This week, as they have every fall since we moved here, the grackles have settled in around our house, flashing through the woods in loose black nets, like thieves of summer. Usually they arrive in company with other birds, sometimes as early as mid-August with migrating young robins, more often early in September with redwings, cowbirds and starlings, but in other years not till mid-month, coming in with the first flocks of white-crowned sparrows, or even later, showing up with the first juncos of October.
With whomever and whenever the grackles arrive, the difference is that they stay. After the robins, the other blackbirds and the sparrows have moved on, I open the door in the morning and find them there: large, black, iridescent birds with bright yellow eyes and long, curved bills, balanced by long, keel-shaped tails – feeding under the tupelo grove. As I step outside they fly up with a rustling flutter of wings, leisurely, with strong crow like beats, calling to one another with sharp chips and high rusty squee-ees as they disperse into the woods.
Grackles are not all that common as fall migrants over most of the Cape. Flocks of a hundred or more have been counted on the Outer Cape, and four hundred plus were once sighted in Bourne near the Canal, but nothing like the concentrations of a half-million or more that sometimes move in dark blanketing clouds, with the sound of a vast electrical storm, through the Connecticut River Valley.
Still, my house seems to be in the path of a minor but regular flyway, and in some years I have counted over two hundred birds moving through the woods. I suspect this is due in part to the sixty acres of nearly pure oak that surround our lot. Acorns form one of the major autumn food sources for the grackles, which crack the hard shells by direct pressure of their strong bills. It is probably the abundance of nuts in our woods at this time of year and the presence of a nearby swamp that make them pause here on their erratic but inexorable movement south.
At any rate, they have become a regular local sign of autumn and linger long enough for me to have gotten some sense of their habits and character. They come closest to the house in early morning when, wakening from sleep, I hear their noisy chatter in the oak branches, a sound like tons of scrap metal pouring down a metal chute. They are most active then, crashing through the trees and catbriar thickets, stabbing at bark insects, tearing off acorns and shadberries, ushering in the day with a sound of violence.
Later in the morning they tend to move around and feed under the tupelos in front of the house with the sparrows and the chipmunks. By midday they usually disappear, roosting quietly somewhere in the woods at a distance from us. One afternoon in early October I came upon a flock of sixty or seventy birds near the bog at the bottom of the wooded slope in back of the house. Most were invisible, down on the forest floor searching for insects in the wet leaves like a horde of towhees. Others perched in the shrubs and lower branches, pecking away at dead limbs. All around me I heard a general rustling sound as hundreds of dark feet shuffled through the fallen leaves and tapped on dead wood. Yet by late afternoon they were back in the tops of the oaks circling the house, calling loudly, energetically, aggressively to one another, plucking acorns off the branches, many of which dropped and bounced off the roof with loud thocks or hit the ground with heavy plops.
So they shuttle back and forth around our house over a period of two, three, or as many as five weeks, but always with a net drift south, carried along the crests of the oaks like black flotsam of the season.
I have been trying, while writing this, to think of a word that describes my feeling about these grackles. The closest I can come seems to be ‘alien,’ though I don’t know why this should be. Grackles are as native as chickadees and hardly to be equated with such foreign interlopers as starlings and weaver finches. Perhaps it is because, like herring gulls, they are native birds unnaturally prevalent. Originally marsh birds of forested regions, their range and numbers expanded enormously as they took advantage of the grain fields provided by early settlers.
Today grackles still have bad press among fanners, but the damage they do in their fields is probably more than balanced by their role in controlling such crop pests as cornborers and cutworms. Even around suburban lawns and gardens they perform beneficial services, eating much weed seed and Japanese beetles, and feeding prodigious numbers of insect grubs to their insatiable young.
Grackles are also one of the few native birds that have been able to hold their own against the encroaching competition from starlings and English sparrows, though this is no great improvement in many people’s eyes. Still, they have never taken any of my corn, nor do they seem to frighten other birds away from the house.
I have to confess, however, to a persistent feeling of, if not enmity, at least apprehension regarding them. I cannot really account for it rationally, or even aesthetically. The grackle is an intelligent, adaptable bird, strong of wing, glistening in his nuptial iridescent plumage, possessing a certain beauty of movement like a ship in flight. He has none of the ragtag malignancy of the starling about him. His stare is cold, yes, but it is a coldness of reserve and nobility rather than evil.
Their calls and thrashings disturb my dreams at dawn, but that is not enough to account for the curious and unexpected sense of dread I sometimes get when I open the door and come upon them, bent over and feeding in the yard. To be sure, they take off at my approach, but there is (or seems to be) a split second of hesitation before they do, as though they had to remind themselves to be afraid of me.
As far as I know, grackles carry no folk connotations of doom with them, though blackbirds in general, and ravens in particular, have figured as symbols of death in western literature for centuries. Their sudden expansion of range and numbers with the coming of agriculture can give one pause, though, as yet another indication that other species are not mere fixed, passive entities, waiting to be destroyed or preserved by man, but are, like us, vessels of combustible genetic energy, waiting only for some environmental change to be released and fly off in bold new directions.
However true this may be, it still does not account for my own reaction to these birds. I am not a superstitious person by nature. The sudden, epiphanic appearances of snakes, hawks or deathwatch beetles may alter my moods, but not my expectations about life.
The arrival of the grackles, on the other hand, can throw an inexplicable pall over what is otherwise an exhilarating, up-beat season. One year, during the week they arrived, a boat that I was watching for a neighbor was stolen from its mooring in the Bay, a good friend was rushed to the hospital with a heart attack, and on the Mid-Cape Highway I hit a deer, breaking its back.
Last year on Labor Day, my son, out riding his bike, fell and broke his collarbone, sending us all to the emergency room for most of the day. The following day, Tuesday, the car would not start, for reasons unfathomable even to the mechanic who came out to look at it. On Wednesday the cat disappeared and the resin I had spread on our new deck refused to dry. On Thursday the pump broke. That afternoon my wife and I quarreled violently, for no good reason. And on Friday, as the Red Sox were giving up first place for good by dropping their fourth straight to New York, I cut my knuckle on the table saw, taking seven stitches. My fortunes seemed, like those of the Sox, subject to sudden, unpredictable fluctuations and wholesale slumps. And then, on Saturday morning, I was wakened out of a troubled sleep by the sound of grackles thrashing through the oaks, dark images blurred and distorted through streaks of rain that ran like tears on the window glass.
The following week the cat came back, the car started, we bought a new pump, and shoulder, knuckle and all other wounds eventually healed. Boston even managed a moment of near glory in Fenway Park at the end of the month. But what had been only a vague feeling of apprehension had crystallized into something definite and permanent, if not wholly justifiable. As I say, I am not superstitious. I infer no design, suggest no malice, draw no conclusions. I merely state the juxtapositions and assert that certain things gain meanings merely by association that are as strong as any produced by logical cause and effect.
This week there is an autumn chill in the air. The blue-berries are gone as though they never were, and in the woods mushrooms have replaced the ladyslippers of May. A few bruised, purple beach plums still dangle on their stems, blue asters bloom coolly by the roadsides, and the light is once again noticeably slanted. At work my typewriter refuses to advance its ribbon and, as I drive home, the muffler goes. On the radio men seem more intent than ever on destroying what is beautiful and valuable. Violence is up in Boston. There is a chance of frost predicted for Vermont tonight.
At five o’clock I pull into the drive. The grackles are there. I hear them high in the trees. I am not surprised. I start up the path to the house – not quite running, but holding a book over my head as a shield against the bombardment of acorns that drop from their beaks.