Fastest Things on Wings

by Terry Masear

  This whirlwind breeding ritual goes on across neighborhoods throughout Los Angeles from midwinter to early summer, turning backyards into extended speed-dating venues, with males tirelessly pursuing every female in sight and ambushing unsuspecting targets at the sugar feeders. During the early-spring months, female Allen’s can expect to be sexually harassed and assaulted whenever they drop in for a drink at the local sugar feeder. Not all females prove willing participants in the courtship game, however. Occasionally, a nesting mother will turn her feminine fury on an intrusive young male and reverse the chase, angrily banishing him into the wild blue.

  Given the speed and determination with which they pursue their chosen targets during breeding rituals, ardent male Anna’s like Gabriel can easily be injured while engaging in dive displays. Just as large birds and aircraft can fall victim to wind shear, an amorous hummingbird redlining a high-speed dive to impress a female can be driven to the ground by a sudden downdraft. Because of the risk of injury, hummingbirds normally refrain from engaging in courtship displays during stormy weather. So in the case of Gabriel’s death-defying overture, I can only conclude that his Beverly Hills romantic interest must have been one irresistible female.

  Gabriel came into rehab just after I started the Los Angeles Hummingbird Rescue website, setting the wheels in motion for what would for me become a transformative summer saving hummingbirds. A few months after I posted the rescue hotline, what had started as a hobby ballooned into a fifteen-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week way of life. I had spent the past spring and summer feeding and cleaning up after hummingbirds from dawn to an increasingly late bedtime. Three months of hummingbird rehab lengthened to six, and the previous season’s average of four calls a day mushroomed into twenty. By 2007, after fielding five hundred calls and rehabilitating more than one hundred hummingbirds, I had been drawn into so many implausible rescue scenarios that it took a lot to surprise me.

  In the year before Gabriel’s arrival, some of my more challenging rescues included a pair of breeding hummingbirds stuck together in an elementary-school soccer goal during a game; a fledgling trapped and floating around with tourists inside a skydiving wind tunnel at Universal CityWalk; three grounded hummingbirds that had crashed together into the Walt Disney Concert Hall downtown (because of its undulating, mirrorlike panels); a nest with a pair of day-old hatchlings inadvertently transported to a Pasadena Rose Parade float in a Japanese maple bought from a San Diego nursery; a young adult darting in and out of an indoor film set at Paramount Pictures; and a three-day-old nestling the size of a bumblebee retrieved at the La Brea Tar Pits by an English bulldog with formidable jaws.

  The four-year-old female bulldog had been brought to an adoption event at the La Brea Tar Pits on Wilshire Boulevard, seven miles west of downtown, where flawless skeletons of mastodons, camels, jaguars, saber-toothed cats, and dire wolves had been recovered after the animals got stuck in asphalt pools in Ice Age Los Angeles ten thousand to forty thousand years ago, during the Late Pleistocene period. The bulldog located the hatchling in some tall grass under a coral tree, wrapped it up in her mammoth tongue, and deposited the miniature pink dinosaur at the feet of adoption volunteers in the middle of their picnic lunch. The naked and barely inch-long female Allen’s, which a rescue volunteer brought me in a sheared-off Starbucks coffee cup, arrived unscathed, made it through rehab, and was released into early twenty-first-century Los Angeles three months later. The bulldog, volunteers proudly informed me, was adopted immediately after surrendering her near-microscopic discovery to the authorities.

  Near the end of that same summer, an older gentleman called about an adult female hummingbird that had been hit while in flight by a golf ball on a fairway in Bel Air.

  “I got two of those in the same year,” Jean marveled when I called to report the golf-course collision. “You could spend a lifetime trying to hit a hummingbird with a golf ball and never accomplish it.”

  “They’re such fast-moving targets,” I agreed. “It seems like you’d have a better chance of winning the Mega Millions.”

  Hummingbirds were so quick, we speculated, that they rarely encountered anything traveling faster than themselves, so they might be interested in and caught off guard by golf balls hurtling by at a hundred miles an hour. In any case, Jean and I are always convinced we’ve heard it all. Until the next unbelievable call.

