Fastest Things on Wings

by Terry Masear

  “Well, you need to move those to another location because that’s what’s drawing the birds into the salon.”

  “Oh, it is? Yeah, that makes sense, actually. I’ll move them after we close tonight. Thanks.”

  I hang up and take advantage of the lull in calls to place the insufferably cute fledgling who discovered the miracle of flight in the garage yesterday into a small cage with another heartbreaker who just learned the thrill of executing a 360-degree turn in midair. Watching them practice their early flight training in the starter cage, I’m touched by the look of concentration hummingbird fledglings get before lifting off one perch and buzzing slowly toward the other eight inches away. Before launching, they spin their wings rapidly while gripping the perch on tiptoes. Once they work up enough confidence to let go of the perch, they float, almost involuntarily, across the cage. As with children learning a new sport, control is the last skill to develop, so beginning fledglings often overshoot the perch and end up stuck on the wire mesh caging on the other side. Until they learn how to fly in reverse, it’s up to me to gently extricate them from the mesh and return them to a perch, facing inward, so they can immediately fly back across the cage, miss the perch, and get stuck in the mesh at the other end two seconds later. Like infants learning to walk, fledglings starting to fly appear deliberate and uncertain. But young hummingbirds are on a much tighter schedule than toddlers, and what looks strenuous and awkward today will be all grace and fluidity tomorrow.

  Half an hour later, Stan arrives with a pair of beleaguered nestlings in a Converse shoebox and two red-eyed adolescent girls in emotional recovery. Stan was right: at five six and a hundred and thirty pounds, with wire-rimmed glasses and no hair, he isn’t Rambo. But he is the star of the day. Stan and I chat in the garage as I place the twins in the crowded ICU while his daughters peer with hypnotic fascination at the fifteen soon-to-be-released young adults flying blurred laps inside the aviary. It’s amusing to see the girls gaping in silent awe at the hummingbirds engaged in their fast-paced bathing, sparring, flower-eating, and bug-catching routines. Within minutes, both forget all about the morning tragedy that had threatened to shatter their fragile adolescent dreams.

  While I’m feeding the voracious chicks, Stan recounts how thrilled the family had been watching the mother build her nest and incubate the eggs. He describes how the kids sat on the bed by the window with their digital camera for hours every afternoon while doing their homework so they could film the mother feeding her babies. His family couldn’t believe how fortunate they were to have front-row seats to the unfolding of such a miracle in nature. It was the most extraordinary wildlife event the kids had ever witnessed, like something out of a Disney fairy tale.

  “We couldn’t get enough of it.” Stan smiles wistfully. “But the second I landed in the yard with that Rottweiler and saw the fur sticking straight up on the back of his neck”—he whistles softly, rubbing his palm over his wet brow and shaking his head—“I prayed I’d never see another hummingbird again. Know what I mean?”

  “I know exactly what you mean.” I nod with a wry smile, glancing at the dozen babies in their nests inside the ICU gazing up at me and following my every move. “Better than you can imagine. These are the unlucky victims in the endless string of collisions between man and nature in this overcrowded city.” And judging from the day’s drama, I think, it’s not just the hummingbirds who need rescuing.

  As Stan and the kids head out, I give them a rundown of the intricacies involved in hummingbird rehabilitation. Later on, I follow up by e-mailing them photos of the twins at each stage of their six-week journey through rehab. A month after dropping the nestlings off, the girls win family tickets to Disneyland for introducing the fascinating world of hummingbird rescue to their middle school at the science fair.

  “Give my best to Minnie and Mickey,” I tell Stan when he calls to report his daughters’ achievement and check on the two colorful Allen’s thriving in the aviary.

  “Are they going to be okay when they get out?” he asks anxiously.

  “No, they’re going to be better than that.”

  “That’s such great news. Can you believe it, Terry? After everything that happened, they turned out so perfect,” Stan marvels.

