Fastest Things on Wings

by Terry Masear

  “Oh, it’s like that, huh? Okay, then,” I mumbled as I raced down the stairs. When I came charging out the door he was still perched on the security cage, but my presence interrupted his menu perusing and he turned to look at me questioningly. I approached him at a steady pace, and I was surprised he held his ground even when I got within a few yards of the aviary. Only when I was close enough to grab his spindly yellow legs did he swoosh off with a few powerful pumps of his mighty wings. Recalling a story Jean had told me about how a hungry hawk had once pulled an adult hummingbird through the bars of her flight cage, I hurried into the aviary to do a head count. When I got inside, the aviary was a dead zone, with every bird sitting stone-still on the back perch with glazed eyes. Even my appearance, which normally sent the excitable young adults buzzing around in happy circles, failed to nudge them from their frozen poses. I counted fourteen, and my heart sank when I couldn’t find the broad-tailed among them. Only after searching the aviary in a heart-pounding panic did I finally locate him, buried deeply inside the lower branches of the ficus tree with an expression of absolute terror. I had identified his demon.

  After his second brush with the devil, the broad-tailed remained in the aviary for another two weeks, contentedly chasing fruit flies and mining fresh lantana. Then one balmy morning in early June, he appeared unusually restive, posturing assertively at the aviary bars as if he couldn’t wait to get out in the mix. The minute I opened the aviary door, he catapulted fifty feet over the house, air-braked in midflight, executed two rapid-fire spirals, rotated while scanning the horizon, hovered a few seconds to look back at me, then shot off in a blur.

  The young broad-tailed’s hawk, who was a hundred times his size, had provided a crash course on the menacing perils of the wild. But after taking a little more time to consider the unmatched genius of his flight skills, my intrepid warrior had faced the enemy and gone out in a blaze of speed and spirit. That same day, Brad ventured six feet out the door and pirouetted once, then decided he wasn’t ready for the wild world and shot back inside to safety.

  As with all birds who refuse to leave the aviary or unexpectedly return to rehab, as soon as I secured the doors and filled the cage with a dozen new young adults, Brad relaxed and went back to catching fruit flies and mining freshly cut plantain lilies and honeysuckle. Brad stayed through four cohorts, always going through the same approach-avoidance routine at the aviary door on release days. But finally, one sunny, crow-free day near the end of June, Brad the brave led the charge out the door, taking fifteen newly minted hummingbirds with him. Aside from this bold and unprecedented decision to confront his fears, Brad revealed another secret I never would have known if he had not stayed so long. During Brad’s three-month stint in rehab, his dark throat feathers, instead of transforming into the iridescent magenta of a male Anna’s gorget, paled to a light shade of silver. And it was then that I gleaned another possible explanation for his shyness: Brad was a girl.

  “Her throat feathers were so dark when she came in. I’ve never been more certain a bird was a male. How is that possible?” I asked Jean after recounting Brad’s remarkable story.

  “Don’t ask me,” Jean said before offering her usual humble twist on the Socratic paradox. “The longer I do hummingbirds, the less I know about them.”

  The first time Jean offered this self-effacing observation in response to one of my questions, I suspected her of being disingenuous, because if ten thousand hours committed to learning something makes someone an expert, Jean was ten times an authority on hummingbirds. But with each passing year, her humble words rang truer.

  My experience with Brad marked a paradigm shift in my approach to hummingbird rehabilitation. Before Brad, I had treated all birds alike, insisting they leave the aviary on release days. By the time I let them out, rehabilitated young adults were at least six weeks beyond the age fledglings in the wild were when they gained their independence. And six weeks for a hummingbird was the equivalent of a year for a human, so I didn’t want the young adults to get too comfortable and fail to launch. But after Brad’s game-changing revolution, I no longer held birds to a uniform release schedule. Instead, I allowed them to choose freedom on their own terms. As long as they did not become aggressive and cause trouble, I let anyone who resisted release stay on with the new cohort. And to my astonishment, at least one or two birds in every group chose to remain in the aviary for an extra two, and sometimes up to six, weeks.

