by Terry Masear
“Max is a giant,” Jonathon exclaims as we approach. “He weighed over three pounds at two months. And such a huge baby. He never got off our laps except to use the box.” He laughs. “Daniel wanted to keep him.” Jonathon rolls his eyes. “So I just found him a great home. Somebody with more than enough money to feed him for the rest of his life.”
I thank him profusely and promise to call with the numbers of two hummingbird finders who fell in love with our cats during their visits and are looking to adopt hopelessly spoiled bottle babies like Max. Sensing my conversation with Jonathon is coming to a close, Bobo turns and then leads me home.
Later that afternoon, when I head into the aviary to fill feeders, I bring along a handful of freshly picked lavender and hibiscus. Before I can get the flowers attached to perches, Pepper, Gabriel, Iron Mike, and Powder begin mining the nectar from the blossoms in my hand with alacrity and grace.
Hummingbirds are driven by all that is light and bright. As beautiful to the human eye as they are, these fireworks of the forest inhabit an even more fantastical world in which everything shimmers and sparkles. The iridescent color on the male’s head and gorget and, in many species, the circular spot on the female’s throat are not only instrumental in bringing hummingbirds together but determine the flowers they prefer. Just as hummingbirds are attracted to the sequined feathers on each other, the iridescent striations on flowers such as hibiscus and the sparkling pollen on passionflowers magnetically attract hummingbirds with a vibrant glow that pulsates in the bright sunlight. In plants such as lavender, this iridescence is visible only in the ultraviolet range that humans can’t see but that flashes like a neon sign for passing hummingbirds.
In the late-afternoon sunbeams streaming through the aviary bars from the west, I can feel the wind from the hummingbirds’ wings on my face and arms. And in that moment, I become entranced by the divine beauty that I so often overlook in my quest to identify and address their problems. As I listen to the hypnotic hum of the dozen blurred wings buzzing around me, I am transported to a place governed by neither space nor time and feel as though I have stepped out of my body into that state of complete serenity Lao Tzu has been pointing me toward all summer. It lasts less than a minute, and then it’s gone. But the memory is unforgettable.
Standing in the aviary among the spinning wings, I recall having only one other disembodied moment like this in my life. It happened seventeen years ago when Frank and I were diving off a remote island in the kingdom of Tonga in the South Pacific. For weeks we had been exploring mysterious caves and breathtaking virgin reefs a two-hour boat ride from the main island. On this particular dive, a dazzling French angelfish tagged along beside me as Frank floated several yards ahead. The shimmering blue-and-gold angelfish stayed close to my elbow through the entire dive as we drifted weightlessly above the motley coral blanketing the ocean floor. Occasionally, when I stopped and turned to admire his magnificence, my faithful escort would pause, fins still undulating, and turn one eye upward at me before returning to our silent voyage. The current carried us over luminous reefs and massive coral heads sprinkled with vivid sea anemones and inhabited by thousands of brilliant tropical fish. The dive was so tranquil and removed it seemed as if we had entered a world that had been enveloped in silence since the beginning of time. As we kicked gently under an arch through which the sun refracted in soft, celestial rays around the fronds of a giant sea fan, I was overcome by an exhilarating feeling that time moves in a circle with no beginning and no end and that somehow the enduring peace that surrounded us in this remote underwater world would, in its eternal presence, prevail beyond everything else. In this flash of insight, there was no longer a me standing apart from the sea and its multicolored inhabitants. And as the lines between me and everything else fell away, I experienced that elusive sense of being at one with nature and the universe that Eastern religions celebrate as the ideal consciousness.
Now, standing in the aviary with Gabriel and Pepper mining the flowers in my hand, I have been transported to that same enchanting place. And I finally grasp what Lao Tzu meant when he asserted, The sage does not seek fulfillment. By devoting one’s time to repairing helpless rescues like Pepper and Gabriel and the hundreds of other radiant hummingbirds I have encountered this summer, fulfillment just happens.
