Fastest Things on Wings

by Terry Masear

  “My dad sent that bird up in the mountains,” Shannon asserted unequivocally as she watched me manipulate a watercolor paintbrush soaked in warm canola oil to remove the sticky spider strands binding the adult female Anna’s wings to her body like a mummy’s wrappings. “He died a week before it happened. And he loved hummingbirds. He used to take hundreds of pictures of them in his yard.” She hesitated for a moment and shook her head, as if wrestling with her own disbelief. “He was right there, shielding me. I could feel it. That bird was trying to tell me something.”

  I glanced over at Shannon with a knowing look. Before rehab ran up on me and hijacked my life, I had a similar experience of feeling that a hummingbird was attempting to communicate with me in some supernatural way. He accosted me at the break of dawn when I stepped out onto the front porch one glorious spring day to get the newspaper. After hovering a foot in front of my face and looking me straight in the eye for what seemed like an eternity, he suddenly executed a sharp vertical and then vanished into the wispy pink clouds overhead. Like Shannon, I sensed my bird was trying to relay a special message from beyond. But in my case, the hummingbird, also a male Anna’s with a shimmering magenta head and gorget, was not telegraphing how much I was loved and missed by dearly departed spirits or steering me away from some unknown catastrophe. Instead, my decorated soldier arrived at the front door like the selective service recruiting for the armed forces. And his message from the hummingbird branch was clear: We want your life.

  When I first began rehabbing hummingbirds, my reaction to stories like Shannon’s near-death encounter always inclined toward skepticism. They’re just birds, I wanted to say. But then that’s foolish, because they are not. Other small birds like chickadees and nuthatches are nearly as quick and almost as cute. But they don’t possess the hummingbird magic that resonates so deeply inside the human spirit that it drives people beyond the limits of sanity. There is something dreamlike and unreal about the fabulous little fairies. And there is a reason for the mythic proportions these miniature birds have assumed historically and continue to enjoy in popular culture today.

  After hearing so many mystifying stories like Shannon’s over the years, all I could do was concede that hummingbirds were capable of extraordinary things. But even with this recognition, I did not understand how deeply their meanings run. Despite the abundant factual and scientific knowledge I had acquired during my close encounters with hummingbirds over the previous few years, I was about to discover far more subtle and complex mysteries spinning within their legendary wings.

  CHAPTER 12

  Brown Sugar

  IF ANYONE HAD TRIED TO EXPLAIN the range and complexities of the hummingbird temperament to me before I started doing rescue, I would not have believed it. We expect our dogs and cats to have unique personalities, and individual differences in higher mammals like elephants and great apes have been well documented. But when we regard a creature as small and seemingly indistinct as a hummingbird, we don’t usually reflect on whether a particular bird is fundamentally aggressive or shy, friendly or aloof, confident or insecure. And yet these variations exist. Even after several years of rehabilitating hummingbirds, I continue to be fascinated by the sometimes slight, other times immeasurable, differences in their dispositions.

  While Gabriel is getting recharged by solar power, I check on the feeders in the aviary where twin female Anna’s from West Los Angeles and three other young adults are jockeying for position around the pink and purple blossoms of a potted fuchsia hanging from the ceiling. The two female Anna’s had been illegally cut from a tree by a well-meaning nature lover named Shinobu who had come from Tokyo, where there are no hummingbirds, to Los Angeles, where hummingbirds seem to be falling out of the sky. Shinobu had been watching the nest’s progress in a juniper tree in his front yard for four weeks. One day in February, Shinobu wrongly assumed the mother had gone missing and cut the nest containing the week-old twins.

  Although I am forever reminding callers of the reasons females appear to vanish a week after their eggs hatch, unfortunately, as with Spencer and his high-anxiety family drama, the mother’s sudden absence throws nest watchers into a panic. I get a hundred calls a year about this abrupt change in behavior. Before I set up the rescue hotline, well-meaning bird lovers cut these nests in a misguided attempt to save the babies, who then died from being fed sugar water for too long. Now I tell alarmed residents to sit out of sight and watch the nest for half an hour until the mother comes in to feed the chicks and to call me back if she doesn’t. I never hear from 90 percent of these callers again, unless it is to celebrate the mother’s unexpected “return.”

  Unlike most concerned hummingbird enthusiasts in Los Angeles, however, Shinobu did not call before acting. Certain the mother was missing in action, he removed the nest from the tree and brought the chicks into the house. Possessing the Japanese fascination for netsuke, Shinobu fell in love with the intricate details he saw in the baby hummingbirds and decided to raise them himself. So, despite his good intentions, Shinobu managed to do everything wrong, first by neglecting to call before deciding to become the hero and then by keeping the nestlings and feeding them an unidentifiable, sticky dark liquid that thoroughly gummed up their crops. One chilly morning about a week after he cut the nest, Shinobu called me from Sony Studios. When I got the chicks from a volunteer driver who picked them up from Sony and delivered them to my house in a decorative Japanese teacup, both nestlings were ice-cold. They had stopped eating because their crops were blocked (which was the reason Shinobu had finally called) and were stretching their necks out and gasping for air. I put them in the ICU, cranked up the heat, and called Shinobu immediately.

