of white cloud, and trade winds... that is, the standard summer day that the postcards show. And it feels like a good day to be lazy, for some reason, so we're going with it.
Bird, up close & personal
The portraits in this edition are off the DSLR memory card, and are of Bird, shot over the last 6 months or so... there are many more, this is just a selection... since, y'know, each one I use needs to be downsized, cropped, have the levels tweaked, etc for proper internet display.
Overlooking our front yard
Not a lot of unique bird action today inside or outside our house; Birdlet still seems to be taking food from us about once in the morning, after sitting and staring at us and thinking about it for a surprisingly long time. Bird pops by whenever he sees me, and to chase Tawny away on general principles. Tawny is still sneaking in and made it into our upstairs today, doing some aerial acrobatics which impressed Susie; he's now quite aware of how our house works and can navigate it well despite all the panes of glass.
The parent bulbuls are still coming by, and the scruffy baby bulbul has landed a few times and taken food from me directly, shaking his wings in the "feed me" command which is supposed to instill that urge in a parent bulbul.
No wait, we just had a minor bird adventure, related to this post.
skeptically surveying the other birds coming and going,
I figured I'd go back and do a "screen capture" from some old video showing Susie raising "Tweety", a baby bulbul who was rescued from a cat in 1994 and who she brought to full adulthood from being an injured chick, and who we accommodated to being wild again, and who may well be the 20th-generational grandsire of all the bulbuls here today, so if farmers wonder who to thank for ag pests, here we are. And it turns out you can't do mac screen grabs from inside their DVD player, which is a shame since there were some cute ones of Sue at half her current age with a baby bird. But that's not the adventure. The adventure was that the cheeping of the long-ago Tweety on the video seemingly lured the current bulbul chick, Scruffy, into our house where he got trapped in the upstairs by all the windows. So we had to go up and try to gain his trust, which didn't work though he ate some reconstituted mealworms from me... he was covered with cobwebs, apparently turning a baby bulbul loose is a good way to clear them out. But finally I had to just catch him by hand and let him outside, so that unwelcome handling may mean that "Scruffy" doesn't want to be friends anymore.
showing off a vertical stand
We shall see. But his parents, and apparently two other bulbuls outside, were very concerned about him... I didn't know they had extended families... and it looked like all 4 went up to him once he was on a branch outside. So is that the last we'll see of Scruffy, or will the siren song of the mealworms bring him back?
Additional possible bulletin:
Bird took a bug to the nesting box for some reason today. No reason he should, I don't THINK Birdlet is in there, but perhaps they are thinking about more chicks.
DJ here. So not a lot of new bird info today... Bird & Birdlet still stopping by for meals from me, didn't see Tawny today so maybe yesterday was his last visit here. Birdlet still eating light and taking baths all day so that strikes me as vacation mode and not egg-laying mode. They may have put reproduction on the back burner after the failure of the Cuties nesting. I still expect at least one more batch this year, but who knows...
red-whiskered bulbul shot yesterday
I did unexpectedly make friends with a baby red-vented bulbul today, which has been fed by its parents nearby, they have scavenged some of the dropped mealworms and have picked fights with the shamas. But having the baby decide to approach me for food was unexpected, since it's, like, not something a baby bird should do. But it did, and I actually had it sitting on my finger chowing down for about 15 minutes while I talked to it. Again, surprising, since its parents don't trust me and weren't to be seen. But I expect it'll remember me fondly and perhaps within a week it'll have a human-designated name and be insinuating itself into the bird-ape ecosystem. They really aren't as pretty as the other species but they have a lot of personality and talk a lot.
here's the mated pair, shot from my door as they checked me out
this guy has been dashing to our porch and inside briefly
While the baby was on my finger, one of the red-whiskered bulbuls, much smaller and more delicate birds, flew up in front of me and seemed to almost be expecting a turn at what the baby red-vented was having. Which is surprising, too, since those are very shy birds... though they have gotten used to me somewhat in the last couple weeks, they used to light out at the sight of a human. Now they associated me with leftover mealworms and are used to me talking and moving in close proximity to them... and yeah, I actually introduce a lot of sound and movement into my interactions to get them used to the fact I do that, I don't want to have to be a silent statue for them to come around. This isn't something I read anywhere, just comes from being a quasi-autistic little kid who grew up around critters.
this is the mom of the baby bulbul, I have a shot of the baby too but for some reason it won't upload
Anyhow, the reason for posting today is that since I never did wake up all that much today, I pulled the SD card from the DSLR I use to shoot portraits of the birds... a different and more unwieldy camera than the superzoom I normally shoot snaps and vids with. But it has better optics and better imaging chip... so I'll post a few pix here... click them to see them at "full" size... they're downsized a lot from full resolution so they'll load fast but are all at least 1600px wide when you click on them, if your screen will handle that.
The whole notion of blogging is, as I understand it, to write even when there's not much to write about, since chronicling the slow spots is just as valid as hitting the high points.