At the end of the week, Deion, a sixth-dan aikido black belt who runs a dojo in the San Fernando Valley, brings me a young black-chinned fledgling who, since she needs to go into a starter cage, will be heading to Jean’s facility tomorrow. On Deion’s way out, he stops to watch the birds in the aviary and falls into awestruck silence. After a few minutes he jolts, as if waking from a dream.
“Sorry about that lapse. I just kind of went into a trance.”
“No worries. It happens to me all the time.”
“How did you get started doing this?”
“I found a bird once,” I answer reflectively. “It was something I always wanted to do, five hundred hummingbirds ago.”
“It’s one of those be-careful-what-you-wish-for things, right?”
“Never have my prayers been answered so abundantly.”
“So how do you know when to release them?”
“You watch their energy. It’s all in their chi.”
“Really?” He looks at me in amazement.
“Yeah, it’s just like martial arts.” I glance at him with a knowing look. “You can tell by observing their posture and the way they move who is ready for battle and who isn’t. Know what I mean?”
“Absolutely! Chi is everything,” Deion agrees. “Is it hard to let them go?” he asks as we watch Gabriel preen his wing feathers and Pepper mine fuchsia blossoms with graceful elegance.
Deion’s question takes me by surprise, because I haven’t thought about how hard it is going to be to say goodbye to Pepper and Gabriel after all this time. “It’s a mixed bag. Some are harder than others.” I gaze at Pepper wistfully. “But as much as you care about them—”
“Never fall in love with your inventory, right?”
“Our love for them is the reason we set them free.”
“How do you decide which day to release them?”
“The weather has to be perfect.” I gaze up at the sky. “Like launches at Cape Canaveral. No rain, not too cold, no wind, a lot of sun, but not too hot. Conditions have to be optimal when they take off so they don’t crash and burn their first day out.”
“How about these guys? When are you going to let them go?”
“Any day now.”
“Too much smog today, though,” Deion observes, squinting up at the hazy blue sky.
“That’s the one constant we’re stuck with, I’m afraid.”
My conversation with Deion that afternoon reminds me of something Sensei Nishiyama had confided to me years ago while we were chatting in his office one day. Because he headed both national and international karate federations, Sensei always had stacks of letters that needed to be written announcing upcoming seminars, training sessions, and rule and schedule changes. The minute he discovered that I could write, Sensei drafted me to help him wade through the piles of correspondence forever flooding in. Invariably, during our administrative sessions, the conversation would drift to karate students and events at the dojo. One rainy winter afternoon as we were making our way through a dozen replies, Sensei mentioned a highly skilled black belt from another dojo who always became so paralyzed by stage fright during his exams that he could never finish his kata properly even though he performed impeccably during training. Despite this flaw, Sensei always promoted him to the next level. When I asked Sensei why he would pass someone who always failed so miserably on the day of the test, he waved his hand in the air and insisted that a student’s performance on an exam was irrelevant.
“Then how do you know whom to promote and whom to hold back?” I asked him curiously.
“Simple.” Sensei leaned back in his chair and gave me a long, thoughtful look. “Just watch how student walks.�
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“How he walks?”
Sensei nodded pensively. “When student stands up and walks to center of dojo, easy can tell. Everything after that”—Sensei shakes his head—“not matter.”
“Really?” I asked with astonishment. “So all these hundreds of students training madly day and night are stressing out about an exam that is irrelevant?”
“Of course training is very important for posture, speed, timing, and proper technique,” Sensei reminded me.
“But the test doesn’t matter.” I finished his thought with a sly smile.
Sensei leaned toward me and narrowed his eyes with a conspiratorial grin. “Don’t tell anybody.”
Watching the hummingbirds zip around the aviary that afternoon, I understand exactly what Sensei meant. Each bird possesses a unique energy that reveals his or her strength, skill, and confidence. And after years of closely observing their demeanor and flight, I know long before I open the doors exactly who is ready to take on the natural world and who is not.