  After saying hello and reminding him who I was, I cut to the chase.

  “So, why did you cut the nest?”

  “Because,” Shinobu began confidently, “Mother was gone.”

  “Well, you know the mother does not sit on the nest all of the time after the chicks are a week old,” I explain.

  “No?”

  “No. She flies in to feed the chicks every thirty minutes, but she doesn’t sit on them during the day or at night after they are about a week old.”

  Silence.

  “So she probably was still there . . .” I trailed off.

  More silence.

  “So you should have called me before you cut the nest,” I finished.

  Deafening silence.

  “Shinobu?”

  “Yes,” he answered with the urgent tone of a soldier being reprimanded by a superior officer.

  “What have you been feeding them?” I asked as that stubborn memory of my cold night in March with the young Anna’s came hurtling out of the past.

  “Sugar water,” Shinobu said quickly.

  “And how long did you keep them?”

  “Just a few days.”

  “How many days?”

  “Maybe four,” he replied uncertainly.

  “Maybe more?”

  “Maybe a week,” he admitted.

  “And you fed them only sugar water?”

  “Yes, sugar water only.”

  “Are you sure? Because I need to know if there was anything else.”

  “Just sugar water.” Shinobu stuck to his story.

  “What kind of sugar, then?”

  “Brown sugar.”

  “Brown sugar,” I repeated. Terrific, I thought to myself. Brown sugar is made with molasses, a thick syrup that sticks to a hummingbird’s crop like glue.

  “And you didn’t feed them ants?”

  “Yes,” he answered.

  “Yes, you did feed them ants?” I tried to clarify, recalling that a cardinal rule in English as a Second Language classes was never to ask a question with a negative in it because many foreign-language speakers answer the opposite way an American would.

  “Yes, I did not,” he asserted.

  “Ah, okay. So no ants.”

  “No, I did not know,” he said defensively.

 
“Know what?”

  “They should eat ants.”

  “No, they should never”—I emphasized each word—“eat ants.”

  “Oh.” Shinobu sounded perplexed.

  “So at least in that respect, you’re off the hook.”

  “Hook?” he asked innocently. “What hook?”

  “Daijobu desu yo,” I finally assured him.

  “Ah, hai, arigato gozaimasu!” Shinobu laughed with relief.

  “You’re welcome,” I answered lightheartedly. “Now, Shinobu.” I assumed a more serious tone and began my standard lecture. “Hummingbirds are wild animals protected by federal law, so it is illegal to keep them.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And they need to be cared for by experienced rehabilitation experts who are licensed by the state.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So you will call me right away if you ever find a hummingbird that you think needs help.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And you will never keep another hummingbird, or any other wild animal, in your house again. Okay?”

  Silence.

  “Shinobu?”

  “Yes!” he finally exclaimed resolutely. “I will not.”

  As soon as I hung up, I raced back to the garage and took the teacup out of the ICU. The nestlings’ crops were bulging with coagulated lumps of brown sugar they had no hope of digesting. Both were a few hours away from starving to death. Fortunately, in the two years since my first unforgettable loss, I had become a master at siphoning crops. Since then I had taken in hummingbirds fed prune juice, Gatorade, protein powder, soda pop, wheat bread, boiled eggs, Fig Newtons, and, in one bizarre instance, human breast milk. Needless to say, hummingbirds eat none of these things in the wild. I donned telescopic surgical glasses and quickly went to work extracting spoonfuls of gooey brown liquid from the chicks’ crops, flushing them with warm water, and then siphoning again. After repeating this daunting procedure three times, I fed the immeasurably relieved nestlings a protein-enriched formula I had warmed in the ICU before calling Shinobu.

  After one uncertain day, during which the chicks shied away from the angiocath whenever I offered food, both miraculously recovered from their brown-sugar overdose and began growing with science fiction speed, as if making up for lost time.

  The brown-sugar twins turned out to be among the sweetest hummingbirds I had ever encountered. Although birders are not inclined to use such endearing terms to describe hummingbirds in the wild, once nestlings enter rehab, distinct personalities emerge. To label all hummingbirds as mean and combative misses one of the most fundamental truths every rehabber quickly comes to recognize: hummingbird dispositions are as varied and diverse as those of any domestic pet. Some are tough as nails, others fragile; some show high intelligence and learn everything immediately, others take more time; some rush in and boldly take charge of every social situation, while others are fearful and shrink away from confrontation. And, finally, some display childlike dependence, while others are fiercely self-reliant and can’t wait to get away from their caretakers.

  From the beginning, the brown-sugar twins fell into the category of the bright, quiet types. Although rehabbers discourage close contact with rescued wild animals who are destined for release, the brown-sugar twins had little interest in obeying the rules. Both craved the personal touch, exploring my fingers with their translucent tongues every time I fed them in the ICU. After they fledged and moved up to the starter cage, they danced in tandem on their perches, fluttering their wings and seeking words of encouragement whenever I walked by or came around to fill their feeders. In the large flight cage, they darted over and landed on the back of my hand when I reached in to hang freshly picked lantana and honeysuckle or change their bath water. After graduating to the aviary, they greeted me at the door and commenced mining the lavender and passionflower in my hand before I could get it fastened to their perches inside. My hummingbird attire consists of old T-shirts from scuba adventures Frank and I had pursued over the years, and the twins zeroed in on the PADI dive flag stitched onto the chest pocket, repeatedly drilling their bills into the decal in search of the sweet succulence that the color red always promises in their world. They also slept close together, side by side, every night on the same perch in their cages and later in the aviary’s ficus tree. Neither ever displayed a trace of aggression toward the other or any other hummingbird. Still, there was no doubt in my mind they would thrive in the wild because of their high IQs.