We're between new batches of chicks now. After the Fluffbutts, there was an attempt to have another batch - tentatively the "Cuties" - in the nesting box, and at least one must have hatched since the parents carried food in there for several days. But seemingly they failed to thrive, perhaps since we were feeding relatively tough reconstituted (boiled) chinese dried mealworms rather than live ones, since our supply of live ones had dwindled during the covid lockdown. This has also coincided with a period of a month or so without heavy rain, which may have cut into the other sources of fresh bugs and worms and stuff out there.
So while last year between March and June we had 4 successful hatchings, which may have been too many, this year the birds seem to be on a slower pace. It could well be that there are already eggs laid in the tree next door, but I tend to doubt it... Birdlet is pretty much in vacation mode, taking a lot of baths and just not acting like anything was urgent.
Bird has been showing up a lot, and has taken to flying into the kitchen and turning loose with his full-volume shama territorial call, which is as loud as a very-loud smoke alarm on steroids. He unquestionably does it to shake us out of whatever we're doing to offer him mealworms, and it works every time.
Bird, who started as the most skeptical of the shamas, and who once spent a night indoors after chasing Cheepy in and getting lost, is now the most chill. The other birds are all hand-trained, but you can kind of infer their level of comfort by how strongly they grip your finger with their claws. Of the current birds, Birdlet hangs on fairly well so she can crank her head around and look around her, Tawny grabs hard since he expects to be chased away by an adult at any time, but Bird doesn't even clench down at all. He sticks his landing on my finger like an olympic gymnast and then keeps his claws entirely relaxed... quite a trick since the way bird sinews are constructed, the weight of a bird contracts the claws on a branch just from the pull of gravity. But bird just balances there using his tail to shift his center of gravity. This despite the fact that not only did he used to hate me as the yard monster, but he's a lot stronger than the other birds. One time a flurry of chicks knocked him back on my finger, and instead of flapping away he just clenched down, and rotated 90 degrees, causing his center claw to slash me as deep as a box cutter would, and about as cleanly other than the presumed horrible bacteria that a hunting carnivore probably has on there. But that was the only time. Also, if the other birds are sitting then and there's some odd sound from in the house, or a passing truck, or Muppet deciding to yell, they will clench down and swivel around. Bird just looks me in the eye and, reassured, goes back to whatever else he was doing. Ever since he originally negotiated his Treaty with me, he doesn't worry about my non-compliance. Have to tell that story sometime.
Bird will eat some radical stuff...here knocking back a venomous centipede in the front yard
But he's reliable if I want a shama... I just open the door and give a brief whistle, and he's there. Yesterday I was reviewing a product Amazon had sent, a bag of black soldierfly larvae. I whistled him up from the backhard and offered him a handful. He regarded them skeptically, though it was clear to him they were being presented as food. Finally he wore me down and I gave him some reheated mealworms. (Neither Birdlet nor Tawny would eat the soldierflies either).
This is "Bird," the Patriarch. In the beginning he was so sure we were monsters that he repeatedly scolded and yelled at us when we were near his chicks. His name became just "Bird" which stuck even though he later shared with us more of his personality. He is bold, curious, demanding and an apex Shama. He has a complex vocabulary and a very strong combative personality to other birds but puts up with us in exchange for a free meal. Now he could care less if we handle his chicks.
Birdlet feeding Peepy1, 2019
Birdlet is the Mom. She is very endearing. She very softly talks to us when she wants us to open the worm bin for her.
We discovered that she raises her girls in a different part of the yard from where Bird brings up the boys. If the clutch is only boys they raise them together, seemingly. (This isn't info from bird researchers, this is our own observation of this mated pair).
This is Eepie 1. Here representing the chicks.
Cheepie - our "special" boy. A favorite
Cheepie was our "special needs" chick. He learned to evade his Dad and stuck around longer than any of the others. Cheepie came in every day to get away from his homicidal dad, to rest and to have snacks. Much time was spent helping Cheepie to eat by pushing food in his mouth, pointing at bugs to get him to recognize them as food, etc. He usually looked a bit ragged which you could see in his tail feathers. Here he is right after growing in his new adult plumage. He still tried desperately to stick around but when the FluffButts fledged he was finally kicked out of his home territory. Hopefully he is doing fine. He had a knack for sitting on clean dishes.
This is a really quick one, but I noticed Birdlet dropping out of the old nesting box on the side of the house today, and there's really no reason for her to be in there unless she's fixing to have more chicks.
not my pic... those old ones are on archived media. Java Sparrows
I built that box back 30+ years ago. There were java rice birds which had pecked the screens out of the vent holes on our upper roof to create a java-rice-bird condo development, you could see a dozen little java faces sticking out the holes sometimes at once. Which was very cute and all, but in Maunawili anything that looks even ROUGHLY like a beehive quickly becomes a beehive. So the bees would chase the java sparrows out of one segment of the roof after another, and I'd have to remove them on a tall ladder, which I was never able to do without killing them. I hated that, but we couldn't really have our drywall ceiling sagging with honey and some night having 50lb of bees crashing through the ceiling to sting us.
