by Terry Masear
“No, it’s overkill. A four-parts-water, one-part-sugar mix approximates the twenty percent solution hummingbirds get from most flowers in the wild.”
Maggie thanks me for the advice and reiterates that her daughter has been hounding her for years to take down the feeders before too many birds become full-blown sugar addicts.
“Worse things could happen to them,” I assure her. I point out that feeders help hummingbirds and are contributing to expanding populations in parts of North America, so in fact the explosion of feeders in backyards across the country is a positive thing. “As long as people keep them clean.”
I have this conversation every day during the summer. Angelenos love to compete to see who can get the most hummingbirds at their feeders. But attracting them to yards also invites a lot of work, and it’s easy to get sloppy, which leads to suffering and death. Over the years, I have seen too many victims of human negligence. So I continue to be a broken record on this point: “Dirty feeders kill. If you don’t have the time and energy to keep them clean, take them down.”
Two weeks later, near the end of July, I release sixteen birds and move fourteen young adults into the aviary with the hybrid and Powder, both of whom have elected to stay on. The members of the fresh cohort, consisting mostly of large-brained black-chinneds, are poised and nonconfrontational, so I optimistically toss Pepper in with them. But again she heads straight for the bars. Although none of the birds in the aviary harasses or even pays her passing notice, Pepper clings to the bars and cries, so again I return her to a flight cage, where she calms down. Watching her fly smoothly between perches, I wonder if her close connection to Gabriel may be contributing to the problem, and I entertain the idea of holding her back until he is ready for the aviary. But Gabriel’s progress remains glacial, and even though he occasionally manages to fly-hop up to a midlevel perch, I still am not convinced he is ever going to hover again. And without the ability to hover in the wild, a hummingbird is doomed.
It’s nearly August and the summer deluge of fledglings has slowed to a trickle. I have been giving Pepper fresh flowers every day, so she is well versed in varieties of local vegetation. But she still hasn’t caught a fruit fly and needs to spend a couple of weeks sleeping outside in a tree at night before her release. I wonder if she might be better off in an outdoor cage by herself for a few days. I don’t have another aviary to put her into. But I know someone who does.
CHAPTER 24
Don’t Leave Me This Way
THE LAST WEEK IN JULY, I take in just four fledglings. Two do not survive their first night in rehab. Late-summer fledglings suffer a multitude of hardships, including stiflingly hot weather, deadly mite infestations, a paucity of flowers, and an overall lack of nutrition. On July 30, I release the birds in the aviary, and again the hybrid and Powder choose to stay. The nine black-chinned beauties, however, who have to head for Mexico over the next several weeks, shoot high into the sky as if propelled by an external force. An hour later I put the smallest group since April, just six young adults, into the aviary. The ICU and the starter cages, except the one Gabriel occupies, sit empty in the garage. Aside from Pepper, an adult female black-chinned missing two primary feathers, an adult male rufous, a male Anna’s blinded in one eye and named One-Eyed Jack, and another adult Anna’s I call Iron Mike, my large flight cages are empty as well. Even more liberating, apart from a call every day or two, my cell phone has suddenly fallen silent.
Any hummingbirds remaining at my facility by mid-August have to be comfortably adjusted to life in the aviary so I can return to teaching at UCLA for the second summer session. I feel I have been away too long already and am eager to get back to the classroom. In addition to their formula feeders, birds in the aviary can drink from sugar feeders during the day and do not require such close monitoring. They also have an abundance of fruit flies to chase around and grow fat on.
On Friday I call Jean and describe Pepper’s psychological hang-up. Jean offers to put her into a small, walk-in flight cage she uses for birds with physical and emotional disabilities. I agree to bring Pepper down on Saturday afternoon. As I begin power-washing the last cages to put away for the winter, my phone rings. Aaron, a real estate agent from Toluca Lake, is calling to report a hummingbird flying around the ceiling of a house he has listed for sale.