  Hummingbirds have a reputation among avian researchers for their mental acuity. Like songbirds, hummingbirds possess the largest brains in relation to body size of all the birds on the planet. Because of hummingbirds’ considerable intelligence, most fledglings in starter cages require just a day of instruction before learning to feed themselves. But tremendous variation exists among young birds. A few learn the first time and race ahead. Some sit on their perches day after day, crying for food even though the syringe is positioned directly in front of their bills and I have directed them to it dozens of times. Some just can’t seem to get it. Others choose not to.

  The brown-sugar twins, despite being deprived of their mother at an early age, went through rehab confident and self-assured. They picked up everything—how to self-feed, maneuver between perches, mine nectar from flowers, catch fruit flies, bathe, and use a sugar feeder—without delay. Just as important, once they joined other hummingbirds in the aviary, they knew how to get out of the way when trouble started.

  Placed in the aviary with a small group that included a wild and fiercely aggressive rufous male I’d dubbed Chucky, the twins displayed admirable composure in the face of chaos. Whenever Chucky—who liked me even less than he liked other hummingbirds—flew into one of his violent rages and began assaulting everyone in sight, the brown-sugar twins instinctively retreated to the perimeter until the dust settled. Chucky, who sported bright tangerine tail feathers, had been rescued by Charles (hence the nickname) from the side of a road in the sparsely inhabited hills north of Claremont after a Santa Ana windstorm. I don’t know how Chucky ended up unconscious and face-down in the gutter, but the punishing gusts that swept him out of his soft nest and onto the hard pavement that merciless night in March somehow transformed him into the angriest hummingbird ever to come through rehab (though later experience with other offenders that came into rescue suggested Chucky had likely been born a tyrant). Chucky’s cage mate was a smaller Allen’s male who had had the misfortune to arrive from the Pasadena Humane Society at the same time as Chucky, and the two of them, as well as a sturdy pair of Anna’s (a male and a female confiscated from an eight-year-old nest robber who was detained by a neighbor while he was carrying the chicks down the sidewalk and who ran off upon questioning) graduated to the aviary with the brown-sugar twins.

  As with classes in school, every cohort suffers its bully. But Chucky gave fresh meaning to the stereotype of the pugnacious hummingbird. To his credit, Chucky was not insufferable when he shared a flight cage with the diffident Allen’s male and had everything under control. But the second he moved into the aviary with four larger, unknown quantities, Chucky went bad fast. Within minutes of entering his new and uncertain domain, Chucky began launching preemptive strikes against opponents both real and imagined. The Allen’s male, who had accepted his subordinate status early on and therefore sat on a perch out in the open as if the pecking order were already established, bore the brunt of Chucky’s murderous wrath. Annoyed that his former flunky neglected to grasp the new world order and head for cover when battle erupted, Chucky would make an example of him by hooking his legs and driving him to the cement patio with an audible thud. The male Anna’s, though considerably larger and stronger than the rufous, was less developed mentally and therefore managed to lose every fight to Chucky, who would dive-bomb him from above and then circle back and torpedo him into the aviary bars. The Anna’s older sister, even bigger and less inclined to back down, didn’t fare much better. I came out to the aviary th
eir first afternoon together to find Chucky hovering over the female and resolutely plucking feathers off the top of her head whenever she tried to eat from a feeder.

  All hummingbirds require training in conflict resolution, and the experiences they have in the aviary can, like boot camp, provide invaluable lifesaving skills they’ll use once they enter the wild. But Chucky’s lessons in survival crossed the line. After a day of random flybys, I called Jean to report the flaming terrorist.

  “He’s such a little shit,” I complained in frustration.

  “What’s he doing?”

  “Anything he wants. He’s in perpetual attack mode. I don’t know what to do with him. He’s been in the aviary only a day.”

  “Throw him out,” Jean advised. “If he’s that mean, he doesn’t need you anymore.”

  “I’ve never had a bird this aggressive.”

  “He’s the perfect hummingbird,” she said. “Nobody’s going to push him around out there.”

  “That’s for sure. He even buzzes me and clicks behind my back whenever I change the feeders. Sometimes I get this eerie feeling he’d take me out if he could.”

  “He would,” Jean assured me. “If he were big, you’d have to shoot him.”

  The next morning, just after breakfast, I ejected the little orange fireball, who shot over the house like a bullet and disappeared into the rising sun on his way out of town, never to be seen again. After Chucky’s early departure, the relief in the aviary was palpable, and Zen calm prevailed for the remaining two weeks of the brown-sugar twins’ stay in rehab.