by Terry Masear
Although hummingbirds exist only in the Western Hemisphere, some European, Middle Eastern, and African immigrants living in Los Angeles who call the rescue hotline describe the hummingbirds they believe they used to see back home during their early youth. Sometimes callers’ accounts are so vivid and elaborately detailed, they almost convince me of their veracity, and I marvel at how people can have such enduring memories of seeing creatures they could not possibly have seen.
Soon after I place Gabriel’s cage outside in the sun, a tourist from Germany arrives with an injured adult Anna’s he found on the beach in Malibu. While admiring the fledglings in cages on the patio, he effusively recounts how, as a child, he used to watch hummingbirds buzz around the grapes on his grandparents’ vineyard outside of Stuttgart. Although I gently explain to him that hummingbirds don’t live in Germany, he maintains that they certainly do and that he has seen plenty of them.
“Are you sure they were hummingbirds? Because they don’t live in Germany,” I repeat more firmly.
“Well, perhaps they escaped from the zoo or otherwise mysteriously made their way to Stuttgart, then,” he defensively insists, because, as a boy, he had watched them flitting about the rolling vineyards on numerous occasions.
While recently discovered fossil evidence of two-inch skeletons unearthed in southern Germany indicates that modern-type hummingbirds once lived in that region, it was over thirty million years ago. The two tiny skeletons, finely etched in stone, have long bills and wing bones designed for hovering. Oddly, the Old World hummingbird-like fossils were uncovered several years ago in a village less than fifty miles, as the crow flies, north of Stuttgart. Gerald Mayr, the German zoologist who discovered the ancient look-alikes, named them Eurotrochilus inexpectatus—“unexpected European version of Trochilus.” Citing coevolution, Mayr theorizes that these ancient pollinators may have, over tens of millions of years, helped design the tubular flowers of some Asian and African plants living today. After the Old World hummingbirds inexplicably disappeared, bees and other long-tongued insects moved in and assumed the task of pollinating the same nectar-laden flowers.
Given the tension of dissent hovering over our conversation, I do not trouble my time-traveling German acquaintance with this archaeological news flash, even though he proceeds to recall his tiny winged visitors in elaborate detail. Regardless of contemporary hummingbirds’ history of being confined to the New World, and despite my doubts about his recollections, my Continental friend adamantly sticks to his story of enjoying a childhood surrounded by the enchanting birds. By the time he leaves my yard, he almost has me convinced Stuttgart secretly harbors hundreds of undocumented hummingbirds. And, as it turns out, the German is not alone in his flight of fancy.
On the heels of my encounter with the steadfast German, a young production assistant originally from France calls seeking advice on how to rescue a bird that has gotten trapped in his Hollywood condo. When we first begin talking, he mentions that he had to look up the English designation before calling since the French word for hummingbird is colibri, which, as it turns out, is derived from an extinct indigenous language of the French Caribbean.
“You have a name for them, but you don’t have hummingbirds in France, do you?” I prod, dropping my voice on the tag question to indicate I already know the answer.
“Well, we don’t have so many in France,” he concedes, “but my roommate says there are a lot in Spain.”
Upon hearing this surprising news of hummingbirds inhabiting Western Europe, I recall a Senegalese documentary filmmaker who had immigrated to Los Angeles excitedly describing hummingbirds she had seen as a child in West Africa, making me wonder if there aren’t imaginary hummingbirds flying all over the world. Ever since I began hearing these accounts, early on in my rescue work, I have allowed finders’ recollections to run freely without questioning their authenticity. And over and over, colorful childhood stories from my international acquaintances continue to demonstrate that the mythology surrounding hummingbirds extends far beyond their reality.
