Fastest Things on Wings

by Terry Masear

  “I came back with two the first time,” he admitted sheepishly the morning he delivered the hungry fledgling to my house. “And even though I tried for an hour every day, I didn’t get much better with practice. But they sure did.” He laughed.

  To get sufficient protein in the wild, hummingbirds have to eat two to three hundred fruit flies a day. When a hummingbird is hunting insects in flight, its elastic lower bill pivots as much as 25 degrees to create an expanded open surface. Once the bill is bent to its limit, it snaps shut in less than one one-hundredth of a second. When first learning to hunt, young adults in rehab plunge straight into a swarm of fruit flies with their mouths wide open but fail to flex or snap their bills, causing them to miss what appear to be laughably easy bug grabs. After their initial failed attempts, the young trainees learn to twist their lower mandibles when pursuing the crafty insects. Still, their first catches are awkward and comical as they wrench and shake their heads wildly in midair to subdue squirming fruit flies clinging to their tongues and the sides of their bills. With practice, young hummingbirds learn to anticipate the fruit flies’ defensive maneuvers and flex their bills accordingly. After mastering these basic techniques, they further hone their hunting skills by darting in swift vertical and lateral trajectories to head off escapees.

  Without a mother to supplement his protein intake while learning to hunt, a young hummingbird will quickly perish in the wild. Newly fledged birds that get separated from their mothers starve to death within a day or two. Because of this risk, no bird leaves the aviary until he has become a mad hunting machine that can effortlessly nail fruit flies with pinpoint accuracy.

  When I get to the counter with my Q-Tips, white sugar, and four sticky brown bananas, the checker looks at me searchingly, as if wondering whether I’m blind, and then offers assistance.

  “Let me get you some fresher bananas.” She winces as she picks up the store phone to call Produce.

  “No, that’s okay.” I stop her. “I like them that way.”

  She glances at me, then at the putrid bananas oozing out of their skins and leaving a stream of sticky yellow slime down the conveyor.

  “Are you sure?” She grimaces.

  “Yeah. They’re for my birds.”

  “Oh, what kind of birds do you have?” She brightens.

  “Hummingbirds.”

  “Oh.” She throws me a puzzled look and then glances at the handful of mush flowing like kids’ Gak through her fingers. “I didn’t know hummingbirds ate bananas.”

  “They don’t.” I smile.

  “Oh.” She looks at me uneasily as she stuffs the gooey fruit into a plastic bag and I hear her thinking: Just let this one go.

  Later that afternoon, Pam sends me a photo of her nest renovation. She has fortified the circumference with a piece of a rubber rug pad and re-anchored the updated structure to the branch with pipe cleaners in the same light brown hue as the tree bark.

  “Brilliant work,” I tell her in a follow-up call that afternoon. “The best I’ve ever seen.”

  “Thank you so much, Terry.” She lets out an exaggerated sigh of relief. “The pressure was so intense. Webcam viewers were commenting at all hours, from Europe and Canada, saying they couldn’t sleep because they were so worried about the babies.”

  “Well, they wouldn’t have made it without you,” I congratulate her. “They should fledge within a week, so don’t hesitate to call if you have any other questions or concerns.”

  “Don’t worry,” she exclaims, “I’ve got you on speed dial.”

  Several days later, Pam sends me a webcam clip of the twin female Allen’s, who are thriving, to the infinite relief and delight of fifteen thousand emotionally invested spectators from one hundred countries.

  “They’re an international media sensation,” I tell her after viewing the poignant clip of the fledglings cautiously taking their first flights out of the nest and then circling back around to check on each other.

  “Thank God they’re out,” she rejoices. “I’m so exhausted from all of the drama.”

  “Well, everything turned out beautifully, because of you.”

  “Yeah, but now I’m kind of worried about the mother,” Pam says nervously.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Well, for some reason she’s tearing the nest apart. She’s got it ripped to pieces. Is she doing what I think?”

