The Birds & Bees

I’ve had an unusual year of birds and bees this year and I’m not 100% sure what to make of it. I’m not speaking figuratively about reproduction or any such thing, but rather the members of the animal kingdom we cal birds and bees. Birds and bees occupy very different positions in the taxonomic hierarchy of the animal kingdom. Birds are of the Class Aves and bees are of the Order Hymenoptera. In the taxonomic hierarchy, Class and Order represent different levels of classification, with Class being broader than Order. A Class is a higher taxonomic rank that groups together organisms with fundamental structural similarities.-Class Aves includes all birds – they all have feathers, beaks, and lay eggs. Class Insecta includes all insects – they all have six legs, three body segments, and exoskeletons. Order Hymenoptera is a subdivision within the Class Insecta that groups organisms with more specific shared characteristics like bees, ants, and wasps. Not that I’ve ever aspired to be a botanist or anything, I think its useful for general knowledge purposes to remind oneself that the complete hierarchy in the animal kingdom (or for that matter the plants and fungi kingdoms…not to mention the random stuff like bacteria that has to get classified somewhere) from broadest to most specific goes Kingdom → Phylum → Class → Order → Family → Genus → Species. Before you get to thinking that bees don’t rate very high, let’s remember where man sits on this spectrum. The complete taxonomic classification for humans is Kingdom: Animalia, Phylum: Chordata (vertebrates with spinal cords), Class: Mammalia, Order: Primates, Family: Hominidae (great apes including humans, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans), Genus: Homo (humans and extinct human relatives like Neanderthals and Homo Erectus), Species: sapiens (modern humans who are supposedly “wise” and “knowing”). With that sort of pedigree, we should all try to remind ourselves where things like birds and bees stack up.

Birds are vertebrates and represent one of the major classes within the phylum Chordata, alongside mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and fish. Out here on this hilltop, the only one of those I don’t really have going on around me are fish. On any given day we see and interact with mammals, mostly in the form of coyotes, rabbits and ground squirrels, with the occasional bobcat (I am excluding pets like Buddy for this discussion). None of that is too unusual even by New York standards. I see that there are a few coyotes in Central Park that people are tracking, so while we may see more coyotes out here, they don’t rise to any level of strangeness. Bobcats are a bit out there, but we haven’t spotted on around here for a few years and we would have to go up to someplace like Mt. Palomar to chance seeing anything bigger like a mountain lion. We have way fewer deer than in the east and rarely see them and things like bears are only in far more remote areas. Our reptiles consist of snakes and lizards, both of which we have plenty, but I would say we have more lizards this year than snakes since we haven’t had but one rattle snake sighting this year. Amphibians are much more rate and for one reason or another the peeping frog population that has previously inhabited the area around our spa has either finally drunk too much chlorine or found more conducive wetlands elsewhere. This year has been somewhere in the middle in terms of heat and dryness, so the lack of extremes has probably affected all of these critters.

In terms of the birds, I want to form my own categorization which would be from biggest to smallest, the soaring kind (hawks, owls, turkey vultures and crows), the running kind (quail and roadrunners), the regular kind (including doves) that occasionally bang their heads on the picture windows and regularly frequent the basalt fountain in the garden, and last, but not least, the hummingbirds. I’ve recently written about the turkey vultures that are a prominent feature at our hanggliding friend’s house, but only occasionally swoop by our property…probably less so now since Gordon feeds them a regular ground squirrel diet. The owl situation comes and goes. We have a barn owl house over our garage that seems to be inhabited and occasionally a screech owl that comes by to sit on our roof over our master bathroom. Owls are territorial, so the barn and screech are not really compatible. The hawks are my favorites, right up until one gets too close for comfort. These red-tailed hawks are often around and range from small to very large. We joke that we have to be careful about Buddy with the hawks, but I’ve come to believe that its no joking matter. The other day I saw a big one sitting on the agave seed stalk just beyond our deck and I suspect that perch had something to do with our little 7-pound morsel of a toy poodle. Then, yesterday, our neighbor filmed a large hawk on the front road chowing down on a recently snatched bunny rabbit. There was no fear of humans or coyotes evident in the hawk’s dining manner. And then there are the hummingbirds, which are all over the place on this hilltop. Kim used to feed them, but they are insatiable and they do not lack for natural feeding spots on the hilltop. Their current favorite is the agave seed stalk, which they can be seen competing with the local bees over.

Speaking of bees, let’s get back to the Order Hymenoptera, Phylum:Arthropoda, Class: Insecta critters. Despite not being as high on the taxonomic scale as the birds, bees are highly successful evolutionarily. As we all know, bees are incredibly important ecologically as pollinators and display remarkable social organization and communication. Earlier this year during a family gathering (I think it was for Easter), a relative who was taking his kid down to the play area took a video of the area directly behind our mailbox, where there are several varieties of cactus and a few flowering shrubs. The video showed a massive swarming of bees in that area. Bees swarm in spring as part of their natural reproductive cycle and colony expansion process. Swarming is how honeybee colonies reproduce. When a colony becomes large and healthy, it splits to create new colonies – similar to how other organisms reproduce to continue their species. Winter survivors emerge and the colony rapidly expands as the queen increases egg-laying. It seems that the spring flowers provide plentiful nectar and pollen, giving bees energy and confidence to establish new colonies in the favorable spring weather. The process is that about half the colony (10,000-30,000 bees) leaves with the old queen and swarm in clusters temporarily while scout bees search for a new home. They must not have liked the mailbox because I heard them a few days later in the big ficus trees on the northern boundary of the property. This was somewhat alarming to hear and observe, but swarming bees are typically docile since they have no hive to defend and are focused on finding new shelter. I’m not sure where they ended up, but I can report that they are still busy all over the property on the agave seed stalks, the lavender, the rosemary and generally on whatever plants are blooming, which is a regular and ongoing occurrence on this hilltop with its prolific flora and fauna.