  In early April of 2008, the annual dancing, chasing, hooking, and sparring commotion that accompanies hummingbird breeding had reached its frenzied climax just as a spring storm was churning its way through the city. So I was not surprised when Gabriel called from Beverly Hills to report a hummingbird thrown off course by an unpredictable wind. With the explosion of spring’s restless energy, Gabriel’s was one among several anxious calls I received that day reporting nests blown out of trees and adult birds injured. But Gabriel did not deliver just another hummingbird in need of rescue. Gabriel presented a mystery that would upend everything I thought I knew about hummingbirds. A tiny force that brought sharply into focus the limits of reason, underscored the subtle and complex rhythms of the natural world, and affirmed the enigmatic forces governing life itself.

  CHAPTER 8

  Going Out of My Head

  A FEW HOURS after Gabriel’s ill-fated romance with the enticing female led to his encounter with a stretch limo in Beverly Hills, I come out to find the defeated suitor sprawled flat and listless on his nest with his wings splayed. When I lift his salsa cup from the warm ICU, Gabriel doesn’t flinch. I gently fold his wings back against his body and rub his head lightly, prompting him to open his bill just enough for me to slide the angiocath into his mouth and inject some formula. Gabriel swallows slowly, though with less effort than when he first arrived, and then lists onto his side and lapses into unconsciousness. I try to wipe the oily dirt off his head and back with a Q-Tip soaked in warm water, but he is so encrusted it will have to wait until a later time, if there is such a thing for him. Although I have seen a few birds that looked worse than Gabriel beat the odds and make it back, his beleaguered condition does not inspire optimism. Watching him drift away, I do what I always do whenever I get a bird as debilitated as he is: pray for a miracle and prepare for the opposite.

  As I’m returning Gabriel to the warm ICU, I hear my phone ringing dimly somewhere in the garage. Before I can extricate the phone from a mound of plastic syringes and paper towels, a voicemail pops up marked Urgent! I hear an extended, rambling plea that makes no sense, and I hit the call-back button halfway into the message that threatens never to end. Some callers are so neurotic and stressed out that I can’t fathom how they get through a day in a city like Los Angeles, where life is spinning out of control at a maddening pace. A few have already gone off the rails by the time they call, and they blather on so unremittingly that I can’t get a word in edgewise. Sometimes I just sit and listen to their free association in speechless silence.

  In this case, when a panicked voice answers halfway through the first ring, I identify myself and ask how I can help.

  “Yeah, I have this bird and I don’t know what the best course of action is because he—I mean, I think it’s a he, I don’t know how you can tell—but I have this injured hummingbird, I mean, I don’t know if he’s injured or sick or just young or what, but anyway I found him on the sidewalk by my neighbor’s house while I was walking my dog, and he was lying on his side so I picked him up and, I mean, I know you’re not supposed to touch them or anything because you leave your DNA on them—”

  “It’s okay to touch them,” I correct him, trying to imagine how hummingbirds might go about detecting human DNA on their feathers. Maybe they check themselves into the crime lab for analysis and put a team of investigators on the case.

  “I mean, I know if it’s a young bird you shouldn’t touch him because then his mother will reject him—”

  “That’s an urban myth.”

  “Well, I know, I mean, I read you’re not supposed to keep them because they’re
federally protected but then it doesn’t seem like the government cares about them anyway because it makes all these laws and then does hardly anything to help them—”

  I have to give him that one.

  “So that’s why I called you, and, anyway, I picked him up and brought him home, well, first I put him in the grass by the sidewalk but then he just laid there and when I came back, I couldn’t leave him on the ground because it’s raining and a cat might get him and I don’t like to see anything suffer, not even people, even though they’re not my favorite species, so I put him in a box on the porch but then I wasn’t sure what to do because he didn’t look too good so I brought him in the house and put him on a towel but he’s just sitting there all wet so—”

  “Can I—”

  “So then I read on your website I should give him some sugar water so I made some but I’m not sure I have the right kind of sugar, I mean, is organic all right? Because that’s all I have and I didn’t want to wait too long because I know they need to eat every thirty minutes. Actually, I didn’t know that before I looked it up but that’s what I read on your website, well, not just on your website but on several of them, which is why I tried to feed him with a syringe so—”

  “Could I—”

  “So I tried to give him some sugar water but he wouldn’t eat any, he just sat there shaking his head and—”

  “Shaking his head?”