  “I’m afraid she is.” I exhale. “So take a deep breath and prepare for the summer sequel. She’s building another nest.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Help Me Make It Through the Night

  DURING GABRIEL’S FIRST NIGHT in the ICU, I get up every few hours and shuffle down to the garage in my pajamas to feed him. Hummingbirds don’t need to eat at night, but the metabolism of a seriously injured bird can drop so low that a little food in the early-morning hours may mean the difference between life and death. Since he arrived just as the nesting season was ramping up, I already have, in addition to Gabriel’s seven bouncy companions in the ICU, eight fledglings in starter cages, six in large flight cages, and five young adults in the outdoor aviary. With the exception of the young adults, who are in the advanced stages of preparing for the real world, hummingbirds in rehab have to be housed in a heated room to ensure protection from the cold, wind, rain, and other natural threats to which they are not yet accustomed.

  To avoid waking the slumbering fledglings, who dart off their perches and begin banging around madly in their covered cages if disturbed, I creep into the garage with ninja stealth and keep the dimmer switch low when checking on Gabriel. The nestlings in the ICU gyrate excitedly for food whenever they see me during the day, but they pile on top of one another in a single nest like drunken sailors and sleep soundly at night. When I get up at three a.m. to check on Gabriel, he is cold to the touch and appears so beleaguered, slumped over in his nest, that I can almost feel him slipping away. When I come back at five thirty to put feeders in the aviary and move the flight cages outside for the day, Gabriel has lapsed into torpor.

  Because of their diminutive size and large ratio of surface area to volume, hummingbirds lose body heat rapidly. In order to maintain a warm-blooded temperature and pull off fantastic feats like hovering and executing 360-degree rotations in midair, hummingbirds have the highest metabolism and largest hearts relative to body mass of any bird on the planet. Their heart rate, which can reach 1,200 beats per minute in flight, can be slowed to less than 50 when cold weather, lack of food, or injury forces them to conserve energy. Once they go into torpor, their metabolism diminishes to 5 percent of its active state. No small number of hummingbirds, particularly injured adults, enter rescue in this condition. When their body temperature plunges, sometimes as low as 40 degrees, they fluff up like cotton balls to retain as much heat as possible while sitting stone-still on the perch with their eyes closed and bills pointed at a sharp angle in the air. Contrary to popular belief, hummingbirds do not go into torpor every night unless they need to conserve body heat in colder climates. And though birds in torpor appear unconscious, they are dimly aware of what is happening to them, as they peep softly, with the most plaintive and disarming cry you will ever hear in your life, when moved. Most can be coaxed out of torpor with food and heat in twenty minutes to a few hours. When an adult awakens inside the ICU, you can almost see him wondering, as he looks around with a bewildered expression at the unruly piles of babies peeping and jostling on either side, Where the hell am I and how did I get into this mess?

  Watching hummingbirds emerge from their deep slumber after an injury or traumatic experience always fascinates me. Torpor is an ingenious evolutionary adaptation to a constantly changing world. Life in the wild is chaotic, unpredictable, and, occasionally, downright terrifying. Torpor acts as a natural sedative that buffers hummingbirds against the harshest conditions. Rather than enduring the threat of bitter cold, debilitating injury, or piercing hunger, when the going gets tough, they check out and drift away to a more tranquil place. While huma
ns seek to avoid the unpleasant realities of the physical world by managing external circumstances, hummingbirds take a more primal approach. They turn inward and regulate themselves. In their retreat from inhospitable conditions, they enter a dimension beyond thought, feeling, and memory. This predilection to create an altered mental and physical state in response to outside adversity betrays a profound connection to the rhythms of the natural world that humans, in all of our rational knowledge and efforts to manage the environment, are sorely lacking.