  “Yeah, it’s pretty amazing, isn’t it?” I agree. “It’s almost like winning tickets to Disneyland.”

  CHAPTER 4

  This Magic Moment

  I RESCUED MY FIRST HUMMINGBIRD in the spring of 2003 after one of our Abyssinian cats escaped from the house and brought home a chick who had been blown out of her nest during a fierce Santa Ana windstorm. The cat, aptly named Tintin for his endless string of mishaps and adventures, rushed into the house early one spring morning and carefully placed the undamaged nestling on the hardwood floor in front of me and my husband as if he were bestowing a gift of incalculable value. While Tintin had already accomplished untold remarkable things in his young life, delivering this miniature feather duster ended up transporting us all into a mysterious and unexplored new world unfolding just outside the door.

  After calling around, I located Jean Roper—the most experienced hummingbird rehabilitator in Los Angeles, if not the world—and drove the nestling to her house. Surprised at how many hummingbirds she had, I volunteered to help, took her phone number, and then forgot all about it. The following spring, in early April, I rescued a chick dangling from a nest that had been flattened by an unrelenting, torrential downpour. On the second morning of the three-day deluge, I was on my way to teach an English class at UCLA when the young hummingbird dropped, metaphorically speaking, out of his nest in the ficus tree and into my life. The moment I stepped out the door that morning with my umbrella, poised to make a dash for the car, I noticed the pinfeathered chick hanging upside down by one claw from the decimated nest. It doesn’t rain much, or often, in Los Angeles, but when heavy storms do roll in off the Pacific Ocean, water comes down sudden, fast, and hard. And if you happen to be a young hummingbird caught in the fury of a coastal downpour, nature shows no mercy. Although I was already late, I splashed to the shed in my high-heeled Italian boots and hauled out an eight-foot stepladder, cursing myself through the blinding gusts for getting involved. After gently dislodging the chick from the nest in the hurricane-force wind and rain, I stumbled down the ladder and trotted back to our converted garage behind the house. Certain the ice-cold nestling was dead, I grabbed a handful of paper towels from the laundry room and was about to set him on a shelf and hurry off to class when a tiny claw rubbed almost imperceptibly against my palm. I raced back into the house, uncovered Jean’s phone number from a jumbled stack of business cards and scraps of paper in the depths of the file cabinet, and called her.

  “Give him some sugar water right away,” Jean advised, “and keep him warm.”

  “Until what?”

  “Until you get him here,” she answered.

  Glancing at my watch, I suddenly was living the recurring, anxiety-filled dream I had in which my class started in five minutes and I was over half an hour away. While hydroplaning across spilled sugar water on the kitchen floor, I bribed a colleague at UCLA to take my American culture class before calling Jean back. At the time, I didn’t know anything about hummingbirds, but I had been watching the nest for weeks and was certain the baby would die if I didn’t act quickly. Ten minutes later, I was in my car crawling in the fast lane along the paralyzed freeways skirting downtown Los Angeles. I had no inkling as I rushed through the morning’s panicked events that I was charging full throttle into my future. After a tense commute through pounding rain with zero visibility, my now-revived patient chirping in protest all the way, I arrived at Jean’s front door with the Barneys gray-flannel suit I had just bought and meticulously put on that morning soaked through. When she answered the door, Jean didn’t bat an eye. She’d seen a lot worse. Awed by the number of hummingbirds she already had so early in the year, I again volunteered to help. As we were admiring the lively array of fledglings buzzin
g around the cages in her sunroom off the patio, Jean and I marveled at how the rare opportunity to rescue a hummingbird had presented itself to me twice in as many years. But as I would soon discover, there are no accidents in such matters.

