For some reason I had Supertramp stuck in my head the other morning, specifically their 1979 hit “The Logical Song”:
I said, now, watch what you say
They’ll be calling you a radical
A liberal, oh, fanatical, criminal
A few hours later I saw that Rick Davies, one of the two founders of Supertramp, had just died at 81. I don’t think I knew that. I can’t remember reading it or hearing it anywhere, though maybe I heard something when my wife had NPR on and I wasn’t really listening. Or maybe it was just the lattice of coincidence of the cosmic unconsciousness – what fans of the 1984 movie “Repo Man” would call a plate-of-shrimp moment.
Similarly, I’m partway through a rather lengthy biography of the singer/songwriter Warren Zevon. After the Supertramp faded I had several days of Zevon’s classic “Desperados Under the Eaves” playing over and over in my head, which I preferred, particularly the point midway through the song where he sings:
I was sitting at the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel
I was listening to the air conditioner hum
It went hmm, hmm, hm-hm, hm-hm-hmm
It’s a sly joke that morphs into a slow-building, strangely moving, two-minute crescendo of choral humming, saloon piano, guitar riffs and violins.
Later that day I was up on the roof of The Studios of Key West and realized I was listening to actual actual air conditioners hum. They were far less melodic – more of a monotonous hmmmmmmm – but I decided to take it as another example of the lattice of coincidence of the cosmic unconsciousness.
Why was I on the roof? Because late that afternoon the folks up at the Florida Keys Hawkwatch had counted close to 3,000 common nighthawks passing over their site – so far – and I was hoping a few of those flocks might drift the 52 miles to Key West before crossing over to Cuba and parts south.
There were clumps of clouds dispersed around various horizons, but the sky above was pretty clear. And also pretty empty. The only real traffic, other than the occasional distant magnificent frigatebird, were the doves and pigeons. Primarily it was white-crowned pigeons, small sorties of three or four dark-shaped birds at a time, darting among mahogany trees and ficuses. But there were also a good number of white-winged doves, usually flying somewhere below, showing the big, sporty white stripes on their wings, reminiscent of tennis shoes or old-school race cars.
The thing I could hear above the air conditioners, though, was the referee whistle-like calls of gray kingbirds. (Note: I have a hard time describing the gray kingbird’s call as anything other than sounding like a referee whistle, but in the interest of trying to do better, I dug around a few websites dedicated to different types of whistles and their histories. And in a technical sense, a referee whistle is properly called a pea whistle, due to the little floating object in the hollow part of the whistle, which spins around when you blow on it, giving it that serrated/syllabic/staccato sound. Modern pea whistles have a little cork ball in them, and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out if the early pea whistles of the late 1800s had actual peas in them. But it turns out the early ones had dried seeds in them or small, carved chunks of wood. (Yes, I know a pea is a seed, though it wasn’t, apparently, one of the seeds they used.) But I’m just going to stick with referee whistle because, for one, the term pea whistle could be confusing on a phonetic level if you just heard it, and for two, everyone knows what a referee whistle sounds like.)
Whether you’ve noticed it or not, if you live in Key West or the Lower Keys you’ve been hearing gray kingbirds call since May. So hearing the calls didn’t surprise me greatly, other than the fact that it is getting late in the season, and the gray kingbirds should be migrating soon, and I’m not totally sure why they’ve been calling so much.
Gray kingbirds are primarily Caribbean species, with a range that stretches up to North Florida.
There were a bunch of them in the top of the ficus tree that looms over the Methodist Church, across from the Studios. Or at least I thought there were until I lifted my binoculars and realized they weren’t gray kingbirds but rather eastern kingbirds.
Eastern kingbirds are only in the Keys during migration. Often they migrate in flocks, outpacing the number of gray kingbirds we have. There was some debate about whether they are diurnal migrants or nocturnal migrants, but flocks are often seen migrating during the day, and because dead eastern kingbirds are rarely found dead at the base of tall radio towers on migratory pathways, is it is believed that, unlike most songbirds, they don’t migrate at night.
Gray kingbirds are also thought to be diurnal migrants.
Except for their white bellies, gray kingbirds are as their name describes. Eastern kingbirds, with a range that skips Arizona and California, but covers all the rest of the lower 48 states, as well as most of the Canadian provinces, are not. Plumage-wise, they look something like hipster gray kingbirds, all black or very dark gray, except for their white bellies, and white terminal band on their tail.
Compared to the gray kingbird, the eastern’s call sounds more like a hopped-up tweety bird than any kind of whistle.
Both species are in the tyrant kingbird family. The gray kingbird is Tyrannus dominicensis, a tyrant of the Dominican Republic, which is where the first described specimen of the species was taken. The eastern kingbird is Tyrannus tyrannus. The double nomenclature means they are extra tyrannical, but that they are the type species, the species that contains the archetypical characteristics of the genus.
The tyrant designation is warranted, though. Both gray kingbirds and eastern kingbirds are some of the most aggressive species out there, especially if you consider them on a pound-to aggression ratio. (Both species weigh about an ounce-and-a-half.) Their mating rituals generally start with the female showing up in the male’s territory, getting chased off, then returning repeatedly, until he generally accepts her presence. The pair then teams up to tag-team anything they consider a threat in their territory – other kingbirds, songbirds, hawks, owls, crows, eagles, squirrels, some bald men and low flying aircraft, among others. My old pointer was so traumatized by getting bit in the butt by one in Bayview Park that she shrank any time one called too close to her.
What was odd about all the kingbirds in the tree was that while it was primarily easterns, gray kingbirds occasionally came in and swapped perches with them. And nobody was showing the slightest bit of aggression toward anyone. Which means the aggression isn’t a permanent state, but probably driven by ramped-up hormones during the breeding season. And now that everyone had fledged their chicks, there was no reason to pick fights or protect territories. A brief bit of peace.
The desired flocks of common nighthawks never showed, but it was nice to spend time with the eastern kingbirds while they were in town.