  Once Gabriel enters the land of sleep and forgetting, I leave it up to him. Two hours later he emerges, though he remains lying motionlessly in his nest with his eyes closed. When I touch the top of his head, he opens his bill weakly, and I continue to feed him, along with the insanely ravenous bobble-heads, every thirty minutes. I spend the day working to coax him back, and when I come out the next morning, I find Gabriel sitting up straight and calm in his nest with his eyes wide open. Heartened by his sudden turnaround, I move him into a starter cage used for fledglings in basic flight training. But Gabriel doesn’t try to fly. He doesn’t try to do anything. He just sits bolt upright on the paper towel I have laid out on the bottom of the cage. I pick him up and place him on a low perch an inch from the cage’s bottom. Gabriel grips the perch with his tiny feet and immediately begins eating from the syringe anchored with electrical wire in the corner. His quick grasp of the syringe’s purpose surprises me since I have been hand-feeding him with a long-tipped angiocath that looks nothing like the feeder in the cage. Although it’s the first time I have seen any hummingbird, juvenile or adult, identify a new feeder so effortlessly without instruction, I dismiss it. Perhaps the color of the syringe’s tip, which I have painted with red nail polish for the younger birds, attracts him, I reason. But then other things happen.

  Although the breeze is chilly on this early April morning, the brilliant Southern California sun is streaming down onto the patio, creating pockets of warmth near the house. The sun has tremendous restorative powers for hummingbirds. My first year doing rehab, I discovered that fledglings who struggled unsuccessfully to take flight in indoor cages made rapid progress when placed outside in the sun. Young birds that had been thrashing around the bottom of the cage for days inside the garage would magically appear on the top perch after spending a few hours absorbing sunlight. Seriously injured adults, while less likely to regain flight from a little sunshine, not only derive great psychological benefits from natural light but respond in fundamental ways to the sights and sounds of the wild world around them.

  After Gabriel’s cage has been outside for a few hours, I decide it’s time to wash the road grime off his feathers. Badly injured hummingbirds cannot tolerate the stress of a bath when they first arrive and need to wait a few days until they have stabilized. Like little kids, young hummingbirds love a warm bath. Adult birds, in contrast, while fond of bathing in fountains and bubbling brooks in the wild, resist being washed by human hands. So I let all but the worst cases go until they can bathe themselves after they make it into a large flight cage. But Gabriel, whose feathers are so dark and crusty I can’t determine his species, is in no position to negotiate. I fill a shallow Tupperware container with an inch of warm water and carry his cage back into the garage.

  “Okay, Gabriel, time for a bath,” I announce, reaching into his cage. Rather than sitting stone-still, like seriously injured birds do, or fleeing into the corner to escape my grasp, like healthy adults, Gabriel leans into my hand. “Oh,” I say with surprise, “a cooperator. Not something you see that often in hummingbirds.” I lift Gabriel out of the cage and lower him into the warm water. He immediately spreads his wings and begins paddling around contentedly in a circle.

  “Excellent, Gabriel,” I applaud. “Most hummingbirds freak out their first time in the tub.” Gabriel gazes up at me calmly and continues paddling around like a domestic duck out for a casual afternoon swim in the backyard pond. I sprinkle water on his head and back as he floats by, then gently rub the oily dirt off his wings before letting him go back to swimming laps. While Gabriel is lounging in the tub, Larkin, who has contacted me about hummingbird crises in the past, calls to inquire about a nest that is disintegrating outside her house in Laurel Canyon.

  “The mother didn’t build a very good nest,” Larkin laments after sending me a video in which one chick is hanging upside down from the bottom of the decimated nest and the second is clinging desperately to a torn-off side.

  An expertly constructed hummingbird nest is designed to stretch like elastic as the babies mature, which is why spider webs are the material of choice. The ideal nest expands just enough to accommodate its rapidly growing chicks while at the same time keeping them tightly contained and insulated. But younger mothers fail to exhibit much foresight and tend to select inferior construction materials, ending up with shallow, rigid nests. And unlike the creative décor of nests fashioned by more experienced mothers, the décor of teenage mothers is minimalist, with little or no external embellishment. I have seen a few dozen of these substandard nests over the years. Built by females that fledged in the winter or early spring of that same year, the nests have clearly been thrown together in a slapdash manner, as if the whole experience of getting pregnant and having babies has come as a complete surprise.

