Fastest Things on Wings

by Terry Masear

  Because they spend so much of their time buzzing back and forth and hovering between perches, birds in large flight cages eat like teenage boys. In the case of a cage housing four Allen’s fledglings, I fill two 12 cc syringes with formula every three hours, or five times a day. Cages containing three or four birds of a larger species, such as Anna’s, may consume twice that.

  The first day with new cage mates can be edgy, but after some reassignments, social relations in the large flight cages tend to run smoothly for a few weeks, until an inescapable boredom and impatience overcomes the growing young adults. At this juncture, rapidly maturing residents are busy honing advanced skills in preparation for the simulated wild of the outdoor aviary. Spending two weeks in a large flight cage is critical for older fledglings’ physical growth, developing flight skills, and psychological maturity.

  With the exception of a few forces of nature like Chucky, young birds that look strong and self-assured in their large flight cage appear slow and terrified the first day they move up to the aviary. The minute they encounter unknown birds in a strange and large environment, all of their weaknesses and insecurities come out. Older and more experienced birds, even the smallest females, can easily dominate new arrivals in the aviary, who fumble around apprehensively and avoid confrontation by heading for cover like freshmen on their first day in high school.

  Once in the aviary, young adults learn all of the advanced skills necessary to survive in the wild. An eight-foot-high, ten-by-ten-foot walk-in octagon with a security door, the aviary has galvanized wire siding, dowel perches mounted all around, and a long plastic-coated perching wire extending across the diameter. Several large cylindrical feeders are positioned five feet high around the octagon and secured to the aviary bars by metal springs for quick release. A raised stone birdbath containing plastic bathtubs filled with river rocks stands in the corner. Rotten bananas in a shallow container under a potted six-foot-tall ficus tree draw thousands of fruit flies every day. Aviary cohorts range from four or five birds in the slower months of late winter to twenty or more by peak season in early July.

  As evidenced by Chucky and his four cage mates, social tension is more likely to erupt into physical altercation when aviary numbers are small. Although it seems counterintuitive—and here, as Lao Tzu reminds me, the truth often seems paradoxical—single-digit cohorts suffer more dangerous bullying than larger groups. Because of a phenomenon known as critical mass, the more birds residing in the aviary, the harder it is for one or two to dominate, so larger groups experience less violent aggression. Naturally, exceptions to this rule can arise, as I would soon learn.

  During their first few nights sleeping outside in the aviary, young hummingbirds crowd closely together on an electrical-wire perch twisted into a six-inch-diameter circle and extended from the center of the roof. After all of their fighting and self-important posturing during the daylight hours, insecure young birds huddle tightly together for warmth and security against the cold and danger of the night. Just as hummingbird adults in the wild obey the law of the jungle and transition from Hobbesian warfare to sharing their sugar feeders on cold, rainy nights, young adults in the aviary seem to recognize that in the face of darkness and the unknown, they are in it together.

  After a few evenings of forming a circle for protection, the budding adults move, one by one, from the wire perch into the ficus tree to sleep. Some continue to sleep side by side in the tree every night until their release. The soon-to-be lone wolves perch together on a branch, resting against one another in what will be their final days of close companionship.

  When I enter the aviary on nights with a full moon, the birds, scattered in pairs throughout the ficus tree, glow like Christmas tree ornaments in the bright moonlight, just as they had in my dream two years earlier, before I owned an aviary or had seen hummingbirds sleeping in the dark. When I look at them from behind, the hummingbirds’ green, oval-shaped backs appear identical both in form and color to the leaves on the tree, making them perfectly camouflaged as they sleep. How do they know this? I gaze at their transcendent beauty in quiet admiration, wondering at all the mysteries they possess that I will never understand. And I take comfort in my recognition of the boundless and unknown world that they inhabit, free from the limited, logical restrictions by which human life is so often enslaved.

  After two months of eating, sleeping, growing, and learning the habits of a wild hummingbird within the safe confines of their manmade fortifications, rehabilitated young adults have mastered the skills necessary to make it on their own. And this confidence prompts maturing birds to turn their attention to the outside world and all of the exciting possibilities it holds for them.

