Signs of spring are hard to hide in the wild

VIC LEIPZIG AND LOU MURRAY

Officially, spring won’t be here for another month, but the birds and

bees have a jump on the calendar.

All over town, critters are courting. If you’re at all attuned to

nature, you’ll see it. Just take a walk through Central Park or the

Bolsa Chica wetlands and look for the unmistakable signs of amorous

adventure.

Since early January, red-shouldered hawks have been chasing each

other through the sky in courtship flights. These noisy hawks of the

forest call like crying babies all day long as they chase each other

through the trees and sky. Several of these beautiful hawks live in

Central Park, with at least one pair nesting at Shipley Nature

Center.

Last year, the pair at Shipley raised a brood of young hawks.

Unfortunately, the female was killed by a car as she flew across

Goldenwest Street last spring. The fate of her newly fledged young

hung in the balance. Young hawks learn to hunt from their parents,

and without the female to teach them how to hunt, their survival was

none too certain. Unfortunately, one of the young hawks suffered the

same fate as the mother a week after her death in another terribly

unbalanced collision of bird with car.

The remaining young hawks hung out in the trees at Shipley,

calling their plaintive cries, waiting for an adult to come feed

them. They waited for a meal that never arrived. Eventually, they

learned to hunt on their own and their cries of hunger ceased. With

plenty of ground squirrels, lizards, snakes, bunnies, and small

birds, the Shipley Nature Center provided the hawks with a nicely

balanced diet.

With the coming of yet another spring, a new pair of

red-shouldered hawks has pair-bonded, courted and mated at Shipley

Nature Center. After weeks of courtship, the actual mating is a brief

coupling that lasts only a second or two with the male balancing on

the back of the female as she remains perched on a tree. If you

blink, you miss it.

Humans aren’t the only observers of this springtime ritual. Crows

are very attuned to the courtship behaviors of other birds. As soon

as the hawks mated, the crows stalked them, waiting for eggs to

steal.

The crows do the same thing at the Bolsa Chica, where great blue

herons are beginning to show an interest in their nesting sites. A

few weeks ago, we counted five pairs of great blue herons, all

looking for good nesting sites in the eucalyptus trees on the bluff.

As soon as the herons begin nest-building in earnest, the crows will

begin looking for an easy meal of eggs or young chicks. The crows

stalk ducks and many other courting birds. They’ve even been observed

hunting cooperatively at the Bolsa Chica, walking across the oil

fields in an evenly spaced formation, gobbling up every killdeer and

snowy plover egg and chick that they encounter. It’s a minor miracle

that any birds are able to rear their young, given the explosion in

the crow population in recent years.

The coyotes also are responding to the change in season. The red

female coyote that dens at Shipley Nature Center raised three pups

last spring. Her boyfriend lives on the Bolsa Chica mesa along with

several buddies, but he’s been in Central Park recently, probably

lured by the approach of mating season. He’s a smart animal. He

crosses Goldenwest Street with more craft than the average 5-year-old

human. He looks for traffic coming from one direction and waits until

it’s clear. Then he saunters to the median. Once there, he sits down

and looks in the other direction, waiting for a break in traffic from

that direction before proceeding. He’s been hanging out at Shipley

Nature Center the past few weeks. A new den of pups should be born in

April, right about the time that the ground squirrels and bunnies are

having their babies.

For a short time in the late spring, Shipley Nature Center is

alive with what appears to be way too many hopping, running, furry

little things, all intent upon devouring every plant in sight. Just

when it seems that there will be no vegetation left, nature balances

itself. The coyotes hunt down the surplus bunnies, squirrels and

mice. We can tell from the bones left behind at Shipley Nature Center

that the coyotes are eating ducks and geese as well. The food chain

in town is intact and functional. Insects eat plants. Birds and

lizards eat insects. Snakes eat mice. Hawks eat snakes and lizards.

The great horned owls nesting at the library eat anything running

around at night. The barn owls in town seem especially fond of rats.

The raccoons, opossums and skunks find plenty to eat as well.

Somehow it all works out and life goes on, spring after spring

after spring. The remarkable thing is that all this is happening in

the midst of an urban environment. Because people in town have saved

some sizable chunks of native habitat from development and have

retained at least some wildlife corridors to connect the fragmented

habitats, all this wildlife can survive in a city of 200,000 people

that is in turn surrounded by 13 million other people in neighboring

communities. Amazing.

* VIC LEIPZIG and LOU MURRAY are Huntington Beach residents and

environmentalists. They can be reached at vicleipzig@aol.com.