This post needs a photo. My old faithful cell phone will still snap blurry, barely recognizable photos but won't upload them. I'll just have to describe what I saw in words.
Killdeer. Everyone in Virginia knows what killdeer look like. For the rest of the world, they're a sort of inland plover whose calls supposedly sounded to hungry hunters like "Kill deer! Deer here!" Since they forage in grassy meadows in between the deep forests, their calls often did lead the hunters to accessible deer and water. The birds are about the size of long-legged pigeons. They look like this.
(Fair use, but Google traces this picture to Unsplash.)
So they are very cute. Usually they don't spend much time in Gate City because we don't have a lot of grassy meadows. We have mown lawns and gardens, and we have uncultivated land that quickly shoots up into woods, and not much of the in-between land killdeer like. This is a very good way to maintain land if you want not to have to worry about ground-nesting birds.
But one year I saw a couple of killdeer nesting on the Presbyterian church lawn, and one year they at least tried to nest in front of the Duffield market, and this year it seems they succeeded in nesting on the vacant lot where Daugherty's Chevrolet lot used to be.
What could be more adorable than an adult killdeer? A baby killdeer, of course. The fluffy little chicks start scampering about on their own stiltlike legs while they're about the size of baby chickens, before real grown-up feathers grow in.
Early this morning someone posted a photo of a downy baby killdeer at someone else's blog, and then I went into town and saw two of them scampering after their parents in the bank's drive-through lane.
Two? No, three. One was with its mother, a yard or so further from pavement than the father and the two bolder babies.
And what was calling my attention to the baby killdeer was the little daddybird, hunching his neck and trailing his wings in a chickenlike threat display, squawking "Peep-peep-peep-peep-peep-peep!" He could almost have been a half-grown bantam rooster. He clearly meant something like "Leave my babies alone or I'll...I'll...I'll reach across your foot and bite your leg and thus assume the position for you to kick me into the creek, I will! Nobody's going to mess with MY babies!"
Then, seeing that I'd spotted him as the source of the angry peeping, he hastily changed tactics, jumped back, skittered back toward Mama Killdeer, and began limping and trailing a wing, nonverbally saying, "Oh, I'm hurt! I'm helpless! Kill me and be done with it but leave my family alone!"
Plovers are hysterical drama queens and also terrible, obvious liars, but you have to love their courage. They keep taking the chance that they'll always be able to fly away before a predator gets close enough to eat them. They are not always able to escape from a determined predator.
It would have served the little fellow's purposes so much better to have been quiet and let me walk past, not seeing him, as most humans would. (Killdeer's peculiar markings help them recognize each other but also help them fade into the background of a meadow.) Who said he had any sense? He's a bird. He has only a bird brain. But he does have a kind of desperate, quixotic fortitude. If I'd been a predator, he was fully prepared to give his life for his family.
In another week his babies should be able to fly, and the family will probably move on. Meanwhile, all cats likely to prowl around the corner of Kane and Water Streets should spend a few days indoors. Male cats normally prowl about a mile in any direction from their home base. Females normally prowl for a quarter-mile or less, but if they're extra-large and/or have hungry kittens to feed, who knows what they can do.
Cats, as a species, need to be at the top of the food chain in neighborhoods where humans live. They need to be outdoors, and we need to have them outdoors. This does not mean that every old purr-by-the-fire cat wants or needs to be outdoors. Older cats who spend most of their time dozing aren't making much contribution to the ecology any more, and often prefer to be indoors. Cats who are ill or injured need to be indoors. Cats with FIV are more likely to live longer if you can persuade them to be content with indoor territory. But we need cats to keep nuisance species populations down, and we don't need to let other predators that are larger and less human-friendly move into the ecological niche cats occupy in Europe and North America.
(In Australia, of course, the ecology is different. In Australia the idea that all cats should spend their whole lives indoors actually makes sense. In the United States it's a stupid idea.)
But the ecology can stand for cats to be indoors when baby plovers are scampering about.
Google traces this picture of a baby killdeer to the AllAboutBirds site maintained by Cornell University, which used to be a respectable school.
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