  With the birds’ entry into adulthood, iridescent patches of magenta on the Anna’s, tangerine on the Allen’s, scarlet on the rufous, and purple on the black-chinned begin appearing on the males’ throats. While they are completing their higher education, birds in rehab fill up their fast-paced days catching fruit flies, drinking quarts of formula, mining colorful bouquets of local flowers, splashing around in their bathtubs, chasing each other in blurred circles, and eyeing the wild birds on the other side of the bars with a mix of fear and fascination. Gradually, the bold recruits begin mirroring their wild counterparts by confidently parading their skills close to the bars that separate them from life on the outside. Observing my free spirits from inside the aviary, I detect the fire in their eyes that reveals their yearning to take on a larger life.

  Finally, on a clear and cloudless day, I open the doors, granting my reclaimed treasures the freedom to fly home to the natural world from which they came. And as they drift out through the doors with cautious enthusiasm and make their transition back to the urban jungle into which they were born, they go with the unspoken assurance that I will be there to catch them if they fall.

  CHAPTER 16

  And the Healing Has Begun

  IN THE FOUR WEEKS between Gabriel’s and Pepper’s dangerous encounters with the opposite sex, twenty young hummingbirds have come into rescue. By the time Pepper appears, in early May, I have taken in sixty birds; eight have been released, forty are still moving through the rehab pipeline, and twelve, despite my best efforts, could not be saved. The twenty that have come in since Gabriel’s soggy arrival include a fledgling whose tail feathers were accidentally pulled out when he attempted to escape the grasp of a young jogger who picked him up in a park, a juvenile who’d been trapped and flying laps inside a Studio City apartment hallway, a nestling heard peeping under a car’s windshield wiper when the finder got home from work, two nests of twins cut by gardeners preparing for house painting, a nest of wind-chime hatchlings abandoned by their mother during a powerful Santa Ana windstorm, and two unscathed nestlings brought home by cats, one by an Abyssinian whose owner was quite proud of his pet’s gentle handling, and the other by an aged and toothless cat who, according to his doting guardian, had rescued grounded chicks in the past. The remainder of intakes consists of young birds discovered on canyon trails, city sidewalks, high-rise stairwells, and the classic Southern California scenario: floating in swimming pools.

  When it comes to their approach toward hummingbirds, cats fall solidly into two camps. The first and most typical are the natural-born killers: cats that catch, maim, and dismember birds with savage abandon. The second, not as common but surprisingly frequent, are the search-and-rescue cats that locate young birds grounded by inclement weather and then gently transport them back to their owners. About half of the cat-caught hummingbirds that make it to rescue die overnight because the bacteria in a cat’s saliva infects a bird’s bloodstream like poison. If a cat-caught hummingbird’s skin has not been punctured and he makes it through the first night of rehab, he’s on the road to recovery. Interestingly, most dog-“found” birds (“found” because only an exceptional dog can catch a healthy hummingbird) that come into rescue survive and are successfully rehabbed because humans have, over tens of thousands of years, bred and trained our cani
ne companions to retrieve with a soft mouth.

  The morning after Hayley drops off Pepper, I set the tragic beauty outside in the sun for light and encouragement. Sitting quietly on her low perch, Pepper has a slender, delicate profile, with the Anna’s characteristic shimmering green back, smooth silver chest feathers, and exotic black eyeliner like ancient Egyptian royalty. When I kneel in front of her cage to examine her in the sunlight, the source of her disability reveals itself. Across the right side of her breast is a thin, one-inch gash where the feathers have been sheared off as if with a razor. This cut is where Pepper came into contact with the metal edge of the chafing dish.

  Hummingbirds have large pectoral muscles that power their wing strokes. Soft-tissue injuries can impair flight, and in nature, when wings do not rotate fully, it’s a quick end. Remarkably, rehabbers have nearly a 100 percent success rate saving birds with this type of wound. But because the damage sustained by hummingbirds with chest injuries is often serious, the healing process takes time. Fortunately for Pepper, the nesting season runs another three months, so time is something I have plenty of.

