Birdless in Huntington Beach

Moving to Huntington Beach from Torrance some 20 years ago required some adjustments.  My yard in Torrance was filled with roses, camellias, and gardenias.  We had a vegetable garden that grew luscious tomatoes and crisp peppers. In other words, we had great soil. This house sits on soil contaminated by oil.  It's hard dense clay and no matter how many times you amend it that wet clay seeps up and takes over. So when we moved here our gardening days ended.

However, we were rewarded by a backyard full of songbirds. The carrotwood trees we planted along with the ficus tree provided food and shelter for an abundance of birds. Redwing blackbirds and tricolor blackbirds were regular visitors to both the trees and our bird feeder. We also had the requisite sparrows building nests under the eaves of our patio. Once or twice we had a large gorgeous yellow headed blackbird on the back wall. Small hawks came to hunt sparrows who hid out in the ficus tree until the hawks got bored. Cormorants occasionally roosted, wings spread, in the trees as well.

After a few years all of the blackbirds were driven out by European starlings an aggressive non-native bird from...you guessed it Europe! The reedy banks of the lake in Central Park a block away which were home to the blackbirds were also taken over by the starlings. The starlings did come every year to eat the red seeds of the carrotwood trees which pop out of hard shells in the spring. They did such a good job that we never had seeds on the ground only the hard shells.

This year, for the first time in 20 years, we have no birds at all in our trees. The carrotwood trees dropped their seeds and shells in abundance only to be swept up and put in the trash. A trip to the park reveals a modest population of great-tailed grackles, a new addition to our area, but no starlings or blackbirds. There are mallards, Canada geese, and cormorants living there. Occasionally a mallard couple will try to take over our pool or a hummingbird will zip by but that's it for backyard birds.

I haven't consulted the Audubon Society to discover the reasons for changing bird populations but I can't help but think that the absence of native birds in my own backyard is a subtle but notable sign of environmental damage. It feels empty and silent in my yard now even with the cars passing by behind the wall. The birds connected me to the natural world while living in world of concrete and slump stone.

Life's just not the same without birds in the yard.