  After a while, I became so tuned to their body language that I could predict with nearly 100 percent accuracy which birds would stay another round. With young adults preparing for release, I can discern by their flight patterns and the look in their eyes when they are ready to go. Eager birds buzz close to the aviary bars, bouncing back and forth in midair with the rhythm of highly conditioned boxers, as if they can’t wait to get out and prove themselves. Some gain so much self-confidence before they depart that they pick fights with earlier releases that hover just outside the aviary, taunting them through the bars.

  Birds that opt to stay longer, however, display an odd reticence toward all that is wild, avoid hovering near the bars, and retreat to the back corner behind the ficus tree whenever internal or outside combat erupts. And despite my fears, their extended time in captivity in no way compromises their ability to thrive in the wild. On the contrary, those that choose additional rehab invariably appear stronger and more adept their second or third time around. Even more important, several of these holdovers ultimately become valuable mentor birds who seem to take pride in modeling advanced skills for the fresh recruits.

  Brad’s memory of her youthful trauma and its enduring impact on her adult behavior left a deep impression on me. But the motivations of another hummingbird who came in the same week proved equally compelling. At six o’clock on a Sunday morning, three days after Brad had arrived, I got a frantic call from Sonja in Beverly Hills; an adult female Anna’s had gotten trapped in the skylight of an outdoor covered porch the evening before, and she had found it lying unconscious on the brick entryway that morning. The second that Sonja rushed the prone bird into my garage I began administering my usual life-restoring routine. After an hour of treatment, the bird regained consciousness enough to be placed in a starter cage outside in the sun. When I came back outside ten minutes later, the frantic female was banging erratically against the sides of the cage. Assuming she had sustained some type of head trauma, I rushed her into the garage and tried to restrain her so she would not injure her wings. But she proved inconsolable and continued slamming herself against the sides of the cage before collapsing to the bottom in exhaustion.

  I had never seen such agitation in an urban hummingbird, especially one that, according to Sonja, had been eating from a backyard sugar feeder for several months. Over the years, I had seen a few birds go off like this, but they were always fierce-eyed males brought in from the sparsely populated mountains northeast of Los Angeles who had likely never encountered a human being. This female’s level of anxiety was unprecedented for a bird who had arrived unconscious. Adult hummingbirds that come in weak and battered usually relax into their five-star lodgings and seem relieved to have a day to regroup while dining in the warm sunlight at all-you-can-eat feeders. And it’s my policy to keep them overnight, since a lot of birds that appear recovered during the day lapse into torpor their first night in rehab when complications from their injuries set in.

  Watching the hysterical female slam herself against the mesh siding of the cage, I was terrified she might break a wing or drop dead from a heart attack. Since Sonja’s house was just a ten-minute drive away, I called her at seven thirty and said I was bringing the distressed hummingbird home. Once in the car, the captive bird began flying in tight circles and banging her head madly against the top of the cage, prompting me to drift through more than one red light on the deserted Sunday-morning streets. The second I arrived at Sonja’s house, I stepped out of the car and unlocked the eye hooks securing the cage’s top. Before I coul
d swing the top completely open, the bird shot out like a missile and headed straight into the branches of a fifty-foot tree a hundred yards away. Five seconds later she darted back out, then returned to the same spot a few minutes later. When Sonja retrieved a pair of binoculars from the house, I scanned the dense brush in the canyon until the lenses finally alighted on the stressed-out mother who was perched on a dangling branch in a towering eucalyptus tree hastily stuffing food into two screaming nestlings.

  CHAPTER 17

  What I Like About You

  AS WITH A HANDFUL of college students among the thousands I’ve taught over the past twenty years, a few hummingbirds, like Brad, have proven unforgettable. Discovering unusual characters is one of the most rewarding aspects of rescuing hummingbirds, or any wildlife. Just when rehabbers think they have seen the full range of possibilities, an exceptional personality arrives to remind us, as Jean loves to point out, how little we understand about them after all.