So I installed tougher covers on the holes, evicting the java rice birds; but decided to see about making alternate nesting sites for them... so in about 5 minutes I took some rough lumber and a piece of left-over counter laminate and made what I thought would be a good birdhouse for rice birds.
They never cared for it. But over the years I'd notice from time to time a shama nesting there, though I didn't get to know them then, and didn't pay much attention. But that has seemingly become Birdlet's favorite place to nest now, for the cheepies, the fluffbutts, and the failed "cuties", which apparently hatched but didn't thrive. So she may be prepping to try again. I can't tell by the look on her face.
We saw Bird, Birdlet, and Tawny a fair bit today; but no exciting new exploits other than their just dropping by, Tawny coming in the house to lecture us and poop on things.
UPDATE: POK POK POK
Susie has told me I also need to relay a lizard anecdote from the day.
I was moving things around in the lower house today and on barging into the back room scared the pair of gold-dust daygeckos who ran off. These presumably were the ones I'd tried to train in that room a year and a half ago. So as they were running off, I said "what, you don't want a worm?"
Well, BOTH of the lizards stopped running up the wall and behind the curtains and raised their bodies down to stare at me... and they raced each other back toward me. Having not really expected that, I didn't actually have any worms for them. So I told them to wait (they grok that) and went and found some in Susie's mealworm farm. Once I got back they each ran to the arm of the chair closest to me and begged for their mealworms, taking them out of my fingers with a strong tug, and running off giggling. I suppose, whatever a lizard giggle sounds like, we probably couldn't hear it.
But since I now need to find a picture, and can only just now find one, I need to explain it, and that leads to the story of why we no longer have a google robot in that room.
ultimately, I caught him in the act
One of those lizards discovered the touch-sensitive controls on the top of the "smart speaker", and it turns out a gecko's touch is more than sufficient to work it. So this gecko learned that it could make huge noises by moving back and forth between the "volume up" and "volume down" spots. Once on "volume up" it would get as loud as possible and go POK POK POK POK until the lizard got tired of that, which was seldom. We couldn't figure out what was happening for awhile since whenever we'd walk into the room the POK POK POK would suddenly stop, seemingly a ghostly manifestation of some sort. After a few days I opened the door really fast and saw the lizard scooting away right when the noise stopped. Why the lizard liked that, who knows. Maybe it stimulated him or her in some way, it was pretty loud. But the only thing we were sure of what that the neighbors were not happy. They hated the POK POK POK at all hours of the day or night and wanted it off. For awhile I tried taping cardboard to the top of the speaker, but the lizard would wedge under it and POK POK POK POK it would go again. So after the neighbors finally said STOP IT! I unplugged the speaker. So the magic box no longer works for that lizard. But it was one of the ones in my story today, so that's the connection.
This is another out-of-order Cheepy video. There will be various of these interspersed with the retrospective. There's a LOT of video of Cheepy since we saw him through a lot, from staying around despite his homicidal father, a swallowing disorder which threatened to starve him, lame feet, and all sorts of stuff that we managed to get him through. Susie taught him to eat various things in the yard which he didn't learn from his parents, and indeed he treated her/us like parents.
So when Sue decided she needed to know how much he weighed, and wasn't satisfied with the estimate "about an ounce", it was easy to figure out his exact weight. Just put a few mealworms on the postal scale and set it to "tare" and have him hop on.
Cheepy is pretty seedy-looking in this vid; in addition to not swallowing right and having problems with his legs, he apparently didn't groom his tailfeathers properly for a long time so spent a long time looking like he passed several times through a vacuum cleaner or something. Unquestionably he would have died in the normal course of events, but when last we saw him he was in full plumage and had survived nearly two weeks without any help or food from us, off having a shama life. That last visit he came in, hung out, had a meal, and then did something he'd never done before: while sitting on my finger after having a meal, he pulled one leg up and perched there contented on a single leg for a time. This is something they do when feeling secure, and perhaps happy. This lasted 5 minutes or so.
Then he flew out the door, out of human knowledge, and into history. Fare thee well, Cheepy.
We'll talk about the Cheepies in a bit, the third fledging of 2019; Cheepy was originally Cheepy1, and there are stories for the others as well.
Another of Eepy2, you can see his black chest feathers filling in
Continuing the retrospective....
So it took us awhile to realize that Birdlet was a female. The thing which did it was that she started flying off with the mealworms rather than gulping them down. Not being entirely clueless, I figured out that she must be female, Bird must be her mate, and that she must have hatched one or more chicks.
