AUTUMNAL RECRUDESCENCE OF THE AMATORY URGE 

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

As I sat in the car, the ruffed grouse barely showed up against the backdrop of dead leaves and woody plants. Cautiously, I got out of my car and walked towards it to have a better look. It showed no sign of taking flight, and even took a few steps toward me,  so I decided to return to the car and retrieve my camera. The grouse was still there, and taking a renewed interest in what I was doing. As I focussed the camera, the bird continued to walk toward me, and right out into the parking lot. Furiously correcting my camera adjustments, I found myself actually walking backwards to keep the advancing bird in focus! With the digital camera set at continuous shooting, I manage to fire off about 20 shots, confident that at least one would be a keeper, before the bird finally came to its senses and flew off.       
 
I am sure we have all experienced ruffed grouse and other birds acting “dopey” at this time of the year.  These birds have become turned on by lower fall temperatures and dwindling light conditions, not unlike what they would experience in the spring, at mating time. Just up the road from where we live, young white-throated sparrows are making valiant attempts at delivering a spring song. A little rough and tattered along the edges, but certainly recognizable as a white-throated sparrow.
 
These birds are responding to what birders and biologists refer to as “autumnal recrudescence,” a sort of partial postseason reactivation of breeding behaviour. And these incongruous interactions will show up among many species. Barn swallows building nests that never get occupied, some species in full spring song trying to lure in mates that don’t appear to be interested, and mating rituals that are nothing more than a stage show. For others, the act either backfires, or was intentional all along. We have all seen mourning doves nest well into September, much later than what birds should be nesting.
 
It’s just not birds, either. One spring peeper is in fine fettle at our home or, should I say, in our home! It showed up in our house a week ago, right after we had potted some outdoor plants and brought them inside. The tiny thumbnail sized frog must have been either in the soil or on the plant itself, and decided to stay put. Anyway, it breaks into song almost every night, chirping away joyously as he would in May. Even outside, as long as the weather stays half decent, these little critters will continue holding dialogue with each other until cooler weather scurries them into hibernation.
 
This late secretion of chemical messengers that occasionally reassert their influence in the fall makes for some very interesting observations at this time of the year. We know that spring birds don’t just sing for happy, but belt out their songs as a way to attract a mate and to establish territorial boundaries. So, it comes as no surprise to learn that bird song is generally at a low ebb in the fall as birds have no need to establish territories or attract mates, and the best they can offer is a variety of confusing call notes as they forage for food. Some juveniles of the year may gurgle out a few rusty test songs, but by and large, all is quiet on the home front, as migration is uppermost in their minds right now. What a surprise to be walking along a local trail several days ago and hear a vesper sparrow belting out a cacophony of pure, flawless songs from a rural fence bottom. Just for a moment, I was back home on the farm in the 1960s when vesper sparrows perched atop bales of hay, and sang every evening in late June.
 
It is not uncommon to see juvenile woodpeckers displaying autumn recrudescence in their own specialized way. While we can attribute some of this exuberance perhaps to an instinct to excavate a cavity in which to spend the winter, mostly it is nothing more than kids being kids and getting into mischief. A juvenile pileated woodpecker a few years back, worked away at the steeple of the County Museum in Picton, until it had made a nice three-inch hole in the structure. It then left the scene of the crime, likely finding that the cavity within was far too cavernous to consider, or perhaps it worked away at the structure for no other reason, except that “it was there.” Whatever the reason, it left a hole in the roof of this former church.
 
We can make educated guesses as to why birds do some of the things they do. But who really knows for sure what goes through their little pea brains when birds follow you around in a parking lot, cooing softly, when instinct should dictate to avoid human contact?
 
“When amatory poets sing their loves, in liquid lines mellifluously bland, and pair their rhymes as Venus yokes her doves.”  Lord Byron, British poet