By Tim Homan
On a warm and partly cloudy morning late in February, 2002, I heard the loud, whickering call of a Pileated Woodpecker in front of our Georgia Piedmont home. I glanced out the upstairs window; a male pileated — red cap sweeping from near beak base to the back of his crested head, crimson mustache bleeding back from his wood-boring bill — had landed on the trunk of a loblolly pine, recently dead and now uncomfortably close to our porch. A few moments after I got a good look at him he took off, his slow-flapping, roller-coastering flight trailing his shadow east to west. The crow-sized bird flew away from the
window's edge of my vision, but his downhill trajectory made me think he was heading for a landing on the oak-grown slope behind our rural home. Curiosity aroused, I walked downstairs to the back window, where I scanned the winter woods.
No pileated, no scarlet cap, no sudden hitches mechanically quick and comical as the woodpecker worked its way up a tree. I spotted something else though, something out of the ordinary, that didn't fit the usual form and texture of the forest. Thirty yards out, in a three-pronged crotch of a white oak, I saw a clump smoother, smaller, grayer, and more uniform than the squirrel's nest that should have been there.
Back at the window with binoculars, I twisted the rounded anomaly — a sleeping raccoon snugly curled head to hindquarters, ringed tail over masked face — into clear focus. Over the next three weeks I spotted the same coon (presumably it was the same one) four more times, each occasion in the same white oak, and in the same upside-down-tripod loft 40 feet above the slope pitching down to Brushy Creek. During the raccoon's last two appearances, both warm sunny days, I aimed our spotting scope — a low-tech version of a coon cam — on the sleeping creature so I could observe its sun-baked sloth from time to time as I puttered around the house. Basking like a lizard on a warm rock, the masked mammal never moved. At least not while I watched.
On the last day I finally witnessed movement, not Procyon lotor movement, but perching bird movement. While I scoped the comatose coon hoping for a sign of life — a sneeze, a twitch, a scratch, a look around, anything — a Tufted Titmouse landed within 3 feet of the slumbering animal. The mostly gray-and-white bird flitted closer still, to within a foot. That caught my attention. The titmouse sidle-hopped to within a few inches of the bandit's backside, cocked its crested head, and paused. The curious songbird moved closer still, paused a few more moments for a final reconnoiter. Then that pert little passerine pecked into fur, four or five rapid-fire strokes before flying away. The oblivious raccoon quivered slightly, no more than a sleepy scrunch of skin.
I was astonished. That feisty titmouse had obviously never heard of one of my father-in-law's favorite maxims: never prod a sleeping skunk, or one of its many close corollaries: never peck a napping raccoon, especially if you are a fragile fluff of feathers and hollow bones weighing less than a single ounce. I could imagine only two possible explanations; the titmouse was plucking an overwintering tick, or it was snitching hair.
My answer came during the even warmer days of late March. And my explanation came from my wife's head — not her mind, mind you — but her head. That spring Page was convalescing from a mysterious and lingering illness that had left her stumbling and mumbling, listless and languid. We thought she might be suffering from Snow White Syndrome: she was sleepy, dopey, grumpy, and had visited doc several times. Despite her condition, she sallied forth from sickbay bed and did what she had to do; she trudged out to the hammock and slept, suspended between the perennial resurrection of new leaf and new shadow. On the first day, as the worrying and wondering in her mind subsided to seductive sleep, she thought she heard the whir of small wings close by, then definitely felt a few sudden, insistent tugs on her hair. By the time she focused her groggy eyes, the only culprit in sight was a Tufted Titmouse perched on a winged elm branch near the far end of the hammock.
Page recounted her hair-raising story to me the next morning. The answer was now clear: the titmouse was a bold, broad-daylight hairsnitch, a purloiner of living strands still needed to warm mammalian bodies and middle-aged heads. Now, when I look into those eyes, those dark and lustrous orbs, I see more than the unfathomable pools of instinct and curious intelligence. Now I also see the gleam and lust of larceny.
An experienced birder, a research coordinator in a wildlife disease lab, and a long-time member of the local Oconee Rivers Audubon chapter, Page decided to play along, to be an obliging benefactor. While others were dutifully going to work, she adhered to a strict regimen of hanging out bent like a banana in the hammock and donating her hair. Emboldened by its nesting needs and accommodating host, the avian hair-removal specialist hied to her brave brunette head with the avidity of a reward-seeking lab rat. The sticky-billed songbird grew more brazen as the week came to a close. The hair heists became the most anticipated parts of Page's otherwise monotonous days.
By the end of the week, Page might as well have been ringing a bell: my hair's combed and ready, come and pluck it! She had an increasingly difficult time holding still, keeping her eyes squeezed shut, her mouth closed to laughter. Each day, soon after she shut her eyes, the dark-eyed hair-lifter fluttered in, landed on Page's willing pate, and went to work — pulling, yanking, tugging — clawed feet firmly braced against her head. It often attempted to cut her tresses with quick scissor snips close to her scalp. Page allowed the hair-pilfering passerine to remain on her noggin for what felt like minutes at a time, its dancing feet kneading and tickling her head.
After hearing Page's amusing stories from the hammock all week, I was eager to see and feel for myself; I wanted to join her on the cross-hatched ropes both Saturday and Sunday. Sure enough, it was just as she said. Soon after we reached our optimum angle of repose, wings whirred and breeze fanned my face. But no little tickling feet landed on my thatchless head. After what must have been a quick appraising glance, the savvy songbird passed on the slim pickings of my receding hairline — fully retreated is more to the mark — and did not risk my beard. I felt rejected, spurned, like a willing blood donor dismissed because of some deficiency. Daring, but no fool, the discriminating hair-napper lit on my wife's outlet mall of locks both days.
Sufficiently recovered, Page sleep-walked back to work the following Monday. She has never been so closely clasped to the Earth since. After wearing our air-nair jokes thin, we reflected for a few moments, took stock of the blessings of birds. Our land provides forest, thicket, and small openings: edge-effect habitat. We supply water, nesting boxes, berry-bearing shrubs and trees, wintertime suet and seed, and for one week, human hair. And for that pittance of effort and expense, birds give us — all who care to look — beauty, graceful life, connection to the Earth of our evolution, and joy — a quickening of the spirit.
Note
In his The Audubon Society Encyclopedia of North American Birds, that monumental work spanning the avian spectrum from abdomen to zygote, John K. Terres wrote that Tufted Titmice nest in cavities, in abandoned woodpecker holes, bird boxes, hollow metal pipes, and fence posts from 3 to 90 feet above the ground. They build nests using various materials such as "wool, mosses, cotton, leaves, fibrous bark, hair, pieces of shed snakeskin-will pluck hairs from live woodchucks, squirrels, opossums, and from human beings seated quietly near nest site."