Figuring out where the nest was, was pretty straightforward… just watch where she flies to. Except… if shamas don’t trust you much, they take circuitous routes to their chicks, so you have to keep your eyes on them through all sorts of diversions. This is possible, though. (and these days, unnecessary, as the parents don’t mind much if we know where the nest is). But it turned out that of all places she’d build a nest in a hanging piece of heleconia about a food outside our fence line. Seemingly a terrible place to have chicks, and in fact it was in the path of machete-wielding flower choppers, and I located the nest barely in time to intercede with them to not chop it all down… literally a matter of hours. The birds didn’t know or appreciate this at the time, but it meant that we had intervened and that whatever happened with the chicks would be somewhat “on us”.
Finally they left the nest, and they’re pretty hard to spot, but by the pattern of Birdlet’s flying (Bird didn’t seem to be feeding them much if at all), it seemed there were three of them. After a day or so I got a view of two of them and a few photos, which was interesting because I hadn’t checked on what shama chicks were supposed to look like, and I was struck by the coloration.
After a few days, the one chick which was off our property apparently failed to thrive, was eaten by a cat, or came to grief in some other way since the parents stopped going over there and instead focused on the two chicks which were hanging out inside our fence mostly in the lower yard. I named them Eepy1 and Eepy2, collectively the Eepies, because why not? At that point it didn’t occur to us there would be multiple batches in the same year. hah.
Initially it took a fair bit of stalking to check on them, but since I was supplying some food - live mealworms - to their mom, the focused on her. They really liked the live mealworms. And each chick wanted to be the closest to Mom because the closest and most assertive chick got more worms. This established a dynamic which would hopscotch them ever-closer to where I was handing out the worms.
This cause Bird to go absolutely nuts. He already felt I was a monster, and said so constantly, and now his chicks were approaching me ever-closer. As this happened, Birdlet would give a monster call at me as well, but quickly decided that I was more of a plus than a minus in the equation, that my worm-giving quality outweighed my scary-monster quality. So soon the Eepies were coming nearer, and rather than staying quiet and motionless I decided to be animated, loud, and intrusive to get them used to it. This of course made Bird go even more nuts, but Birdlet who was doing the feeding just decided that was what I did and it was harmless. So the Eepies learned that their mom considered me harmless, their dad thought I was dangerous, but that when they were nearby me they got more and better food. This was a pretty simple heuristic on their part… baby birds are all about the food. So after a few days they’d be so close that they and their mom would be standing on the same concrete step I was sitting on, with me handing them to her and her simply pivoting to shove the worms into their gullets. Another day or so and they were taking mealworms directly from me. And so on. Once they decided I was the third “feeder” in their lives, that became a pretty durable thing in their pointy little heads. As they got older, they learned that they didn’t have to wait for mom, they could find me on their own and ask for worms.
I should note that at that point I wasn’t giving away enough worms to constitute the bulk of their diet, just to augment it. Live mealworms were pricey. They were probably one of the highest-food-value things the birds were finding though.
So as the Eepies grew up, they became hand-trained and would come visit and stuff, even while their dad continued doing the monster calls at me. The two chicks would be sitting on the fence next to me and their dad would fly up and razz me and then fly away, and then do it again and again, trying to communicate to the chicks that they were in danger, and they entirely ignored him. As did his mate, who would also sit there taking mealworms from me.
There are a number of videos of the Eepies, enough that they won’t all be linked at this site, but I've thrown one in, above. (As always, click full screen for it to look like anything. This was my first experience with hand-training a chick, so there's a lot of baby talk; I intentionally make a lot of noise and movements to get them used to it, not to mention a large camera held about 6" away). This video is Eepy2 on a rainy day in Maunawili.
They hung out until Birdlet hatched the NEXT brood, more sensibly laying her eggs in a hollow in the neighbor’s avocado tree, and that’s where the Peepies entered the story and the Eepies were driven away by their very aggressive dad. We didn’t really expect that, having not read up all that much on shamas, and his level of violence in getting rid of them kinda surprised us. Surprised them, too. At the point young shamas are being displaced by another brood, both of their parents not only shun them but actively chase them away, peck them, etc. This meant that Sue and I became the only “parents” that were still acting marginally sane, so if anything the chicks are more attracted to us at that point.
So the Eepies went out into the world, with the odds against them, and we know not what became of them. Nor did we immediately realize there would be FOUR batches of chicks in 2019 in our yard from Bird and Birdlet. That brings us to the Peepies, which will be mentioned next…
Tawny just flew into the house right before his dad showed up. He is always teaching me. Today's lesson was "Don't leave Glass Water Bottles near the ledge of the countertop." He demonstrated for me (he can tell I learn most by example and not through lectures) by landing on it. As a sub-adult well on his way to adult weight and strength, he has quite a lot of power in those legs of his when he kicks off. He landed on my water bottle. Luckily it was not knocked over this time and I got a brief lecture from Da Big Kahuna (DJ) on not leaving things around for the birds to destroy. But what this lead to was much more interesting. As I walked over to the bottle Tawny flew off - only to spy his dad who was coming to Don's hand to land on the mealworm cup. A quick 180 by Tawny and some "on the fly" decisions to evade his dad that led him to disappear above the banister up into the upper living room where we could not see him. Don always worries when the birds do that in case they get scared and maim themselves by bashing against the windows in a panic to get out. And the first time for them often is Panicville. Don's first instinct is to go up and try and guide them out. This works but sometimes this by itself can sometimes cause dissonance in their little brains and lead to erratic evasive maneuvers so I prefer to see if they can figure it out for themselves first without us there as a distraction.