  “Yeah, I mean, not like he was saying no to the sugar water but like back and forth a couple of times, not constantly, but every time I pass my finger in front of him to test his vision he tries to follow it, and then his head goes back and forth really fast like he’s watching a Ping-Pong game.”

  “That’s a head injury. It’s serious.”

  “Well, that’s what I thought but I’m not an expert and I don’t know anything about hummingbird neurology so I can’t say for sure what’s wrong with him but he looks really messed up and I’m going crazy, I mean, I don’t know what to do with him because even though he doesn’t look that good I want to save him but I have no idea how so—”

  “You have a couple of choices,” I jump in assertively, to no avail.

  “My neighbor told me I should take him to the shelter but that’s why I called you because I hate going to the hospital myself and really freak out when I have to go to the emergency room so I can only imagine how he would feel, but anyway I know going to the hospital is terrifying even when you have comprehensive health insurance and he’d probably be really scared.”

  “He’s already scared, but I don’t think he would know he’s going to the hospital.”

  “Well, I hope not, because I had to be rushed to the ER once and it was the most horrific experience ever and I still have nightmares about being trapped in an ambulance, but I won’t kill you with the details.”

  “I’m already carrying my own full load of nightmares, so I appreciate that.”

  “So maybe I should take him somewhere, or maybe I should wait awhile because I can take care of him twenty-four/seven and I don’t want to stress him out more than he already is so I think I’ll just keep him until he stabilizes and maybe he’ll be okay.”

  “It’s unlikely he’ll recover from a head injury that quickly, but if you don’t want to drive him somewhere right now”—Given that it’s rush hour, I say to myself, and even if you manage to get on the freeway at six p.m. in Los Angeles, you’re not going anywhere for a long time—“you can keep him a few hours and then bring him to me in West Hollywood.”

  “Yeah, because it’s rush hour right now and I’m in Santa Monica and there’s a Sig Alert on the Ten East so I don’t want to sit in traffic for three hours if he’s not going to make it anyway, because there’s no point, is there?”

  “Maybe not.”

  “But then I thought maybe there is some magic potion that might cure him, you know?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I mean, maybe he just needs some time or food, even though he doesn’t want to eat anything, but maybe a professional could help him more than I can.”

  “You can bring him to me anytime.”

  “Because I’m a Kevorkian so I don’t believe in letting him suffer needlessly if he’s in pain and terminal anyway, but if he has a chance and the shelter kills him then I’m responsible for wrongful death just like well-intentioned rescuers aren’t protected under the Good Samaritan law.”

  “Well, I think—”

  “Because I don’t know if anybody can save him. I mean, I don’t think the prognosis is good but then I’m not an expert and I don’t know what I’m doing at all, so I’m pretty hopeless.”

  At last we arrive at the truth. Despite this frank admission, the tangential young man decides to call me back in a few hours. I hang up and wonder what just happened. In any business or institution that deals with the public, callers run the spectrum and you have to be prepared for anything. And so it goes with hummingbird rescue in Southern California, where people from a dizzying array of social classes, ethnic backgrounds, professions, educational levels, criminal histories, states of mental health, and degrees of sobriety call at all hours of the day and night in search of help and understanding.