Psychologists refer to this puzzling phenomenon of recalling events that never happened as false memory, which stems from fantasy and wish fulfillment, as when children describe encounters with hobbits and extraterrestrials. If memories are supposed to be what is left over after we forget everything else, when it comes to hummingbirds, they may be what is imagined when experience falls short of our desires. People who call the rescue hotline attach all kinds of special significance to their hummingbird encounters. While we are stumbling through mundane work, relationship, and family problems, hummingbirds, it would seem, feel compelled to zoom down magically from above and set us straight. The human imagination knows no limits when it comes to envisioning the extraordinary feats the tiny shooting stars are capable of performing. Portrayed as inhabitants of the fairy realm, these free spirits, who dwell somewhere in that rarefied air between the beautiful and sublime, spiral into our weary human world from a parallel dimension to shake things up and remind us of larger possibilities.
Occasionally, a caller describes how an expressive hummingbird dropped out of the sky and landed on his shoulder for no apparent reason other than to display affection. Some people excitedly recount hummingbirds perching on their heads and hands out of the sheer delight of getting close to them. Seasoned rehabbers ascribe these anecdotes to fantasy, since hummingbirds, unless young and helpless, badly injured, or starving for the sugar water in someone’s hand, are not interested in carrying on affectionate relationships with humans. Still, tales of interspecies adoration abound, perhaps because, like unrequited lovers, we desperately want hummingbirds to be as enamored of us as we are of them.
Humans do ridiculous and comical things to get close to hummingbirds. I have seen videos of people with sugar feeders dangling from rods attached to bicycle helmets they’re wearing so they can get an intimate view of the hummingbirds as they come in to drink. Residents of the Gulf Coast sit in their yards all afternoon cradling saucers of sugar water on their laps to attract ruby-throated hummingbirds preparing to fly five hundred miles across the Gulf of Mexico during their fall migration. Other admirers who live on migratory routes in Alaska remove their feeders and stand in the same location cupping sugar water in their hands so hummingbirds will come down and perch on their fingers.
Many callers to the rescue hotline elaborate on the valuable messages hummingbirds have delivered in times of grief or crisis. People frequently report hummingbirds accosting them in their backyards to deliver messages of love, hope, or forgiveness from deceased family and friends. Neurotic callers who project their own traumatic experiences onto hummingbird behavior present the greatest challenge to rehabilitators, as they abandon all reason in their quest for private justice.
A week before Gabriel’s arrival, a distressed, middle-aged social worker in the High Desert northeast of Los Angeles called insisting that a hummingbird nest in the date palm beside her house had been abandoned by a bird that was “not a responsible mother.” Mistaken reports of abandoned nests are the most common calls hummingbird rehabbers receive. Jean and I get up to five a day during nesting season. The caller was agitated and eager to cut the nest, so I warned her off and then patiently guided her through our educational tour.
“Ninety-nine percent of the calls I get about abandoned nests are false alarms,” I assured her. “When the nestlings are a week to ten days old the mother stops sitting on the nest, so people get confused. But this is the hummingbird’s natural behavior.”
“But this is not a good mother,” she objected. “I’ve been watching her and she’s just not around as much as she should be.”
“She’s around. You just don’t see her.”
“No, I’ve been watching the nest constantly and she hardly ever comes back,” the caller persisted.
“She comes back every half hour, but she’s really quick and may stay only a few seconds to feed the chicks, which is normal.”
“I don’t think so. I
hardly ever see her.”
“But the nestlings are strong and healthy, right?”
“Well, yeah, so far, but I don’t think she’s doing such a great job. My own mother abandoned me when I was little, so I know how it goes. She starts being around less and less and the next thing you know, she’s gone. And that’s what I see happening here.”
“This is a little different than your experience. The mother’s absence is simply the hummingbird’s instinctive behavior. She stops sitting on the nest about a week after the chicks hatch and becomes more elusive in order to keep from attracting attention to the nest, which reduces predation. So if you’re not seeing her that often, it’s because she’s being a very good mother.”
“That’s what people said about my mother,” she fired back. “But I knew the reality. She wasn’t there when I needed her.”
“Well, all you can do is sit and watch the nest for an hour without taking your eyes off it. If you see her feed the chicks every thirty minutes or so, she’s doing her job and you need to let it be.”
