(non) ghost stories, and the jay formerly known as WR/AY

Santa Cruz Island has a rather interesting history as a ranching property. Erosion was the negative legacy left by this era, while many historic buildings the positive. This past weekend Katie, Sinead, Colin and I drove out to the far West end of the island. Our plan was to spend two days and two nights trapping birds on that side of the island. The West end is casually referred to as Christy’s. If I remember correctly, this is because back when the island belonged to one man, Justinian Caire, when he died, he left that part of the island to one of his daughters (named Christy.) There is an old ranch house within 10 minutes walk of a massive beach, as well as a barn and another building. I’m not sure the original function of this building, but it had a kitchen and dining room that we used while we were staying out there.


Supposedly the Christy ranch house is haunted. The story I was told was that it isn’t Christy, but a different woman. This woman was married to the captain of a ship, or something like that, and when she found out that he was trafficking in people (Chinese) up to San Francisco Bay, she jumped off the boat when it passed through the channel between Santa Rosa and Santa Cruz. Needless to say, she didn’t make it. Now, I’m not one to believe in ghosts. But some of the stories I heard, (from pretty reputable sources, and people who also are not the type to believe in ghosts) left me a little weirded out. (Windows slamming open and shut, feet being played with in the middle of the night, pressure on backs of necks and chests, being picked up out of bed and dropped… to name a few.) But being stubborn, I decided that I would just conveniently ignore said stories until I saw for myself. I think I was still the most anxious. Colin and Katie wanted to see something, and Sinead went off to explore the ranch house at dusk by herself.



Nothing happened.

Now that may seem rather anticlimactic, but I blame it on a few factors. Supposedly this ghost likes men more than women. (So our ratio was a bit off.) Things have also most often happened to people who were completely convinced that the whole ghost thing was just ridiculous. (And we all were pretty open to something being possible. Although I did spend a good deal of time the first night being rather jumpy - and then rationalizing anything I saw.) We’ll have another chance for the ghost to make an appearance though. We’re thinking of having a little Halloween shindig out there.

We’ve had success with our trapping as of late. Today Katie and I set a new record for most birds caught in one day this fall. In about 5 hours we managed to catch 6 Island Scrub Jays in our looney tunes style box trap. The crew has set ourselves an arbitrary goal of trapping 50 birds before we open a can of special cheese that we’ve been saving.



Today Katie and I managed to get ourselves to within two birds of that goal. We caught 5 previously unbanded birds, and re-captured one. We have been trapping all new birds, but today I had to make an exception for the bird banded WR/AY. She was being incredibly annoying when I was trying to capture the unbanded birds in the area. Being completely comfortable with the box trap she would jump right under and grab as many peanuts as she could fit in her bill, then take off to cache them. It wasn’t long before she was back again. We were friends for a while, when she showed the unbanded birds how getting peanuts was done, but not later, when she altered her trap entering tactics. This consisted of landing on the top, hopping onto the stick, then jumping down. This was problematic. Often when she’d land on the top the trap would sag to one side. Or when she jumped on the stick it would be knocked off kilter. This meant that the next time she decided to land on the contraption it would collapse. This is not something that you want an unbanded bird who is just getting comfortable with the idea of taking a peanut from under the strange wire box to witness. As a result I kept on having to reset the trap after every time WR/AY came. (Which was a lot.) I was not amused. After about 10 or 15 minutes of this nonsense, Katie, who was down below finishing up processing a bird we had caught previously, could hear me up above letting WR/AY know how I felt about her trap tactics. When Katie showed up and I still hadn’t been able to get an unbanded bird, I decided it was time to pull it on WR/AY. The short lived vendetta ended with me replacing her color bands entirely. She had been banded with 5 bands at one point, but had managed to remove one, and the Red band was nearly gone. (I didn’t even have to cut it off, when I applied pressure it just cracked and broke off.) In honor of the affection that most of the crew has for this bird, (which is more amused annoyance), I banded her UGG/AY. Ugg.

UGG/AY is not the only bird that has incited trapping vendettas. Up in our Portezuela plot there is a newly formed pair of birds. The female is banded OPR/AP. We affectionately refer to her as Oprah. Her unbanded male became Steadman. (After the real Oprah’s long time partner.) Steadman evaded the box trap two times, and landed on the stick another, collapsing it, much to his surprise. So needless to say he was trap shy. We had to employ different methods if we were going to be successful… So we broke out our newly arrived bownet, and set it up for a first time use. Success came eventually, and Colin happily banded his nemesis.