  “This is probably a teenage mother,” I explain to Larkin as I carry large flight cages in and out of the garage to replenish formula that seems to vanish into thin air. “And young hummingbirds, like human teenagers, are ill-equipped for parenthood. They shouldn’t even get pregnant because they’re so unprepared for the responsibilities that come with taking care of a baby. And then, to make matters worse, they end up with twins.”

  “It’s so funny you say that because I was thinking before I called that she looks very inexperienced.” Larkin begins laughing. “Like she doesn’t know what she’s doing. She built the nest in a day and it’s kind of flat. And now she’s picking at the outside like she’s trying to fix it but doesn’t really know how. So do they get better with age?”

  “Of course, just as with humans, there is a learning curve. So the nests of older, more practiced mothers are well designed, stable, and beautifully decorated like works of art. And the babies thrive, get a good education, and end up leading successful and productive lives.”

  “So what’s the prognosis for my underprivileged children?”

  “I’m not going to sugarcoat things here, Larkin. Without intervention, these kids are doomed. This clueless teen mom is screaming for help.”

  “Maybe there should be some social services center to call in cases like this,” she says giddily.

  “Yes, that’s me. I’m the hummingbird CFS. So let’s join forces and fix this broken home.” Then I launch into a tutorial on how to build an improvised nest that will support the chicks until they are up and out.

  When I get off the phone with Larkin, Gabriel is still circling around his bathtub like a motorboat with no driver. “I’m pretty sure you’re clean now,” I say, lifting him from the chilled water. When I set him on the paper towels on the floor of his cage, he again crawls onto the perch and begins drinking from the syringe as if he has been doing it all of his life.

  “They should all be as easy as you.” I shake my head in disbelief before setting him back out in the sun to dry off.

  But I didn’t understand Gabriel yet. And he was going to be anything but simple.

  CHAPTER 11

  Everybody Wants You

  EVERYBODY LOVES HUMMINGBIRDS. It’s one of those universal clichés, like “Everything you do comes back to you,” or “The more you learn, the more you realize you don’t know.” Almost all the people who call the rescue hotline go on about their affection for hummingbirds with groupie adulation. Of the some ten thousand avian species flying about the earth, members of the Trochilidae family manage to seize the heart and spark the imagination to a disproportionate degree. In a world filled with things on wings, hummingbirds refuse to be dismissed, t
aken for granted, or upstaged. Cute, charismatic, and supernaturally quick, they have, during our handful of human millennia living alongside them, demanded our attention and respect.

  Early Spanish explorers to the New World called them joyas voladores, flying jewels, for their brilliant, iridescent feathers. The colors of the beija flor, or flower kisser, as Brazilians refer to hummingbirds, span the shades of the rainbow, from a flamboyant, fire-engine red to a deep, luminous violet. Their iridescence comes from tiny air sacs in the feathers that reflect different colors of light, like soap bubbles. While Southern California hummingbirds shimmer brightly in the summer sun, their plumage can’t compete with the dazzling neon colors seen in some of their southwestern and South American counterparts. Male desert and mountain hummingbirds sport especially brilliant hues—matching the vibrant flowers they feed on—on their crowns and gorgets. As in other bird species, the feathers of the female and young run toward more muted earth tones, to maximize protection and ensure camouflage during nesting.

  Hummingbirds have always been regarded as sacred in Native American cultures. Aztec legends depict them as messengers between worlds. In Apache and Hopi lore, shape-shifting is a common theme. In Southern California, more than a few callers are convinced the spirit of a departed relative dwells within a hummingbird buzzing around outside the window. Mothers are the most frequent spiritual visitors, followed by grandmothers and dead lovers. But callers with deceased children identify most intensely with hummingbirds as spiritual ambassadors, perhaps because bereaved parents continue searching for what is lost the rest of their lives. I can’t say exactly how many callers have related stories of deceased friends and relatives descending in the form of hummingbirds from the immaculate heavens above to the gritty city below, but the number is high.