  One female black-chinned, named Iris by the classics professor who rescued her in the hills above Santa Barbara, changed everything I thought I knew about hummingbirds. Iris was unable to fly after being bumped out of her nest by a moving van and plunging twelve feet to a concrete driveway below. Once inside the ICU, the three-week-old Iris abandoned her Kleenex nest and took up residence sitting on a pair of ten-day-old Anna’s in their original nest. Every time I came out to the garage to feed the bobble-heads, Iris would be resting calmly in the nest with a little head poking out from under each side of her chest. Occasionally, she would reach down with her bill and groom the babies or reposition them with maternal tenderness.

  When she fledged, I put Iris into a starter cage with a painfully shy Allen’s that had been kept too long by a woman who came across her in the backyard and thought it would be fun to let her kids raise a hummingbird. She called me a few days after bringing the nestling into the house, when it was too late to reunite it with its mother, and wanted to know what to feed her. The woman did not say it directly at the time, but whenever someone inquires about long-term dietary needs, it’s a red flag, signaling he or she intends to keep the bird. So I explained to her that harboring a hummingbird is not only illegal but cruel and inhumane and that the bird would suffer and starve to death on sugar water. This information usually does it for most callers and they surrender their precious discoveries. Nobody wants to spend a week watching a hummingbird die, especially when he or she is the one killing it. But even with this strong caveat, some people can’t see past themselves.

  “Well, my daughter is nine and she’s very intelligent for her age. So I think she can handle it,” the woman pushed back smugly.

  “It’s not about intelligence,” I said, trying to reason with her. “She has no idea what she’s doing and she’s not equipped to deal with this situation for ten different reasons. Hummingbirds need to be in the hands of licensed rehabilitators with years of experience.”

  “Well, my daughter makes her own decisions, so it’s up to her.”

  This kind of laissez-faire parenting always pushes me over the edge. Some parents think they are doing their kids a favor by handing their own jobs over to them. While studying educational psychology in graduate school, I read volumes of research on different parenting styles, and laissez-faire was always singled out as the most disastrous method, even worse than a strict authoritarian approach, of which I’m no fan either. But given a choice between the two and their respective prospects for future dysfunction, it’s no contest. I tried to imagine what it must be like in a permissive home like hers when the kid comes skipping into the kitchen and shouts, Hey, Mom, I’m going to smoke meth and watch some hard porn on the Internet this afternoon.

  Oh, sure, honey, here’s a pipe and the password. Do you need anything else?

  Or how about If I can get my hands on the right detonating device, I can blow up city hall tomorrow.

  Oh, wow, now that sounds like a challenge.

  Nobody was steering the ship here. But a young hummingbird’s life was at stake, so I had to try.

  “It’s not up to her,” I shot back. “First of all, keeping a hummingbird without a permit is a violation of federal law,” I reiterated. “And second, this is an adult decision, and”—news flash—“you are the adult. It’s up to you to provide parental guidance, just as you would”—and here I meant “should”—“with any decision a child is not capable of making on her own, given her lack of maturity and limited understanding of the world.”

  “Well, my daughter will cry if she has to give up this bird.”

  “She’s gonna cry a lot more when she has to watch it die.” I hardened my tone. “Use this as an opportunity to teach her the proper care and respect for wildlife, and explain to her that someday, when she’s ready, she can get into rehab”—After going through her own, I think—“if she chooses.”

  The hands-off-to-a-fault parent finally said she would call me back. A week later, when the nestling stopped eating and it all got too real, she broke down and called. Barely breathing, the fully feathered Allen’s female was lying on her side, too weak to eat, the morning the mother and her three kids arrived with her in a flimsy birdcage crammed with flowers, handwritten love poems, dolls, and children’s jewelry. The cramped cage was so cluttered with junk the bird couldn’t have moved if she had wanted to. Not that she had enough strength to do anything after being starved on sugar water for a week.