  A month later, Jean called and asked me to retrieve an adult hummingbird trapped inside a film-prop rental warehouse in Hollywood. After chasing the preternaturally fast male around beneath vaulted ceilings for an hour while tripping over Hollywood’s history of surfboards, saddles, whiskey barrels, and treasure chests, I finally captured him by duct-taping an antique butterfly net to an aboriginal spear. Two minutes after downing a strong dose of sugar water in the palm tree–lined parking lot, the handsome but terrified bird shot back into the wilds of the Hollywood Hills. Impressed by my ingenuity, Jean called again the following week requesting an emergency pickup. When I arrived at her house that night toting a pair of pre-fledglings discovered by a ten-year-old who’d heard them peeping inside a neighborhood green-waste container, I inquired about the waterlogged nestling I had dropped off the month before.

  “He’s gorgeous,” Jean said effusively. “He’s a deep, dark green, which is unusual for an Anna’s. But that’s not all,” she added cryptically. “He has something else.”

  “What? What else does he have?” I asked. “Can I see him?”

  “He’s sleeping now. But I’ll show you next time you bring me a bird.”

  “Well, I guess that pretty much guarantees I’ll bring you another bird.”

  “That’s the idea.” She smiled mischievously.

  A week later, Jean called about a nest with two chicks that had been cut by city tree trimmers in Hollywood.

  “Why do they trim trees in the spring when birds are nesting?” I asked angrily. “Don’t they get it?”

  “They don’t care.” Jean sighed with a world-weary exasperation that indicated she’d been through this argument with the city too many times. “It’s whenever they get their funding.”

  Before I could disconnect my cell phone, I was in the car retrieving the nest from a young Latino tree trimmer who was waiting at a bus stop on a crowded corner of Sunset Boulevard.

  “¿Sabes qué árbol?” I asked as he handed me a small takeout box containing the nest I hoped to return to the mother.

  “No.” The sun-scorched young man shook his bandanna’d head as he swept his hand toward a sprawling boulevard of slashed jacaranda and ficus trees winding into the Hollywood Hills. When I opened the nachos box he had tucked the nest into and met the gaze of two fully feathered, rufous chicks who were peering up at me with a poignant mix of fear and expectation, the moment froze in time. As I lingered at the traffic-congested intersection under the blazing sun with the box of twins in my hand, the stark contrast between the metallic sea of cars and the pristine natural beauty of the delicately colored nestlings tugged at something deep inside, like a memory from an earlier existence. As the harsh urban landscape fell away around us, a mournful wind whistled from the distant hills. Suddenly it seemed as though I were standing alone with the birds in a vast and uninhabited desert. A desolate feeling, at once alluring and haunting, swept over me. And for the first time, I glimpsed the importance of the work I was involved in. Without people who cared enough to call about them and a few hard-working rehabbers to take them in, hundreds of these magnificent creatures would perish under the crush of civilization every year. As I listened to the buzz of chainsaws and explosive clatter of the woodchipper shredding tree limbs down the block, I wondered how many others had been missed. This disturbing recognition of human carelessness, along with the suffocating exhaust fumes and blistering noon sun radiating off the concrete sidewalk, caused me to stagger slightly before sinking onto a bus bench.

  “¿Estás bien?” the tree trimmer asked with an expression so disarming he felt like an old friend.

  “Sí, estoy bien.” I nodded as he sat down beside me and, for a fleeting moment, became my silent companion in our isolated bubble of compassion that required no explanation. “Gracias,” I said finally, gesturing toward the yellow box in my hand.

  “De nada.” He bowed his head with a serious half smile before turning a reflective gaze toward the horizon. “Son pájaros especiales.”

  “Yes, they are,” I agreed softly. “Very special.”

  Ten minutes later I was making my way down the smog-shrouded freeway in a daze, as if driving through a dream. When I arrived at Jean’s still reeling from the day’s events, I tried to appear nonchalant while inquiring about my rainstorm rescue.