  The first hummingbird that came in with a chest wound similar to Pepper’s puzzled me because he could fly forward between low perches in a starter cage but could not get any lift. The newly fledged Anna’s, who arrived unconscious and in torpor, had been found under a jungle gym by a three-year-old boy named Brad. By the time Brad and his dad arrived with the bird, on a brisk afternoon in late March, the young father was certain his son’s remarkable discovery was dead.

  “I’m afraid we’re too late.” He grimaced after handing the silver-and-green fledgling over to me wrapped in a child’s T-shirt as the not-quite-yardstick-tall Brad disappeared behind his father’s legs in silent terror.

  Cradling the inert bird lightly in my hand, I could feel an almost imperceptible vibration. “No, he’s still alive,” I assured him as bashful Brad peeked one wide blue eye out hopefully. “What do you think happened to him?”

  “I’m not sure”—Brad’s father shook his head—“but there were a lot of noisy crows in the yard a couple of hours before my son found him this morning.”

  “Ah, being at the bottom of the food chain is one of those unfortunate realities for young hummingbirds.”

  “Can you save him?” he asked anxiously.

  “Yeah, I think I can,” I said before glancing down at Brad, who immediately retreated back into his nook like a frightened mouse.

  “Is it okay if we stay a few minutes?” His father looked at me uncertainly.

  “I’m pretty sure I can save him,” I said cautiously as I locked eyes with the father, “but I can’t be certain, if that’s okay.”

  “Yeah, we’ll chance it.” He nodded uneasily.

  “All right,” I agreed as I went to work warming and force-feeding the bird. After fifteen minutes of small talk with the father and intensive rehab with the bird, the young fledgling emerged from torpor, opened his eyes, and began looking around with the usual stunned expression hummingbirds get when they awake surrounded by giants.

  “Thank you, Terry.” Brad’s father gasped as if he had finally come up for air after holding his breath too long underwater. “You don’t know how much this means. It was a very big deal.” He cocked his head toward the hidden cherub peering out again with one enormous blue eye.

  “Do we have a name for this little bird?” I asked quietly.

  The father turned his head and looked down; after a pause, the blond hair shook back and forth slowly.

  “Well, he’s a handsome young boy,” I observed, examining the dark stippling running down the fledgling’s throat. “So we’ll call him Brad.” I smiled, prompting the tousled blond head to disappear silently into its safety zone.

  By the next morning Brad could perch, self-feed, and spin one wing perfectly. But he had a deep gash on the right side of his chest, and his right wing proved stubbornly slow to heal. For two weeks Brad sat on his low perch watching me go about feeding and tending to the forty hummingbirds buzzing in the cages around him. Frustrated with his lack of progress, I developed a kind of remedial flight training in which I positioned Brad on a slender twig two inches from the high perch in his cage then lowered my hand slowly so he would rotate his wings and fly to it. Brad responded to this physical therapy with delight, dancing excitedly on his low perch whenever he saw me approaching his cage with the stick. The second I placed him on the high perch and held the stick an inch in front of him, Brad would step gingerly onto the twig and begin fluttering his wings as I raised and lowered my hand inside the cage. After a few repetitions I would hesitate just long enough for Brad to fly-hop across the gap between the twig and the perch, thus giving him the sensation of being airborne. Like adults with soft-tissue injuries, young Brad could travel only a few inches from the twig to the high perch when I first began lowering him on the stick. But each day, I widened the gap a little farther, and he achieved more lift and greater distance; after several days, without realizing it, Brad was flying again. A week later Brad moved up to a large flight cage with a pair of Anna’s twins whose mother had been killed in an automobile accident.