“I have a private showing in an hour and I’m afraid this distraction is going to blow the deal. I have no idea how to reach him,” Aaron explains with agitation.
“How high is the ceiling?” I cut to the chase.
“It’s high.”
“How high?”
“Like, thirty feet, maybe more.”
“Thirty feet!” I exclaim. “That’s like a warehouse. Who would want a house with ceilings that high?”
“Well, a lot of celebrities live in this area.”
“Ah, I see. So they need rooms with ceilings high enough to accommodate their towering egos.”
“Yes.” He laughs. “That’s a good way of putting it.”
“Okay, Aaron, this might be a lot simpler than it appears. Are there any bright red fabrics in the house?”
“Yeah, actually, there are. The owners have kind of garish taste and they have red velvet drapes in the den,” he observes disapprovingly.
“That sounds like it has greater potential to be a deal-breaker than the trapped hummingbird.”
“I couldn’t agree more.”
“So take the red drapes down and—I assume there are double doors in the living room?”
“Several.”
“Open all the double doors, and drape the curtains over them.”
“Really?”
“Red is an irresistible magnet for these guys. Try it. And call me if it works.”
The minute I hang up, the phone rings again. Cliff has a fledgling grounded in his driveway that he has been assisting for three days.
“The avocado tree is too high to put him back in the nest,” Cliff informs me. “His mother is still feeding him during the day and I take him into the garage at night. I wouldn’t even be doing all this if it weren’t for my kids.”
“Well, it’s good to know you’re learning something from them,” I encourage.
“Yeah, I grew up in the sticks in Wisconsin and we didn’t interfere with nature.”
“Yes, we did,” I counter. “I grew up in the same sticks and we interfered in all kinds of ways with our farms, subdivisions, freeways, pollution, deforestation, water management, and hunting. But when it came to saving wildlife, people just didn’t get involved in any positive way. If a wild animal needed help, everyone retreated into that lazy and convenient ‘Let nature take its course’ line. As if we haven’t screwed everything up already.”
Cliff is silent for a moment. “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” he finally concedes. “There was a lot of indifference. But my kids aren’t like that at all. They’ve been so worried about this little bird and insist we can’t just leave him out there. It’s so important to them that we help him survive.”
“It’s heartening to know that they’re taking the lead.” I praise Cliff’s effort before advising him on how to build a faux nest and secure it to a tree nearby, which will ensure the chick’s safety at night. “That way you don’t have to get up at dawn every morning to put him back out.”
After dispatching Cliff, I get an excited voicemail from Aaron. “I can’t believe it worked!” he exclaims. “The hummingbird flew down almost immediately to check out the red drapes, then buzzed straight out the door.”
I get two or three emergency calls every year reporting hummingbirds trapped in fire stations. I tell the firefighters to move the trucks just outside the door. They always call me back in astonishment when it works.
At nine o’clock, after going through my usual routine of securing the caged birds inside the garage for the night and washing feeders, I head upstairs to get ready for bed. As I am taking a shower I notice a swelling mosquito bite on the right side of my waist t
hat I had gotten the night before. When it comes to mosquitoes, I’m candy. Since my early youth, the little bloodsuckers have seized every opportunity to gnaw on me. As a kid on the farm, I used to suffer dozens of bites on hot summer nights. Frank can stroll through a tropical swamp half naked at dusk and not get a single bite. I take a bath in extra-strength Cutter and cover myself like a sheik and still get bites on every inch of exposed skin and even on some that is not. Being outside with the hummingbirds around the clock, I have gotten used to having a few irritating bites every night when I go to bed despite my daily ritual of dousing myself in insect repellent until I choke. But this bite is enormous, the size of a half-dollar and maddeningly itchy. As I am drying off after my shower, I show the bite to Frank.
“Eww! Are you sure that’s from a mosquito?” he exclaims in horror, slathering a handful of hydrocortisone on the expanding welt.
“Yeah, I got it last night. But it wasn’t this bad. It itches like mad.” I grimace as he empties the tube.