Tawny has been upstairs several times. So I told Don who was about to rush upstairs, not to worry. Tawny has this. He will be fine. It is his idea. Let him work it out.
When it is a Shama's idea they usually calm down and figure their own way out of a situation. This no doubt is because they are evolved to flit about in tight spaces in the underbrush. It is breathtaking to see them when they are on a mission and flying really fast evading tree limbs as they go. We've even seen Birdlet (the mom) scramble under the worm compost bin after a bug. Very tight quarters.
To stop DJ from worrying I crept up the stairs to observe the boy. He made some big circles then came back down to the kitchen. Saw his dad again and made another big circle. Then he flew to the middle of the room and made a low dive and flew out the door (Bird was still on the cup in DJ's hand in the doorway) undetected by his dad. Or at least not chased by his dad- little escapes Bird's notice - but apparently he was low enough and fast enough not to be perceived as a threat. Tawny would make a good AF stealth bomber pilot instructor. Or maybe he fancies himself as the Luke Skywalker of Shamas? Don is learning to quell his fears that Tawny will kill himself off when he goes upstairs and is recognizing that Tawny was clearly showing him "Hey! DJ Look at Me! I Got This! This was MY idea! Fly, Fly Upstairs ! Then ! Out I go! Bye!"
Since I'm going back to square one, I'll introduce "Bird" formally here. Of course if you've seen any of the recently-posted videos, you can tell that he now considers me part of the family, but there's a long story that goes with that, and it's kind of interesting, and I won't be telling it here and now. Just wanted to throw out a few pix of him for the blog.
He's a very pretty male shama, and was always the most skeptical of us humans. After a very long time he started to warm up to me and finally decided he and I were friends, to the point that I can be wandering the yard and call him down to talk even if he can tell I don't have any food. However, he continued to consider Susie a monster and gave her the full monster treatment, including razzing her and avoiding her, until just a couple months ago, and it has only been the last month or less when he'd land on her hand even for food.
He's strong, coordinated, treats his mate abominably, and instinctively attacks his own chicks once they've worn out their welcome. He even kills some of them, I think, though driving them away will in most cases accomplish the same thing. We try to be very aware of that, and the ins and outs of various generations of chicks we've gotten to know as individuals is where "ShamaDrama" gets its name. As much fun as it is for us to have them share our lives a bit, they're living a no-nonsense life & death foraging existence, and our providing of some extra food sends signals for the parents to reproduce, even though there is no actual increase in the shama carrying capacity outside our yard. This can be finessed a bit; I suggested to Cheepy that he claim a territory that no other shama would defend, and just get take-out food from us, and darned if he didn't do exactly that for as long as he could. But that's another story.
This is Bird, the patriarch. We live in his yard. He has fairly recently decided that's OK.
This is being inserted somewhat out of order, it was shot Sept 16 2019 when Cheepy was a young adult. He kept visiting until March 2020 when the parents of the Fluffbutts started keeping him more effectively away.
Our house is kind of oddly arranged, but has a nice view. It has been in a state of flux for well over a year, with all manner of things in the process of being moved from one place to another, so this vid may well be censored by Sue rather than allowing people to see how messy it was then; (it's similarly messy now but a DIFFERENT mess.)
But the point is that the upstairs is designed with big windows all around, and the first few times a shama gets into the upstairs, it's hard for them to figure out how to get out.
So that's where the "Cheepy Maneuver" comes in. He used this multiple times, as his go-to disorientation strategy: if he ever couldn't figure out how to get out of the house, he would just find Sue and land on her head, and she'd walk him to the nearest port of debarkation. This really did happen multiple times until he could get back to the kitchen door from any place in the house. He didn't land on her head any other time, nor have any of the other shamas come up with a similar strategy. It worked for him every time. Why he was so sure it would, we may never know.
A bit of discussion with the assembled fluffbutts in a rambling 8-minute vid shot by Susie on our upstairs porch a month or so ago.
The Fluffbutts were the first fledging of 2020; the second fledging didn't produce any chicks which lived, and we're I guess waiting for the third. As of the day this is posted, the only Fluffbutt still visiting is Tawny, originally Fluffbutt2, the slightly smaller of two male chicks.
The vid won't look like much unless one expands it to full-frame, I suspect...
So after having failed at teaching any of the house lizards much of any impressive tricks, I decided I'd bond with a shama, because I'm no good at meditation but I clearly needed to get out of my own head more. Thus, I decided that making friends with a yard dinosaur might be a good way to do that.
