Scritch, scritch

I had big plans this week: a nature documentary in the BBC tradition, albeit a tad more rudimentary. You know the sort of thing: imagine that mellifluous, refined, British male voice that is never in any hurry at all, no siree.

Ah, the Abert’s towhee: Perhaps not as obviously impressive
to the casual observer as the American Bald Eagle, but the modest towhee has some surprising skills under the hood.

And here we’d have a bald eagle photo that I got the same day, because re-purposing photography and working it into the storyline is key to documentary affordability.

But people make plans and technology laughs. As my previously trusty and currently up-to-date video software crashed, crashed again, crashed again again again again arggh, I decided to simplify.

Even this nine-second bit of cropped video required a ridiculous process by which every change was manually saved immediately so that the crashes didn’t set me back too far. So take a look, and we can talk (as the talking heads say to their guests these days) on the other side.

Why, you enquire politely, are we looking at a video of a small, dull bird scratching in the same-coloured gravel? Blame or thank a faithful reader who commented a few weeks ago about the difference between avian talons for capturing, holding, and then ripping prey animals limb from limb (or equivalent), and avian claws for scratching in the dirt or gravel or underbrush.

As a result, that talon/claw distinction was relatively recent in my mind as we ambled out of the Riparian Preserve at Water Ranch last week. And so my attention was caught momentarily by an Abert’s towhee doing precisely that second thing: scratching in the dirt/gravel. In fact, there were a few of them, but they kept their distance from each other, maybe because of the dust they were kicking up. Anyway, I got video of one hopping around and that was that. As you already know, my attention went to the gracious egrets and the chance-caught grackle. and who can blame me?

A few days later I looked at the video clips and was surprised to see what the towhee was doing. Not standing on one foot and kicking up the dust and dirt with the other like a five-year-old thinking about how to talk their way out of trouble; not pawing at the ground, like a bull thinking about launching into trouble. No, it was jumping forward and backwards, fast, with both feet together. Scritch, scritch. Scritch, scritch.

Now, my eyes are excellent unaided for close-up work and OK even without glasses around the house, but they show their limits–even with corrective lenses–in the great outdoors. Maybe it was the distance from me; maybe it was the size of this bird; maybe it was the speed of its footwork. In any event, until I looked at the video I had no clear picture of how it was actually moving its feet.

I’m at the stage where I pay attention to the complex manoeuvre of slipping my slippers on, one at a time, without anything to hold onto, but I can actually move my feet roughly the same way as this towhee. I know because I tried. I can execute a small jump forward and a small jump backwards without going over backwards. I can even do it a few times before I have to sit down. I can’t imagine doing it for hours every day in order to get enough to eat.  I would not want to go toe-to-claw with a towhee in an extended scritching competition. Your results may vary.

So, yes, the bald eagle is a fiercely impressive bird. Abert’s towhee just isn’t quite so fierce.

And another thing. One video clip just happened to freeze the towhee in a horizontal posture about a quarter-inch off the ground – a posture I hadn’t noticed in the wild (see comments above on the limitations of of my eyesight) and that makes my hip flexors hurt, just looking at it. Was buddy listening for lunch? I think so. Unlike the scritching, I can’t replicate this manoeuvre at all. I didn’t even try.