The distraught nest monitor grudgingly agreed to follow my advice but called the next day to deliver another account of the mother’s neglect. Again, I assured her of the hummingbird’s competence and urged her to leave the nest alone. Though still insisting I was missing the point, she agreed to keep her distance. But the next morning she cut the nest and, to my immeasurable exasperation, called me with a pair of healthy, two-week-old Costa’s nestlings.
“I was up half the night crying. I just couldn’t take it anymore,” she reported defensively. “I know how it feels to be left alone all of the time.”
When I first started doing rehab, I dressed down nest robbers like this, demanding they reattach the nest and find something else to do with their time for the next few weeks. But I have learned the hard way that people who call rescue aren’t necessarily interested in doing what’s best for the wildlife involved. Self-absorbed callers can be volatile and become so incensed by rational argument that they hang up and disappear. No matter how logical my reasoning might be, some people can’t be talked down from their high-strung emotional tightrope. So I play along, for the birds’ sake.
“Get them to rehab right away, then, so they get the care they need,” I insisted, giving her the number of a rescue facility in her area. I get two or three of these off-the-map calls every year. Each time, I comfort myself with the recognition that although the chicks would be better off in their natural environment, and the last thing we need are more babies in rehab, our nearly 100 percent success rate with healthy nestlings far exceeds the estimated 30 percent chance of survival they face on the red-in-tooth-and-claw streets of Southern California.
Just like humans’ imaginary medical emergencies, false alarms over abandoned nests throw entire families into crisis mode. When domestic drama devolves into emotional pandemonium, the rehabber is often cast in the role of shrink in managing the family feud.
Not long after the nest cutter’s meltdown in the High Desert, Spencer from West Los Angeles called at eleven on a Saturday night, twelve hours after his five-year-old son shook the branch of a potted tibouchina on the front porch that a hummingbird nest was attached to, sending the mother darting off in terror. The pervasive misconception that touching a nest or chicks will lead the mother to reject and abandon her babies accounts for no small number of frantic calls to hummingbird rescue.
“Sorry to call so late, but we just got home from a dinner party and the mother still hasn’t come back. Nobody has seen her since this morning,” Spencer related dejectedly over the phone. “At first I was angry at my son because I warned him several times to stay away from the nest. But now I just feel sorry for him because his sister is furious and calls him a murderer every time she passes him in the hallway.”
“Your daughter sounds really tough. I’d recommend law school.”
“I’m an attorney,” he responded playfully.
“I went to law school for a while.”
“What on earth possessed you to do that?” he asked with exaggerated disbelief.
“I don’t know. I guess I got tired of trying to make an honest living. No offense.”
“None taken,” he replied lightly. “So you took up hummingbirds instead.”
“Well, they’re a passion, not a profession. And they definitely keep you honest. So, getting back to your daughter, it sounds like the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.”
“Unfortunately, no.”
“How old is she?”
“She’s eight.” He sighed. “Very smart and really into animals. My wife is trying to be strong but she’s freaking out inside because she’s convinced the babies are dying. And my son senses her fear, so he’s been hiding in his bedroom. The whole family is losing it. I’ve spent the entire day trying to run interference, but now nobody can sleep. I don’t know how much longer we can take this stress.”
“Okay, Counselor, let’s break down the facts of this case,” I said, and then I walked him through my usual round of questioning about the chicks’ age, appearance, noise level, and behavior.
“My wife says they looked really lethargic this afternoon,” Spencer told me after submitting to my interrogation. “Could I just bring you the nest so we can get past all of this?” he pleaded with the weariness of a family-court judge after a long day on the bench.
“I don’t think that’s the right move. Based on the nestlings’ age and your description of their behavior, I think the mother is still there and the chicks are fine. They might appear lethargic because they’re at the age when their eyes are just starting to open so they look kind of squinty. But when the chicks can thermoregulate and don’t need their mother’s body heat anymore, she moves off the nest. So her seeming disappearance at this point is actually just part of a hummingbird’s natural behavior. It’s an unfortunate coincidence that she stopped sitting on the nest the day your son shook the branch. But she’s still on the job and will zip in to feed the babies every thirty minutes during the day. So maybe you can explain this to your family in order to calm things down a little and get some sleep.”