I didn't know of any shamas in particular, but we've got the sort of yard where they can be found. And about 20 years earlier, when digging for some garden plants out in the front yard, I noticed that a shama had come and perched about 6 feet away, to rush in if I uncovered any tasty bugs. This behavior, and boldness, made me think that if one actually had a supply of bugs, they could probably acquire a durable association with a shama. So I filed that away in my mind for later.
Birdlet, getting better about personal space
So by March 2019 as I had come up against hard limits in lizard-training, I decided that maybe I had enough mealworms left to make friends with a shama. (per mention in the last installment here). The idea of one of them landing on my finger and singing and just generally being convivial seemed like fun.
So yeah, in lieu of meditation, which I'm no good at, I'd just go sit out in the backyard whistling and throwing worms in the air... behavior which would definitely get you thrown off a public bus, but there was nobody to see me.
At first. Then various birds took notice. One was a beautiful shiny male shama, who decided my presence back there was a terrible breach of the natural order, and the fact that I had mealworms somehow made it worse. So he'd use his "monster alert" razzberry voice to tell me to get the hell out of his yard, hopping around and alerting the other birds that there was a predator in the yard. This was to be his main interaction with me for a very long time. I called him Bird, as in "hey beat it Bird, I'm looking for a FRIENDLY shama." But he was determined I wouldn't find any, and did his best to prevent it.
However, there was a shy little dark bird which looked SORT of like a shama, dull color but same basic coloration and smaller. I assumed it was a chick, because it seemed curious and didn't always heed Bird's monster alerts about me. She'd take a tossed mealworm, and liked them a lot. (Bird would too if I threw one far enough, but would then return to scolding me). So over the course of a week or so I just tossed them less far, until she'd take them out of my hand. And when nothing bad happened, more familiarity developed, and I could go down and whistle and she'd fly over, despite the scolding "monster! monster!" calls from Bird, who I assumed to be the chick's father. (Not yet understanding that shama dads don't much care if chicks survive after about 6 weeks of age).
And pretty soon, she was fine taking them from my hand
So I had the beginning of a friendly relationship with Birdlet, so named since I assumed she was a chick (hadn't figured out her gender yet), and an antagonistic relationship with Bird, who decided it was his job to chase me out of my own yard on general principles whenever he saw me. Which was every time.
Birdlet, though, would land near me or on my foot or knee, and give a plaintive little soft "foooo" call which clearly only I could hear. And over a year later, near as I can tell she only uses the "fooo" call to prompt humans to do stuff.
I see Susie has been posting about Wally the gold-dust day-gecko... so while she takes her evening shower I'll write a bit more.
Susie, the "mother of worms"
In fact, the whole shama adventure grew out of my seeing if I could train some of the gold-dust geckos who have been displacing the regular house geckos by being bigger, smarter, and - well- eating the others. But they do seem to have a lot more personality. So I originally got some live mealworms to see if I could train them. (the daygecks, not the worms)
the regular geckos are dumber too. Sue now uses tops at night
"Peeky" the first trained daygeck. Seen here peeking.
Chompy
Turns out that training day geckos isn't all that satisfying... I did train a number of them to run to my from their hiding places when I'd call "lizard want a worm?, but any more exotic behaviors just didn't materialize. Though they still know that trick, even if they haven't seen me in awhile. And actually, there was a brown anole "velociraptor" from outside who learned better just by watching, and when I'd say that he'd race from far away, climb the furniture, leap in my hand to grab the mealworm, then run back outside, so his IQ was presumably higher since I hadn't even tried to train him. There was also "Chompy" a green anole who would likewise come in and leap into my hand... this familiarity became unfortunate when I was doing an interview for an associate's security clearance and the interviewer had Chompy leap repeatedly on her face over the course of the interview. I suppose my saying "Chompy! No!" didn't help either, I made clear it wasn't a pet but just a lizard from the yard, but she was skeptical.
Anyhow, after failing to teach the lizards any tricks, Susie asked me what I'd do with the remaining live mealworms, so I said "I'm going to bond with a shama, like in the Cinderella disney cartoon where they land on your fingers and sing songs to you, and make you clothes and stuff. And the making clothes thing is negotiable". "How will you do that?" she asked. "I dunno, just go out in the backyard and throw mealworms up and down until some shama happens by". I said.
And that's more or less how I met Birdlet, and the whole shama drama escapades began. Little did I know what I was getting us into...
By Sue:
I am amazed that wild birds will decide to take chances on bipeds to not harm them. I am equally impressed with the willingness of canines to put up with what must appear to them to be totally brain dead reactions by us humans who seem incapable most of the time of understanding the simplist of canine language. I am equally impressed at the audacity of Wally, the Gold Dust Gekko who lives in my office, who just now came out from behind the monitor to sip the last of my tea that had brown sugar in it. He likes sweets and has no compunctions about sneaking into my cups when I am not looking. Ha! Saw you this time Naughty Wally! Wally also has a disconcerting habit of staring at me in the face. Literally- he cranks his head up and looks at me. Then he expects me to go get him a mealworm while he waits impatiently. His ability to command me to do his bidding also amazes me. Apparently I amaze easily.
