by Terry Masear
CHAPTER 9
We’re in This Thing Together
THEY THRIVE because of, and in spite of, us. Over the past fifty years, Americans have increasingly flocked to urban centers, and hummingbirds have followed closely behind, taking advantage of our lush backyards planted especially for them and mesmerizing us with their captivating beauty and grace. But as I quickly learned on my early tree-trimming expeditions, for them, living alongside us is a mixed bag. Sharing space with people is never easy, even for creatures as universally loved and admired as hummingbirds. Human carelessness, indifference, and sometimes blatant disregard for their winged companions in the natural world are the reasons rescue has become such a big business in the Greater Los Angeles area, where thousands of hummingbirds struggle to coexist with eighteen million people concentrated in the most densely populated metropolitan sprawl in the country.
Southern California ranks as the hummingbird-rehabilitation capital of the United States, if not the world. State-sponsored and private nonprofit wildlife organizations admit more than one thousand hummingbirds into Southland rescue facilities every year. Southern California’s impressive rehab volume prompts wildlife centers from all over the country to call Los Angeles Hummingbird Rescue for advice. Rehabbers from facilities in New York, Michigan, Missouri, Texas, Florida, and Washington have contacted me about the nuts and bolts of hummingbird rehabilitation. During our extended conversations, I can’t resist asking staff members how many intakes they had the year before. Most report between five and fifteen. When I visited the Audubon Society in Portland, Oregon, a few years ago, a volunteer proudly described taking in a dozen hummingbirds.
“I mean in a year,” I said to clarify my question.
“That’s a year,” she confirmed.
“That’s a day in June,” Jean said with a laugh when I called to report the diminutive statistic.
“A slow day in June,” I added.
If we include all of Southern California’s rehab facilities, we’ve had spring days in which over thirty young hummingbirds were rushed through rehabbers’ frenzied doors. And we keep that many more alive out there every day during the nesting season by coaching callers through “soft” intervention strategies that require long experience and quick thinking. Telephone-assisted rescues, which run the gamut of possibilities, include telling callers how to liberate trapped birds from houses, offices, schools, and garages; retrieve and feed window-strikes; head off human interference; repair nests damaged by weather and human disturbance; construct faux nests for fledglings grounded in precarious circumstances; and dust mite-infested nests.
The proliferation of cell phones has made it faster and easier to answer questions that defaulted to sheer conjecture several years ago. When I first started doing rehab, I had to rely on the caller’s description, often imprecise and distorted by personal perceptions and anxieties, to determine a bird’s age and condition. Now I ask callers to send me photos of the birds so I can assess their age, gender, metabolic condition, and general health before taking action. After rehabilitating hundreds of hummingbirds, I have learned to read their posture, demeanor, and the look in their eyes, even from a photograph. Observing them closely every day, I’ve come to know them inside and out and can interpret the subtle messages they send intentionally or inadvertently through their body language. Every detail offers clues about their present situation and physical condition, enabling me to address problems with swiftness and accuracy.
When a caller attending a Make-A-Wish Foundation picnic in Griffith Park finds a black-chinned nestling grounded on a public walkway, he looks up Los Angeles Hummingbird Rescue on his iPhone and calls me within minutes.
“Twenty kids are circling, insisting we rescue him,” the caller warns. “What should I do?”
“Send me a photo of the bird,” I tell him, “close up, from his right side.”
“His right?”
“Right.”
When I get the photo a minute later, I notice the nestling’s crop is bulging. The image is so crisp and sharply detailed I can see the dark outline of fruit flies inside the bird’s crop. I call the young man back immediately. “His mother is still feeding him. So shear off a paper cup about two inches from the bottom and line it with Kleenex. Have the kids help build the nest so they are invested in the outcome. Then secure the cup to a tree branch nearby, in the shade and out of the kids’ reach, and watch from a distance to make sure the mother locates the new nest. If you see her feed the chick once, you’re good to go.”
“Got it,” he answers confidently.
But while cameras can be a positive force in rescue, they create their share of trouble as well. In this digital age when no experience is meaningful unless it is photographed, uploaded, and shared on social media sites, hummingbirds, being spectacularly photogenic, suffer the dual consequences of their exotic beauty and people’s need for validation. Each year dozens of calls to rescue are the result of amateur photographers using flashes to capture images of active nests. Older nestlings get spooked and plunge to the ground when a camera flashes close by. The reason for their terrified reaction, I have speculated, may be that adult male hummingbirds flare their iridescent throat feathers and angle them toward the sun to maximize light reflection when confronting adversaries during battle. Conceivably, then, brooding females and feathered nestlings instinctively interpret a sudden flash of light as a hostile male approaching with deadly intentions. Whatever the case, aside from the potential for sustaining fatal injuries from the fall, a nestling has a seriously reduced chance of survival once he is grounded, even with the mother still present. After the damage is done, the careless photographers often become frightened and embarrassed, and they appoint others to do damage control.
