Our house is under surveillance. A goldfinch has taken up ownership of the backyard because he loves to eat the strange looking pincushion daisies my husband mows around for him. I’ve been watching the whole thing for a few weeks now, and what I can say is that this is a very smart little bird. He has each one of us here sized up, and he knows who is trouble and who he can safely ignore. He has also developed tactics for dealing with a pincushion daisy that are almost military in scope and planning.
When our older dog comes outside in the morning, the bird pays him no mind. He’ll keep at work on his flowers, only flying a few feet away if the old dog comes especially close, coming right back the moment his back is turned. My husband and I are allowed to stay on the porch. One step off, and he leaves. My heeler pup, however, is rightly considered a true menace. He only has to stick his head out the door, and the goldfinch is gone. He knows trouble when he sees it.
Like an Italian male in a bespoke suit, the goldfinch is one of the most tastefully dressed creatures on the planet. The little gold and black coat is very svelte–there’s even a touch of the hipster there in how ostentatious it all is, and his personality seems to go with his taste in clothes. He’s quick and bright, delicate and a bit finicky. This bird makes plans. It studies its enemies. It carries out ideas.
You can see how smart they are if you watch. When this bird encounters a top-heavy pincushion daisy (they have these round balls for flowers that grow on long stalks, so it can be hard for a bird to land on one without tipping it over) he has a way of scooting carefully up the stem, so he can pin the flower down on the ground and have his way with it. A sparrow that was nearby, who looks very clumsy and scruffy next to a goldfinch, tried to emulate this trick, but it was a complete failure. The sparrow was too heavy and did not understand how slowly one must inch up the flower stem to successfully accomplish the task. After a few failed tries, it gave up and had to settle for picking up scraps of the plant off the ground.
I guess starting to watch birds is sometimes part of getting old. Everything slows down a bit. You begin to notice things you’ve seen every day but never really stopped to examine. I know a lady who takes her vacations just to go where certain birds live and try to see one. I never understood that, never had much interest in doing it before this year, but watching the goldfinch and his work on the daisies is currently one of my favorite things to do. There’s no reason to travel thousands of miles to see beautiful birds when we have a huge migratory highway running right through our own yards. It’s one of the great things about living out here, that you can have such strange native plants as this pincushion daisy, and that you can watch the amazing tactics for eating their seeds that might have taken centuries to develop, and it’s all happening right in your own backyard.
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Diane Adams is a local journalist whose columns appear Thursdays on BrownwoodNews.com