Earlier today I was sitting on our indoor stairway. Tawny had come in and I was feeling lazy so I sat down. This seemed weird to Tawny so he flitted about, very undecided about trusting the new me. He went back outside and sat on the banister. I called to him " Tawny! Come!" while proffering worms. well "Tawny" came- but wearing a border collie suit and silly doggy smile. Yup. Muppet came over, turned on his side and put his head in my lap. About this time, Tawny decided for no apparent reason, that if a canine approved of me, he did too! So he came in and landed on the cup I was holding. About 6 inches from an apex predator's mouth. Said predator didn't even bat an eyelash. No response at all to a tasty morsel within striking distance. In fact neither of our dogs shows any interest at all in the Shamas. They just ignore them even when one flies right in front of their face (a behavior I do not recommend but it has happened. Will write more another time about how we got Nani to accept a truce with birds).
Thus the contrast to what happened an hour later was very interesting. And has happened before. We went down to the enclosed lanai (the screen door is left open). As we entered (we being me and Mup) a flapping and a rapid rising of wings as a bird took off from inside Nani's crate to fly out the door. Muppet was in full chase from the moment he saw him. How did he know it was a dove and not a Shama? I asked him and he just looked at me like "Duh! Mom! I know what a Shama looks like! And that was no shama! Geesh!" He really does think I am clueless sometimes.
Someone came fluttering into the upstairs and immediately was frantically trying to escape. The Shamas are usually concerned but not panicked. Turns out it was a Red-Whiskered Bulbul. No idea what inspired. him to come in. But he was in full on- bash against the windows to get out mode. Took us working in tandem to help guide him to the way out. Doubt he will be back in anytime soon.
Here is a Generic Red Whiskered Bulbul
Was not able to get a shot of the hapless one who came in. We were too busy saving his panicked life. L0L! Aren't they beautiful? !
Photo credit David Irving, 2016, Taiwan Source: wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons
It is so delightful to have wild critters come in and make themselves at home. Not so delightful to forget about one of their propensities ... the one to eat, then get a look of concentration on their face.. then poop. I forgot about that as I was rushing down the stairs, sweeping my hand along the bannister.. yuck! Brown smear of Shama goo on my hand. Ugh. Needless to say Tawny was low down on my "A" list at that moment! He has an entire world of trees outside. Hey! (But as Don pointed out he was at least still ON the "A List". Guess I am willing to put up with the cons as well as the pros :).
Not a lot of Shama news from today but while Susie is showering I'm pulling a few frames from some video which recently got uploaded. The Fluffbutts are about 6 weeks old now, and the only one still hanging around here is Tawny, originally designated Fluffbutt2, as the smaller of two male chicks in the first fledging of 2020. (it seems as though the second fledging, the "Cuties", didn't succeed as we haven't seen any living chicks or the adult behavior that they might be out there. This may be a bit of a break for the fluffbutts in terms of not being chased away as robustly).
The fluffbutt eggs were laid in the nesting box I hung on the side of the house for a completely different bird species about 35 years ago, the third nesting there for Bird & Birdlet. They popped ut of it on March 13.
This is either Tawny or Hawky on fledging day, deep in back yard
The images taken at extreme superzoom are not exactly sharp - the camera used has a 60x zoom lens which isn't exactly easy to hand-hold and which I generally use to shoot video; these birds are much better documented on video but for bandwidth reasons blogger is friendlier to stills.
As Susie wrote, today I made her a fairly spectacular breakfast which she walked away from with the door open. I don't know why plates of human food look so interesting to shamas, but they do have a real propensity to go for them. When Cheepy was coming in multiple times per day to hang out and take snacks, we'd cover up our plates even leaving them for a few seconds. So is this how pandemics get started? Birds landing on breakfasts?
Sue feeds Fluffy and Tawny a month or so ago
Thing is, Tawny may well have been "doing stuff" with Sue's breakfast plate for some time before I noticed it, so she microwaved it to cook any bird poop which wasn't immediately visible... one hopes for long enough.
My husband made me a very very tasty breakfast. A delicious repast of scrambled eggs and onion mixture - with rice of course - being this is Hawaii and all.
I left it on the counter for just a moment but quickly returned when my husband noticed Tawny was sitting on my plate. What!!!!! I yelled at him from across the room. Undeterred he simply turned around and brushed that long almost adult-length tail across my eggs. Bad Birdie!!!
Does anyone know what horrible bird parasites and diseases I might get from eating those eggs? I choose to assume none but you may know differently. I dumped the part he had possibly pecked on and nuked the rest in the microwave. Then enjoyed them. But really, Tawny, really ?? !!