A young hummingbird lover named Skye calls on behalf of a neighbor who is insisting she rescue a baby he scared out of the nest with a flash the day before and that he is convinced has since been abandoned. Both the perpetrator and his wife have called Skye several times from work and urged her to get the chick into rehab immediately.
“They’re driving me crazy, calling every twenty minutes,” Skye reports with exasperation.
“Were there two babies in the nest before he scared them out?”
“Yeah, there were two.”
“So what happened to the other one?”
“She flew up into the tree. But this one is smaller and can’t fly.”
“He’s a little younger. They hatch a few days apart, so he’s not quite ready yet.”
“No, not at all. He fell to the ground, so I put him back in the nest, but nobody has seen the mother since yesterday. My neighbors are afraid he’s going to die. I don’t know what to do.”
“Take a photo of the nestling from a distance using a zoom lens and no flash,” I instruct her, “and send it to me.”
Two minutes later Skye sends a photo of the young male Allen’s resting comfortably in his nest, bright-eyed and abundantly fed.
“The husband says he knows from being a Boy Scout that if anybody touches the baby, the mother will abandon it,” Skye volunteers when I call her back.
“That’s a myth,” I inform her. “Hummingbirds don’t abandon their babies just because somebody has touched them. So his Boy Scout education was a little thin. Maybe they should have taught him not to get too close to nesting birds with a camera flash,” I suggest.
“Exactly,” Skye laughingly agrees. “What a waste, all those long summers of Boy Scout training.”
“So next time he calls, ask him to renew his Smokey Bear pledge to use caution and common sense before lighting a fire. Or taking a flash photo.”
“I will,” Skye answers gleefully.
But not all camera calls are so lighthearted. Another caller who got too close to a nest with a flash threw the alarmed mother into such a panic she darted off, slammed into a picture window, dropped to the ground, and died instantly from a broken neck, leaving a pair of week-old Allen’s babies in the nest.
Desperate calls like this arrive without warning, at any time of the day or night. And I empathize with each hapless casualty, avian and human, as I struggle to keep my own emotions in check while everyone else comes unglued. Callers like Jasper are so devastated by a hummingbird’s death that I have extended postmortem debriefing sessions with them over the phone. I spend hours every year comforting guilt-ridden callers as they cry over birds that have been accidentally maimed or killed. Because, as a veteran of the rescue wars, I’ve put in my time. So when it comes to finding someone who gets how it feels to cry like a baby over a dead or dying hummingbird, callers have come to the right place.
“Cut the nest and bring the chicks to me. Everybody screws up sometimes,” I console Jasper, “so stop beating up on yourself. Bring me the babies and I’ll get them back out there, healthy and strong. And life goes on.”
Agonizing scenarios like Jasper’s unfold every day during the nesting season. With telephone rescues, rehabbers function as dei ex machina, gods that magically appear from the machine to resolve hummingbird entanglements and advance otherwise tragic stories toward happy endings. Most window-strikes, birds trapped in houses and garages, babies falling from nests, and victims retrieved from spider webs can be saved with advice given over the phone. And though the conversations often prove long, emotional, and exhausting, the extended hours spent coaching callers through this deluge of emergencies during the breeding season save hundreds of hummingbirds annually.
The paradox of running a hummingbird rescue is that our primary goal is to keep jeopardized birds in their natural environment and out of rehab. Orphaned, injured, and otherwise compromised birds that can’t be preserved in the wild are brought to us as a last resort. Despite efforts to keep them in nature, half the birds we get calls about end up in our care. Jean and I together admit four hundred hummingbirds to our facilities every nesting season and send another three hundred to other rescue centers in Southern California. And each year, more keep coming.
Stepped-up planting of nectar-producing vegetation and the growing use of sugar feeders have led to population explosions in crowded cities like Los Angeles, where hummingbirds have become year-round residents and the most treasured backyard visitors. Some Angelenos go to extreme lengths to attract hummingbirds to their properties by maintaining staggering numbers of plants and sugar feeders for the guests who never leave. A recent caller informed me that she and her husband cultivated one thousand potted plants aimed specifically at attracting hummingbirds to their property in Orange County.
“How many plants?” I ask, thinking I misunderstood.
“A thousand,” she repeats.
“A thousand potted plants?” I exclaim in disbelief.
“Yes!” She giggles.
“Just for hummingbirds?”
“Yes. It’s insane, isn’t it?”
“Well, it’s no crazier than what I do. But how do you take care of them all?”
“It’s all we do.” She laughs, with a clear recognition of her mad obsession.
Still, I don’t quite believe her about the thousand plants. Until she e-mails a photo that shows an undulating sea of epiphyllum and clivia suspended from trellises and stacked on tiered planks across a patio extending into what seemed like eternity.
Other committed enthusiasts hang corridors of sugar feeders, filling them year-round to accommodate the burgeoning number of fast-flying beauties visiting their balconies and backyards. A repeat caller named Paul phones me every summer from the hills above Burbank to report the dizzying number of hummingbirds dining in his yard. Based on the volume of the twenty feeders he hangs out every morning and the metabolic requirements of hummingbirds in the wild, Paul is feeding between three and four hundred hummingbirds a day most months of the year.