That night, just after dark, Chad from Venice Beach calls about a hummingbird stunned by a window strike late in the day. Chad tells me the hummingbird is now flying around in a small cage in his living room. After describing the adult male’s sudden recovery, for a minute, Chad asks if he should release him.
“Hummingbirds can’t see in the dark, so keep him overnight and release him first thing in the morning.”
“Is it okay if I feed him every hour, then? Because he’s so cool and I stay up all night,” Chad points out innocently.
“He doesn’t need to eat all night.”
“But I stay up all night anyway, so is it okay if I feed him every hour?” he persists.
“Feed him until ten or so, then cover the cage and let him sleep, all right? Because he has to get up and go to work in the morning, unlike us.”
“Okay, Terry.” Chad laughs cheerfully. “I totally see your point. And, dude, what you do for hummingbirds is so awesome!”
Awesome. How many times have I heard that word this summer? An old term that has been co-opted and converted into slang by American youth. For William Blake, it meant “inspired to reverential wonder by the sublime and majestic in nature.” In reaching beyond beauty, the sublime, rather than being ornamental, overtakes reason in its pursuit of a higher perception that aims for transcendent knowledge. So what better way to celebrate this sense of wonder than by aiding these charismatic creatures in their efforts to survive in a manmade environment fraught with urban hazards? Because for all the headaches hummingbirds have caused me, when they come through the door, I am humbled by their splendor and boundless allure. And as the summer edges to a close, I realize with mounting clarity that, in keeping with Lao Tzu’s description of the ideal life, the more I give to them, the more I have.
Considering all of this, then, Chad, when you said that rescuing hummingbirds is awesome, you nailed it. Totally, dude.
CHAPTER 28
What a Wonderful World
BY THE LAST WEEK in August, I have taken in one hundred and sixty hummingbirds. With the release of the final group in the aviary, one hundred and thirty-five will be reintroduced into the wild. Jean’s figures run even higher. Taken altogether, the number of birds we have gotten back out there is staggering. Over the past four decades, hard-working rehabbers have released more than ten thousand healthy young hummingbirds in Southern California. Most survive and propagate for several years.
Experts estimate Southern California hummingbirds live from five to eight years. Hummingbirds have roughly the same number of heartbeats in a lifetime as humans. A hummingbird that lives eight years has about three billion heartbeats, approximately the same as an eighty-year-old human.
The main source of information on hummingbird longevity comes from banding studies, some of which estimate a lifespan of between four and six years and others of between six and eight. But examples of older hummingbirds are common, including a nine-year-old black-chinned discovered in Montana, a nine-year-old ruby-throated in West Virginia, a twelve-year-old broad-tailed, and more than one instance of a rufous living beyond the ten-year mark. And I receive numerous calls every summer reporting Anna’s and Allen’s females nesting in the same tree, and sometimes the same refurbished nest, for several consecutive years. So when you consider the offspring of our releases and the descendants of their progeny, rehabbers have added to the streets of Los Angeles and the broader western landscape not just ten thousand of these captivating birds but hundreds of thousands.
As I scroll through a summer of text messages and revisit the endless photos of damaged, grounded, and distressed hummingbirds brought to me over the past six months, I understand that I am gazing into the cold eyes of nature, which is staring back at me with steely indifference. And only then do I realize the formidable adversary I am up against. Nature escorts you into the heart of darkness and leaves you there to find your own way out. Rehabbers enter the indifferent, irrational, and amoral world of nature and try to impose reason and morality on an environment in which perpetuation of the species takes precedence over the survival of the individual, which is essentially meaningless. This last point is what is so hard for Americans—and particularly Californians, with our overriding commitment to individuality—to accept. Whenever somebody brings me a hummingbird in need of help, the bird is, in that person’s eyes, the most important bird in rehab. And while there may in fact be millions of hummingbirds flying around the Western world, when an injured or orphaned bird comes through my door, his or her particularity is all that I see.