I instructed Spencer to have someone get up at the crack of dawn and watch the nest closely for thirty minutes to determine if the mother was still present. He reluctantly agreed. When I checked my voicemail the next morning at seven, Spencer’s message was the first of three.
“Terry!” an exuberant voice boomed. “The mother came back at dawn and fed the babies. It was amazing. What a tremendous relief,” he shouted as the family celebrated in the background.
Later that week, Jean called me after hours of dealing with traumatized hummingbird lovers who were psychologically imploding for reasons entirely imagined.
“I’ve spent the whole morning on the phone counseling people about crises that aren’t even real,” she lamented with frustration. “Then a woman calls and is hysterical about a fledgling flying around inside her house. It took me ten minutes to calm her down enough so she could listen to what I was saying. I should put out a shingle.”
“Why bother?” I asked rhetorically. “The line at your door is already snaking around the block.”
The following day, Willow, a textile artist in West Hollywood, called me to describe how she communicated telepathically with a hummingbird in her yard and had connected with the bird through divine intervention. I get this a lot. People assume that since I rescue hummingbirds, I travel through portals and am privy to all kinds of paranormal information unavailable to regular human beings. Callers often confide that hummingbirds represent their spirit animals or totems. Others describe their hummingbird shrines and tattoos and report bonding spiritually with them. During my first few years of doing rescue, I shared laughs with other rehabbers over such accounts, since we viewed bonding with hummingbirds, like falling in love with the town playboy, as strictly a one-way street. But I had something to learn about this too.
In Willow’s case, the emotionally starving artist placed a potted la
ntana on her dining-room table to lure the hummingbird into the house with the goal of forging a stronger connection. Predictably, the bird flew in, became panicked and disoriented, hit the glass trying to get out, fell, and, in a bizarre twist, ended up tightly sandwiched between the two lower panes of the kitchen window. Given my impossible schedule during hummingbird season, I don’t normally do house calls, but I happened to be driving near her neighborhood on Melrose when Willow called and frantically informed me that the trapped bird had chicks in a nest in the pepper tree just outside. When I got to her house, with its walls draped in loud artwork indicating she had drifted into a few too many hippie-dippy Melrose yard sales, Willow was sitting red-faced at the kitchen table trembling with fear.
“She doesn’t love you the way you love her,” I admonished the weeping Willow as I carefully extracted the petrified hummingbird from between the windowpanes with chopsticks. “Don’t ever invite her in again.”
By the end of that mad week, in an entirely different but equally unforgettable scenario, Shannon, a graduate student from Riverside who brought me a spider-web victim, described how a hummingbird had diverted her from a potentially deadly encounter as she was hiking alone in the San Bernardino Mountains. Just as Shannon was about to descend the trail into a ravine, an adult male Anna’s appeared out of nowhere and hovered directly in front of her, flashing his magenta gorget like a stoplight in the bright sun. When she approached the bird, he took off in the opposite direction. Assuming he was gone, she continued down the trail, but the bird zoomed up from behind and hovered just to her left. A moment later, to Shannon’s astonishment, the hummingbird buzzed in wide circles over her head several times as she was making her way down the trail, then, like Lassie, signaled her to follow him in the other direction by flying a few yards ahead and hovering at eye level. Intrigued by his friendly behavior and armed with a new high-speed digital camera, Shannon turned and followed the dazzling male up the trail and along the ridge for several hundred yards, snapping photos all the way. After taking dozens of pictures, Shannon descended the trail on the other side of the ridge and went home. Two days later, she read a news story reporting the body of a young hiker at the bottom of the ravine the hummingbird had guided her away from. A month after the incident, when Shannon made the sixty-mile drive from Riverside to deliver the female hummingbird she had found entangled in a spider web inside a parking garage, the cause of the hiker’s death remained undetermined.