“I have to fill them all every day,” he laments. “I can’t leave LA. I can’t go anywhere. I would feel too guilty.”
“I know the feeling,” I say sympathetically every time he calls. As much as anyone, I understand how people surrender their souls to hummingbirds.
Angelenos’ devotion to monitoring what many perceive to be their divinely assigned nests weaves hummingbird and human life together into the fabric of urban existence. Besides having to cope with intrusive backyard photographers, nesting hummingbirds get caught up in international social media pressure. Callers who put webcams on nests report receiving hundreds of texts and chat comments from viewers alarmed about inclement weather, the distressing appearance of the babies, the disturbing angle of a nest, or a mother’s deficient parenting skills.
In the heat of the summer baby season, a hummingbird enthusiast who has a live webcam running on a nest with a pair of two-day-old hatchlings calls me in a panic after receiving dozens of chat comments criticizing the mother for not feeding her babies often enough.
“What should I do?” Pam asks pleadingly. “Everybody on the chat is freaking out because the mother isn’t feeding the babies. People are writing every two minutes urging me to rescue them.”
“There are way too many helicopter moms hovering around this nest,” I caution her. “Hatchlings have a yolk sac and don’t need to eat every thirty minutes until they get a few days older. The mother knows what she’s doing. You just need to let her do her job.”
“But the babies are opening their bills and begging for food every time she comes back to the nest and she just sits down and ignores them. Can’t we do something to help?”
“I know what we can do,” I say. “Let’s take a vote on YouTube and have people give the mother’s parenting competence a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. If her disapproval ratings are high enough we can call the state and ask social services to intervene. Then they can come out and arrest the mother, confiscate the chicks, and put them up for adoption so they can be placed in a more stable home environment where the parent isn’t such a slacker.”
After a moment of silence, Pam bursts out laughing so hard she cries. “Thank you, Terry. You’ve just made me realize how ridiculous we’re being with all of our anthropomorphic second-guessing.”
Two weeks later Pam calls me about the same nest, which is now tilting precariously to one side after an explosive windstorm. By the time she calls, the nest is seriously compromised, with the older chick clinging desperately to the outer edge.
“The nest is falling and one of the babies is almost upside down. They’re getting thousands of views and everybody is going crazy. What should I do?”
“I’m in the supermarket right now,” I tell her as I load my basket with white sugar and Q-Tips. “Can I call you back?”
“No, Terry, can’t you tell me now?”
“I’ll just be ten minutes.”
“Please, Terry, this is an emergency. The oldest baby could fall any second,” Pam persists. “Can you just give me some quick advice for now?”
But there’s no such thing as a quick conversation about a nest repair. “Okay,” I relent, sitting down at the blood pressure machine by the pharmacy before launching into a long discussion on how to mend a broken nest. “You’ll need some pipe cleaners.”
After a twenty-minute tutorial, I dispatch Pam and check my watch. During hummingbird season, I take the summer off from teaching at UCLA and turn my life over to the birds. Once orphaned nestlings start arriving, I can’t go anywhere for very long. Frank and I have no summer holiday because hummingbird babies flood in over the Fourth of July weekend. There is no such thing as a day off or a vacation. Leaving town is out of the question. I can’t leave home for more than thirty minutes during daylight hours. I can’t even go out for lunch. My friends collectively write me off for four months
. I eat my meals, if you can call them that, while standing in the kitchen talking on the phone. Or, more frequently, on the run between the house and the garage. If I need to go to the doctor or dentist, I put it off until September. I can’t even get a haircut. Never mind that by the end of the summer my unruly auburn curls make me look positively Paleolithic. The birds in the ICU need to eat every half hour, and I’ve been gone too long already.
I grab a small bunch of rotten bananas from a discard box tucked under the display and hurry to the checkout counter. Fruit flies love decaying bananas, the stinkier the better. When summer temperatures head into the eighties, a few decomposing bananas in a Tupperware container can incubate and produce hundreds of fruit flies daily for growing birds in the aviary. This abundance of arthropods gives the young adults ongoing opportunities to hone their bug-snatching skills. Though it might seem that catching fruit flies comes naturally to hummingbirds, young birds’ first attempts prove uncertain and off the mark as fruit flies have developed erratic flight patterns to evade capture.
I know from my own experience that although fruit flies appear slow when buzzing around a glass of wine in the summer, they are nearly impossible to catch with your hands. A young man from the city of Diamond Bar found a fledgling on a Wednesday, and since he could not bring her to me until the weekend, he wanted to know how to supplement the bird’s diet in the meantime. I explained to him that if he put rotten bananas on a plate outside, fruit flies would appear in a day or two. But when I warned him about the difficulty of capturing the wily insects, he boasted that he had been training as a boxer since he was a teenager and insisted he could catch enough for the young bird to thrive on until he got her to rehab.