I’ve answered two thousand calls this summer, and I recollect the pep talks, encouragement, and consolation I’ve offered. I consider the creative strategies I have devised to inform, educate, and comfort an urban public unprepared to cope with raw nature. Most of the time I am left guessing whether callers have the emotional resources to deal with the hard realities presented by a merciless and unforgiving natural world. When I sense they do not, I am forced to reframe, cajole, and, when I have to, outright lie about what is going on out there. My job is to harness callers’ unchecked emotions, refine them, and turn them back out as something productive and purposeful, something that, despite man’s carelessness and nature’s indifference, reintroduces the beauty of life into our fallen world. Because what most callers really want is someone to listen to their concerns and fears and reassure them that making an effort to save something as diminutive as a hummingbird is not crazy, silly, or irrelevant. And by encouraging rather than dismissing that moment of compassion, I hope that I am helping people develop and evolve a more empathic consciousness that spills over into their interactions with all living things, including fellow human beings, toward whom so many callers express such abiding hostility. Because, in the end, whether we are rescuing hummingbirds or simply admiring them from a distance, their hypnotic beauty and magical flight bring people together.
On a spectacular morning in early September, under a dazzling turquoise sky half obscured by fluffy white cumulus clouds so thick and towering they look like steppingstones to the higher reaches, I head out to the patio. The hummingbirds are swirling wildly in the aviary as if they feel some special electricity in the air and sense something is up.
For a brief moment, I try to imagine what it must be like to be them. To be capable of such phenomenal speed and possess the power to execute straight verticals, fly sideways and backward, and effortlessly soar high into the sky. I visualize what the buildings, trees, and clouds must look like passing by in a blur. What a wonderful world they inhabit and how much fun it must be to fly like angels and dance on air as they view our constantly changing landscape from high above. Of course, their lives are not as carefree as they appear. They have land squabbles, gender conflicts, and hard days just like us. Still, with all of their troubles, every time I watch the new releases buzzing and circling one another around the patio their first day out, I suspect they have a lot of fun. When people ask me if I think hummingbirds ever sto
p fighting and just play, my answer is always the same: If you could fly like that, wouldn’t you play?
I approach the aviary and reach for the handle on the side door, but then I hesitate with a heavy heart. After such intense emotional investment over the past four months, it’s hard to imagine life without my two shining stars. Summoning all of my resolve, I say goodbye first to Gabriel, then to Pepper, and open both aviary doors. Without wasting a moment, Iron Mike leads the charge out the security door, the black-chinned and One-Eyed Jack, flying forward this time, on his tail. Pepper glances at me and hesitates on her perch, but when Gabriel heads for the open door, she rises up and follows along. As soon as he crosses the threshold to freedom, the angel Gabriel spirals in wide loops once, twice, three times and then climbs hundreds of feet and vanishes through a hole in the cotton-candy clouds and into the exhilarating blue beyond. Seeing Gabriel’s act of brilliance, Pepper begins her spiral, ascending weightlessly into the heavens on gossamer wings. At a dizzying altitude, she soars over the buildings and trees, elevating higher, faster, stronger, and fearlessly into the vast unknown.
I am flying.
Epilogue
FOR THE FOURTH TIME, Powder remained in the aviary after the other birds’ release. I left both doors open, hoping she would finally muster the courage to go. A day later, she ventured out to explore the bougainvillea surrounding the patio, but before I could get the aviary scrubbed and the doors closed, she was back inside, snapping up the last of the late-summer fruit flies. For the next several days she came and went through the open security door, always returning at night to sleep in the aviary’s ficus tree. After a week of this routine, I came out one afternoon to find the UCLA hybrid, who had been released nearly a month earlier, perched inside the aviary with her. The hybrid, which I’d finally concluded was a female, also came and went before vanishing a week later.