“Come on,” he says, leading me out of the bathroom. “Let’s get you to bed and see how it looks tomorrow.”
On Saturday morning I get a text from Cliff reporting that his young bird has successfully fledged. “Thank you for your insight and advice,” he writes. “I feel a lot better getting involved in a positive way.”
My encounter with Cliff triggers haunting images of the violence against wildlife I witnessed during my farm youth in Wisconsin that I wish I could erase. But along with those grim recollections, my involuntary detours into the past also remind me of the long road to enlightenment I have traversed in my thirty years since.
Talking to Cliff makes me remember a funny story Jean told me a few years ago about a woman who called to report a fledgling that had been struck by a car in Long Beach and was flapping around in the gutter just outside her house. The caller wanted to save the suffering bird but her husband insisted she let nature take its course. Jean promptly told the caller to ask her husband whether, should he ever get hit by a car and be left helpless and crawling in the gutter with a broken leg and no hope of saving himself, he would prefer that everyone driving by let nature take its course and leave him there to die. Twenty minutes later the caller showed up at Jean’s door with the injured bird and her husband sitting stone-faced at the wheel in the driveway.
We hear this kind of anthropocentric smugness a lot in rehab. Some people insist that individual humans are more important than members of all other species and therefore they do not believe that injured wildlife, even something as wondrous and amazing as a hummingbird, should be rescued. The survival-of-the-fittest argument goes something like this: (1) animals live in nature; (2) nature is a big sorting mechanism that weeds out the weak, which are meant to die, while the strong go on to perpetuate the species; (3) saving the weak propagates a less robust species that ultimately will create the need for more rehab and so on; and, finally, (4) rescuing several hundred hummingbirds every year means nothing in the big scheme of things.
As a young graduate student in my early twenties with no clear career plan, I studied ancient Greek philosophy and spent three years teaching Aristotelian logic to hundreds of exceedingly illogical college undergraduates. Hence my answer to the natural-selection proponents in relation to hummingbird rescue is (1) there is nothing natural about Los Angeles; (2) young hummingbirds who end up in rehab after their nests get cut out of trees to clear the way for an unobstructed view of the city/hillside/ocean whatever are not constitutionally weaker than those born far from such urban threats and don’t deserve to die; (3) some of the strongest, fastest, and most striking birds I have released started out at a disadvantage but nonetheless will produce offspring as physically impressive as any hummingbird on earth; and, finally, (4) next time you are lying in the hospital facing certain death without medical intervention, ask yourself (and this one requires brutal honesty) how important your life really is in the big scheme of things. If you have trouble with this last question, try imagining the minuscule planet we inhabit from across the universe, from a vantage point, say, a hundred million light-years away, keeping in mind the immense sweep of history and the billions of humans who have inhabited the earth before you. If, after this philosophical exercise, you are still convinced of your relative importance in the universe, seek help.
Fortunately, the outdated view that endorses, at best, ignoring creatures in nature and, at worst, exterminating them is heading for the dust heap and, in many young hearts and minds, being superseded by a more compassionate commitment to caring for the planet’s rapidly dwindling wildlife populations. And I derive comfort from the fact that, in rescuers’ quest to promote care and concern for our wild companions in nature, Lao Tzu backs up our efforts, reminding us, The sage takes care of all things, and abandons nothing.
Just after noon on Saturday, I get a call from Emma, a few blocks away in West Hollywood, about a hummingbird that has not moved off her backyard sugar feeder for two hours. I ask Emma to reach up and slide the bird off the feeder. When she does, the hummingbird collapses in her hand.
“Her colors are incredible,” Emma marvels.
“Can you bring her to me?”
“I’ll be right over.” Emma arrives five minutes later, and I open the Godiva truffle box she hands me to find an adult female Allen’s adorned in the bold green, orange, and white hues of the Irish flag.
“Wow, she is spectacular.” I shake my head in amazement.