So the pros are being delighted to have a wild feathery visitor and the cons are the consternation of realizing I am too stupid to cover up my breakfast! I can't blame Tawny. It appears to be a genetic trait. I recall that one of his siblings from a prior clutch sat on one of DJ's painstakingly put together "rice wraps" that he too had haplessly left "for a moment". I forgot that after that we would cover our plates on the counter. But after Cheepie moved across the street to establish his own territory and was told categorically by his dad to never come back after the FluffButts were fledged, I got out of the habit. Thanks Tawny for that reminder. But seriously, couldn't you have just sat next to the plate instead of sitting on it while making that point?
Wednesday, May 6, 2020
It is very rewarding and disconcerting to be involved with wild Shamas. The males are one of the
most beautiful birds in bird-dom (per me). They really are. And their calls are so melodious. They all have their own personalities - a combination of uniqueness and biological drives. Shamas for all of their beauty and pretty calls are not, I repeat not, a social bird except when young. As they become preteens, then teens then subadults their social interactions more and more are about honing their skills to displace another Shama. With the Fluffbutts, this has been more in evidence than the prior clutches. Now that they are sub-adults they are in constant battles for supremacy. And those lovely melodies? In Shamaese they are clearly telling others of their kind "Get out of here or I will kill you" and "Hey! Those mealworms are MINE! " I will kill you over them. I mean it". And yet we adore them.
Woke up this AM to a very specific Shama call that I had only heard once before- in fact the day before. It was a single very, very loud call that reverberated in the house. 6:30 AM or so. Was it Bird (the father) again? Bird has sat in the kitchen and made this note. Sounded JUST like him. But N0! It was his son Tawny. He was sitting on bar that goes across the hallway by the bedroom. Oh My Shama! What was he doing there? As far as I knew he had never ventured that far in. It was not until Don came up and I excitedly showed him the chick that I discovered that Don had not opened the door yet. Tawny stayed in all night. Quietly. We didn't go to sleep until late last night. Very disconcerting that we had no idea he was in. It would be so easy to injure one of these little guys, though they are pretty good at evading any perceived harm.
Don wrote a really nice post about it below. I'm just doing this to get practise doing a blog. I need to discipline myself to do 5 minutes per day. I want to share with others about the magic of our little Shama family but at the same time not clog their email boxes so this will be our ode to the Shamas. I was on a call to a bank this AM and while on the phone mentioned waking up to Tawny and the bank guy looked up what a Shama looked like while we were on the phone. One of the perks of his working out of his home. HaHa!
Well, FurryGodmother hasn't been posting, so I'll throw one on here from time to time. This is DJ.
I didn't sleep well last night so was up by 4:45am while FGM was still fast asleep... but then about 530 there was a really loud mature shama call... REALLY loud... and I heard Susie talking with someone upstairs in the voice and demeanor she generally uses for the shamas.
Tawny the Fluffbutt
Yes, it turned out that Tawny the Fluffbutt had somehow gotten inside and managed to spend the
night inside with us without our noticing. Kinda surprising, since he's normally about clicking a lot and commenting on things, but he seemingly decided to keep his presence prudently on the downlow until morning, when he decided that he needed to declare himself, probably laying claim to the house much as Columbus did the New World.
So he flitter around awhile once the sun started coming up, perplexed as is often the case when they make it into our upstairs, which is mostly windows. He ultimately found the open door though, and didn't seem overly traumatized, in that he has been inside a bunch more today yelling at us for food.
Fluffbutt1, known as "Fluffy", gone for 10 days now
About 4 days ago we got what will probably be the last visit from his sister Hawky, who we hadn't seen in about 3-4 days and who showed up inside breathing heavily and looking a bit like she'd played a few games of badminton. Life is tough on these young birds, who have the instinct to go out and pick fights, and don't have the mass, experience, or skill to win them. Evolution is basically betting their lives that there has been a recent vacancy in a shama territory, even though that's hardly ever true. We made the offer for her to stay in and have mealworms rather than throwing herself out again, but she decided to take her chances... as they all do. Well, all but Cheepy, he kept coming back and hanging out inside until the fluffbutts were born and they all got crazier about chasing him away.
Bird, feeling surly
So now the only birds were' seeing are Bird, Birdlet, and Tawny. No sign that birdlet is sitting new eggs yet, but she may be if last year is any indication. Yesterday Bird decided to come into the kitchen and do his full-volume adult-male shama territory call, which sounded like he was on a public address system. Probably the loudest he's ever heard himself too, good acoustics. And he certainly did it because we weren't paying attention to him. He used to be freaked out about coming inside, and then after trying to kill Cheepy got trapped in the house and had to overnight, which he was not happy about. Spent the night sitting on the stainless steel whipped-cream maker on top of the hutch. I figured that after that close proximity he'd be weirded out by us after that, but if anything he decided we were even more harmless than he had previously believed.
