Kinglet Wars
by Lea Barnhart

After Christmas, in lowland California, bird behavior and plumage is focused on Spring mating endeavors. The second week of January I had a daily visit by a Ruby-crowned Kinglet. He tried mightily to drive an invading male from his proposed new territory in preparation for mating. The territory: our house; his competition: his own reflection in all first floor windows of our house. His method to drive out the invader was repeated flights into the window with a loud thump on impact, pull back to a near perch, momentarily compose, and fling himself into the glass again. The attacks on the windows lasted an hour. Then he disappeared for an hour only to renew his assault on a different window during the next hour.
In spite of my anguish at the continued thumping sound and wondering if the tiny critter would drop dead from the repeated impacts, I was drawn to the windows to see up close details of this 4¼ inch long bird. This is the payoff. In the wild the Kinglet is furtive and wiggly. He flits and jitters from perch to perch performing his officious Kinglet duties. Even binoculars rarely capture details other than the size, white wing bar, and pale lemony breast. My window views afforded me details that observation in the wild does not. His display of aggressiveness is a neon red crest that is hidden during routine daily activities. Not only did this competitive critter raise his crest but the red plumage was at a rarely seen 90º angle to his skull during much of the assault on the house.
WHY BIRD! Joseph Wood Krutch, Thoreau biographer, 20th century naturalist, and pantheist, wrote “We are likely to awake with an ‘Oh, dear!’ on our lips; [birds] with a “What fun!” in their beaks.” I had the privilege to make a visual acquaintance of this competitive zealout Kinglet and his raised red crest.
If your social conscience includes wildlife conservation, you can start in your own backyard. Backyard bird feeding takes little effort and brings the birds to you for observation and identification. The weekend of February 15-18 birdsource.org conducted a Great Backyard Bird Count. To help scientists determine if bird populations are declining or if wintering locations are shifting, a snapshot of bird numbers and species is collected on this data base at the same time each year. You can sit by your window or in a park for 15-60 minutes and record the species and numbers of birds you see on a pre-printed list on any or all of these four days then submit your data to www.birdsource.org.

~ Lea Barnhart is a weekend birder, a life-long student of Evolution and The Nature of Science, and a proponent of science education. She participates positive local action for wildlife and environmental conservation. She was born in the Bay Area, has lived in other states, and is glad to live locally with her husband, Read, and their three cats. You may reach her at wbarnhart@verizon.net.