“She flew a little when I tried to put her in the box,” Emma says. “But she just went down to the floor kind of on an angle.”
After Emma leaves, I put the stunning female in a starter cage for observation. She can perch and spin her wings perfectly, and her dazzling feathers are flawless. Watching her fly a short distance and then sink to the bottom of the cage, I notice that she looks unusually rotund. But she does not appear fat and squishy all over like Pepper or the birds bulking up for migration. Instead, she seems abnormally bottom heavy and begins panting each time she drops to the bottom of the cage. I call my expert for guidance.
“Take her out of the cage, press lightly on her abdomen with the tip of your index finger, and tell me if you can feel something,” Jean advises.
Holding the bird in my right hand, I press on her abdomen with my left index finger. “Yeah, there’s a hard lump there, like a tumor or something,” I tell Jean. “But Emma didn’t feed her anything. I’m sure of it.”
“No, it’s nothing she ate,” Jean corrects me. “She’s egg-bound.”
“Egg-bound?”
“Yeah, her egg is stuck. That’s why she can’t fly. I see it sometimes in early winter and late summer.”
Having never heard of such a phenomenon, I ask Jean how many other unexpected surprises await me in the enigmatic world of hummingbirds.
“There’s a lot more going on than we’ll ever understand,” she assures me.
“Well, I have no idea how to treat this,” I begin nervously, recalling our conversation two years earlier about the fledgling who left a permanent mark on my heart. “I’m bringing Pepper down in a few hours. Can I bring this one too?”
“Yeah, it’s better if you do,” Jean agrees, to my infinite relief. “I had two kids. I have some idea what to do.”
Late Saturday afternoon, I load Pepper and the egg-bound bird into my car and head for Jean’s house. In discussing Pepper’s paranoia, we decide that on Sunday morning, Jean will isolate her in a small outdoor flight cage adjacent to an aviary full of birds awaiting release. That way Pepper can see the other hummingbirds but won’t feel physically threatened by them. After four or five days of this exposure therapy, I’ll pick her up and bring her home so she can go through my aviary with Gabriel and the last group of adults. I drop the two birds off at six o’clock. Jean has just four older nestlings in her ICU and a few fledglings in starter cages. When I remark that I’ve never seen so few hummingbirds at her house, the expression of relief she shoots at me defies description.
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nbsp; “Call me if it pops out.” I motion toward the egg-bound beauty, say goodbye to Pepper, and hurry out the door. Driving home that evening, I am excited and relieved that after three months, Pepper will finally have an opportunity to make the transition to a full-time outdoor life that takes her another step back to the wild. And although I already miss her, I believe I am doing the best thing possible to promote her recovery.
I have never been so wrong about a hummingbird.
CHAPTER 25
Sunday Morning Coming Down
WHEN I GET UP AT DAWN to put my last five caged birds outside and fill the aviary feeders, I have a voicemail from Jean asking me to call her right away. Her tense tone alerts me to danger, and although I have braced myself for bad news, I still hold on to hope that the gorgeous egg-bound female survived the night. As soon as I come back into the house and feed three impossibly whiny cats, I call her. Jean answers on the second ring, which is a first.
“Something tells me this isn’t going to be the happiest news,” I begin cautiously.
“No, I’m afraid not.”
“Well, she didn’t look too good yesterday and I guess she was suffering,” I reflect philosophically.
“No, Terry, it’s not the egg-bound bird. It’s the other one.”
“What?” My breathing stops dead as if I’ve had the wind knocked out of me. “You mean Pepper?”
“She wouldn’t eat last night and when I got up this morning she was on the bottom of the cage.”
“No, Jeannie . . . not . . . not Pepper,” I protest, putting a clenched fist to my mouth as I begin pacing around the kitchen in a sudden cold sweat. “There was nothing wrong with her, she . . .” I struggle to catch my breath as hot tears burn my eyes. Jean remains silent for what seems like an eternity. “Well . . . is she . . . what is she?”