  The summer before, three rail-thin, black-leather-clad Goths who reeked of whiskey, weed, tobacco, and some unidentifiable pharmaceuticals brought me a fledgling in a breath-mint box. Even though their bloodshot eyes looked more like a hard Sunday-morning sunrise than an early Saturday night, they somehow, through their chemically induced haze, recognized the value of the tiny life they had stumbled upon on a crowded sidewalk in West Hollywood. The instant they found the grounded fledgling that dozens of others had indifferently passed by, they took time off from their busy club-hopping schedule to look me up on their smartphones, stroll down to my house from Sunset Boulevard, and deliver the patient, after which they quietly returned to the mad party carrying on just a few blocks away. I gained a lot of respect for the Goths that night. Despite the abuse these three emaciated rebels were subjecting their own bodies to, they wouldn’t dream of standing idly by while a helpless hummingbird starved his way to an early death.

  The poker-faced Goths, who looked hard as nails when they first appeared at my door, turned out to be unusually sensitive and thoughtful. But other, more questionable residents I’ve dealt with through hummingbird rescue have given me pause. I’ve taken in birds from drug dealers, gangbangers, the morally bankrupt, the criminally insane, and other degenerates lingering on the periphery that nobody has bothered to report. But the atrocities damaged humans commit against one another do not translate into ill intentions toward the orphaned and injured hummingbirds these lost souls rush to my door. In fact, it’s quite the reverse. Hummingbirds provide an avenue for some of the walking wounded to express the empathy they are unable to extend to members of their own species, who are collectively implicated in the anger and pain these hardened cases carry around with them in an unforgiving city. In short, hummingbirds, perhaps more than anything else in their tortured lives, give them something easy to love.

  Still, some of the conversations I have over the phone make me wonder. The odd tone of voice, the off-color remarks, the dark secrecy some finders have about where they are. You never know who is going to show up at your front door with a box in his hand. One recent exchange I had about a fledgling pulled out of a storm drain just after sunset went something like this:

  “Where are you?”

  “Whadaya mean?” a gravelly voice comes back.

  “I mean, what part of the city are you in?”

  “Does dat matter?”

  “Well, only insofar as I can give you the location of the nearest rehab facility.”

  “Well, why don’tcha tell me where you are.”

  A little uneasy, because I fear that I am about to invite a Mob boss to my house after dark, I tell him I’m in West Hollywood. “Near the Beverly Center.”

  “I can do dat.”

  “But, well, how far away are you? Because it
’s nine thirty already and I have to get up at five, so if you’re more than a half an hour—”

  “Everything in LA is twenty minutes, depending on traffic,” he interjects. “I’m in Pasadena. I’ll be der by ten. Okay?”

  “Well, actually there’s a humane society in Pasadena you can take him to tomorrow if—”

  “I’ll be der by ten,” he repeats adamantly.

  “But if you’re in Pasadena there’s no way that . . . Hello?” I say as the line goes dead.

  At 9:59, a six-foot-two, two-hundred-pound, rock-solid, heavily tattooed mixed-martial artist shows up at my front door cradling a perfect Anna’s fledgling tucked into a sparkplug box.

  The bright-eyed young male pops up like a jack-in-the-box and cries for food when I open the top. “He looks great,” I say with a shrug.

  “Good, ’cause my girlfriend was freakin’ out he was gonna die,” he grumbles.

  “I can’t believe you made it here so quickly,” I marvel, peering after him as he lumbers off my porch toward the street.

  “Carpool lane.” He flashes me a crooked smile before throwing a leg over his Kawasaki Ninja, dropping the visor on his helmet, and roaring into the dark city.

  I close the door and glance down at the fledgling staring up at me silently with huge eyes and his mouth gaping like the figure in Munch’s The Scream.

  “I don’t blame you for being scared. You may be fast someday”—I shook my head—“but you’re never gonna move like that again.”

  Over the past decade, I’ve talked to twenty thousand random callers from all over Los Angeles on my precarious journey down the byzantine path of hummingbird rescue. How could I not have encountered a little bit of everything? But one thing all callers—the good, the bad, and the scary—have in common is a desire to restore light and equilibrium to the artificial Los Angeles landscape that we share with our flying urban jewels. And by saving nature’s treasures, with each rescue, compassionate finders return this rough-edged metropolis to the City of Angels, whose tiny winged envoys offer the opportunity to celebrate the best of our humanity by participating in their preservation into the distant future.