  Similar to adults with head and back injuries, damaged fledglings like Brad recover with the dogged determination of returning war veterans. Slowly and deliberately they learn to fly all over again. Most sit passively for a week or two before attempting to do anything. Then they begin the long healing process by sliding off a low perch and bouncing back and forth across the bottom of the cage. For hummingbirds, intermediate forward flight is the easiest, while hovering represents the most demanding maneuver. Once injured fledglings and adults can fly forward between low perches, they begin working their way up. And gradually, as a result of the flight therapy I invented for Brad, birds with pectoral injuries regain vertical lift, learn to pirouette in midair, and, always last, relearn that most complex and strenuous of aerial skills, hovering.

  Helping seriously injured adults recover their flight capacity is even more poignant than watching nestlings fledge. Keenly aware of what they have lost, adult hummingbirds put their absolute trust in me and seem to understand that I am bringing them back from an otherwise certain death. Sometimes I notice them watching me intently as I fill feeders in the cages around them, waiting for their turn as if looking forward to flight-training exercises they cannot perform without me. When I open the side door to their cages, they begin bouncing and fluttering on their perches in eager anticipation. And day by painstaking day, they recoup everything that was so suddenly stripped away from them.

  By the time Brad made it into the aviary, five weeks after his arrival, he was the perfect hummingbird. Except for one thing: he refused to leave when I released the birds from the aviary two weeks later. When I opened the doors on a glorious morning in May, as the other young adults ventured out, first cautiously, then ecstatically, into the wild, Brad looked out the side door with trepidation, flew about three feet past the threshold, hovered for a few seconds, heard crows in the distance, turned, and bolted back inside to safety. When I entered the aviary and tried to lure him out with a sugar feeder, he perched in the back of the cage as far from the doors as he could get and stared at me with wide dark eyes. A few hours later, after scrubbing the aviary while Brad watched uneasily from his high perch, I finally closed the doors and brought in a new cohort. Two weeks later, when a dozen young adults bolted to freedom, Brad went through the same routine.

  “Okay, Brad,” I relented after an hour of unsuccessfully attempting to persuade him out the second time. “It’s up to you to go when you’re ready.”

  While Brad was involved in his to-be-free-or-not-to-be vacillation, another curious character emerged from the rescue ranks. A week after Brad’s arrival, an animal hospital in Sierra Madre sent me a broad-tailed fledgling who had sustained a slight head injury after slamming into the window of a school bus. After a few tipsy days in a head-injury cage half the size of a starter cage, the young male began flying normally
, so I ran him through the customary stages of rehab. But once he got into the aviary, he also refused to leave on schedule and stayed through two cycles. The day my emboldened broad-tailed finally took the plunge into the wild, he cut an impressive figure as an unusually large, powerful hummingbird. But a few hours after his release, I came out to find the distraught young adult hanging on the outside of the aviary screaming to get back in as if he had been terrorized by some unimaginable monster. When I put my hand over him, he didn’t flinch, so I closed my fingers around his back, gently slid him off the bars, and returned him to the aviary with the new cohort. At the time, I had no idea what could have terrified my broad-tailed powerhouse so thoroughly his first day out. But I sensed something bigger and scarier than Brad’s croaky corvids had made him fear for his life after that initial launch. And the next morning, the suspect appeared.

  At six thirty, after feeding the crowd of nestlings in the ICU, filling aviary feeders, and setting cages out on the patio, I trudged back upstairs to lie down for thirty minutes. By late spring, my internal clock is so finely tuned to thirty-minute intervals that I no longer require a watch. Awaking at seven, I glanced out the upstairs window and then did a double take. A Cooper’s hawk was skulking around on the lower roof of the aviary’s security cage inspecting the fifteen young adults inside. Earlier that week, I had seen this young raptor hanging around the roof of the neighbor’s garage where I throw birdseed to the doves and finches in the morning. He had been arriving at dawn every morning with his mother, who was teaching him to hunt. One day I watched her herding a squirrel in circles around the roof with her wide wings while he sat absorbing the lesson from his perch on the power lines above. Now he was checking out my hummingbirds as if he had dropped in at the local sushi bar for a quick snack. I slid the upstairs window open and shouted at him to get lost, at which point he rotated his head and glared at me defiantly with steely yellow eyes as if to say, And what are you intending to do about it?