LITTLE ROCK — Zoe Caywood spends plenty of time outdoors, and so she’s not surprised to see cardinals strutting about and squabbling.
But until she sold War Eagle Mill and retired, she hadn’t enjoyed the leisure required to truly appreciate the dedication with which one male cardinal can fling himself at a window.
She knew enough about bird mating habits to expect such behavior in spring, when hormones drive males to claim and defend breeding territory. Youtube.com is a-flutter with home videos in which cardinals can be seen attacking their own reflections in bedroom windows across the country.
But the birds aren’t breeding in November.
After a week in which one cardinal continually flung himself at the six picture windows that line her deck, from sunup to sunset, Caywood posted a plea for advice on the University of Arkansas’ Birds of Arkansas discussion list ARBIRD-L.
“I got several solutions on how to cure it but, actually, none of them work,” Caywood tells ActiveStyle.
Ideas she tried:
Shining a bright light inside the house so its brilliance would prevent him from seeing any reflection.
“Of course there are six windows along that deck, and he’s hitting all of them;
it’s just that he likes one a whole lot better than the others. So I had that light shining right on that one window, and it stopped him for about two hours. It really did kind of calm him down,” she says.
“But then at the end of two hours, back he came again.”
Hanging nylon netting over the outside of the windows.
“It flops and moves, and it just doesn’t even bother him.
Wherever there’s a loop in that netting, he hits the window anyway.”
Sticking adhesive Post-It notes and strips of ribbon all over the windows.
Failure.
Meanwhile, birds have dirty feet.
“The thing is, I had just cleaned those windows,” she says. “And now they’re splattered, all the way across, they’re just splattered.
“I really do feel sorry for him, just banging and banging it.
“I have had cardinals where they’d hit a window for a little period of time. And I’ve also had them one year where they would hit the side mirror on my car. ... He would fly up and look at that side-view mirror and crash and crash and crash.”
The car problem was solved by putting bags over those mirrors. Not this fall thing, though. “What’s curious is how long it’s going to go on,” she says. “It will be about 10 days of this, poor little thing.”
Finally, a friend who loves birds told her to look up “recrudescence.”
“You have to look that word up,” she says, laughing.
Nature writer Stan Tekiela explains the concept on his website Nature Smart Wildlife (naturesmart.com). He explains that in spring, the amount of light birds receive through their skulls and bodies (the daily “photoperiod”) triggers “a gland in the critters’ brain called the hypothalamus which is connected by a thin stalk to the pituitary gland. The pituitary gland sends out gonadotropic hormone into the body, which acts upon the testes of males and the ovaries of the females, putting the bird or amphibian into breeding condition.
“It’s like turning on a breeding switch.”
As photoperiod increases with summer, testes and ovaries shrink and the birds calm down.
“However, in late summer the photoperiod or the amount of available daylight matches the photoperiod of the spring breeding season and the critters’ hypothalamus picks up on this signal and is temporarily tricked into thinking it’s spring. This is where gonadal recrudescence occurs. Recrudescence means to break out anew after a dormant period, and that is what happens.”
Birds and also frogs are tricked into springtime agonies, but only briefly; the photoperiod soon shortens, freeing them to look for food and huddle against the wind.
Even when they aren’t inspired by hormones, cardinals are fractious birds, Caywood thinks.
“It just seems like they’re hypertensive and they fight all the time. It’s the two males fighting or the male is fighting the female or two females fighting, and it seems to be all year-round. They’re aggressive like that. They’re pent up. They’re high-stress.”
ActiveStyle, Pages 30 on 11/26/2012