  Cases like this are among the hardest we encounter in rehab. I can see the desperation in the birds’ eyes when they arrive. And when a parent allows, even encourages, her children to subject young hummingbirds to such agonizing pain and deprivation, it gets my blood boiling, because there is no excuse. It’s the one thing that infuriates every rehabber. Without exception, birds kept too long by members of the public come in underweight and malnourished and are brought to us when they are shutting down. Then we get to watch them die.

  “I warned you about this a week ago and now here we are. I don’t know where to start with you.” I shook my head in disgust as I struggled to cap my anger after her three kids wandered outside. But when I glanced up, she was staring back at me, frightened and stricken.

  “No . . . I . . . see now,” she whispered haltingly as her eyes darted back and forth between the plump, fluffy nestlings in the ICU and her dying bird encrusted with dried sugar water.

  “Okay, fair enough. But make sure they get it too.” I cocked my head toward the children outside. “Educating kids is an important part of what we do.”

  “I will.” She bowed her head slightly as tears streamed down her expressionless face.

  After I spent the first harrowing night force-feeding the famished bird every three hours, followed by a week of giving her intensive protein and vitamin infusions, she achieved enough lift to move into a starter cage. But the apprehensive fledgling refused to eat unless I reached in and held the syringe while gently coaxing her bill into it. Rescued hummingbirds that have been traumatized by sugar water early in life often harbor deep anxiety about eating from any human apparatus, turning away in terror from plastic syringes that resemble the eyedroppers people fed them with. Like most nestlings that recall the pain of starvation, this young female constantly sought reassurance while learning to self-feed during her first few weeks in rehab. Noticing her cage mate’s need for extra attention, Iris adopted a similar disposition and also refused to eat unless I touched her syringe first. Although well aware of the location and purpose of the syringe, which she had learned to use early on in the ICU, Iris would sit on the perch beside her timorous cage mate and cry until I relented.

  “You know how to do this,” I chided Iris every time she made me go through the motions. At times I would resolve to force her hand. But it did not matter how long I ignored her. She wouldn’t give in. After an hour, Iris would begin to fluff up her feathers and close her eyes, threatening to lapse into torpor as she continued peeping softly. Tough love wasn’t going to work. She won every standoff with m
e.

  Iris turned out to be a born teacher, and I became her first student. In the end, she finished rehab brilliantly. After graduating to the aviary, Iris refused release for over a month. Instead of heading out to the wild when the doors stood wide open, Iris put her strong nurturing instincts to work, becoming one of those rare mentor hummingbirds for the next two groups of new arrivals. With each fresh cohort, Iris taught aviary etiquette by example, modeling how to eat from new feeders, catch fruit flies, hide in the ficus tree at night, and stand up to bullies. She was especially solicitous of the smallest and most frightened underdogs in each group. Whenever she noticed a fearful bird hanging back, she alighted on the perch beside him, tapped his chest lightly with her bill, then encouraged him to join the fray by dropping down and snapping up a fruit fly.

  On one occasion, early in the morning, when hummingbirds like to bathe, Iris brushed a young aviary recruit lightly on the back with her feet as she flew over before heading for the bathtubs. This is what mother hummingbirds do when prompting older nestlings to fledge. Hovering over them, the mother taps her babies with her bill or runs in place on their backs to get them up and out of the nest. When it came to nurturing the young, Iris ran far ahead of the curve.

  Throughout her stay in the aviary, Iris exuded admirable confidence and self-possession. She never got in anybody’s way and nobody messed with her, not even the bossiest young males. Iris had a calming influence that taught me some things about hummingbirds, and about people, too. Her need for special care early on did not mean she was weak or inferior. On the contrary, Iris displayed the most striking example of empathy I have ever seen in a hummingbird. Like several other psychologically complex birds that would come through my facility, this little future saint just needed an extra dose of compassion during her formative youth. And once granted this consideration, Iris turned the tables by nurturing timid rescues in need of the same support.