  “Come out here.” She motioned me through the house and into the backyard, where dozens of large flight cages hung from a long trellis that had served as a grape arbor in an earlier life. “This one.” She pointed to a cage on the end in which two adult Anna’s, a male and a female, were gracefully pirouetting back and forth between perches. The strapping young male looked darker than I had imagined he would from Jean’s description, to the point of appearing almost black from certain angles.

  “You’re right.” I nodded excitedly. “He’s incredibly beautiful. I’ve never seen a hummingbird that dark.”

  “Not an Anna’s anyway,” Jean agreed. “But look closer. Don’t you see anything else?” she prompted, as if we were playing a child’s hidden-object game.

  When the two birds alighted side by side on a perch, I peered more closely into the cage. Aside from his cobalt-green feathers, the male looked like any other Anna’s. But closer inspection revealed something I had never seen on a hummingbird before. On the top of his head, in the very center, was a bright white spot that formed a perfect circle. I knit my brow as I studied the spot. “What’s that from?”

  “I don’t know.” Jean shrugged. “Maybe a mutation. Or some kind of albinism. Who knows?”

  “It’s so cool.” I stared in disbelief.

  Jean nodded. “I always know who he is. He’s easy to recognize.”

  “Have you ever seen that before?” I turned and looked at her questioningly.

  Jean shook her head. “Never.”

  “Never?” I echoed incredulously, trying to imagine the five thousand birds she had shepherded through rehab during her two-decade career of saving hummingbird lives.

  “Uh-uh.” Jean shook her head resolutely. “I’d remember something like that.”

  “Is he okay otherwise?”

  “Oh, he’s great,” she assured me. “Healthy, strong, and really smart. He gets everything the first time.”

  I left Jean’s house that day proud and excited that my bird had turned out so exceptional, and I flattered myself that his uniqueness had something to do with me. Speeding down an unusually empty freeway toward home, I wondered if my uncommon discovery, along with the moving encounter with the rufous nestlings that afternoon, represented some kind of culmination of events in my hummingbird-rescue efforts that had brought me full circle and would guide my hummingbird experience to a meaningful conclusion. But before I could get home, Jean called me on my cell phone.

  “There’s another nest with two babies at the West LA animal shelter,” she reported with exasperation. “Same thing. You don’t have to bring them tonight. Just keep them until you can get down here.”

  But Jean knew that I understood the danger of keeping young hummingbirds on a sugar-water diet for more than a day or two. Already starting to stress inordinately about each bird entrusted to me, I picked up the pinfeathered Anna’s twins on my way home and was back at Jean’s house the next morning. By the end of a busy month retrieving tree-trimming victims, I was onboard for the rest of the season. And the next.

  After another year of driving in wide circles around Los Angeles’s tangled freeways picking up hummingbirds from shelters and delivering them to Jean’s rehabilitation center, I persuaded my husband, Frank, to help me build a dozen elaborately detailed cages designed specifically for educating young hummingbirds. A month later, we bought an intensive care unit and an outdoor aviary, got permitted under a local wildlife-rescue nonpr
ofit, passed a state inspection, and took the giant leap into saving tiny lives. But while I made the leap into the unknown believing, like Kierkegaard, that faith would carry me through, it turned out to be more like jumping off a tall building convinced, like Superman, that I could fly, only to discover halfway into the free fall that I most certainly could not.

  Before hummingbirds, Frank and I had spent our days going to work, renovating a dilapidated house, attending graduate school, and writing books. By the summer of 2004, we had finished a seemingly endless four-year remodeling project on our house in West Hollywood, and I had, at the same time, wrapped up five years of demanding study for my doctorate. Although I had a challenging job teaching English to international graduate students at UCLA, I felt hungry for a connection to the natural world that was more compelling than tending to half a dozen potted cacti on the patio that I always managed to destroy by overwatering. Which is about the time the hapless hummingbirds came along with Jean and her encyclopedic knowledge of rehabilitation, lending credence to the Buddhist proverb When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.

  In late spring of 2005, just as the hummingbirds were gliding into the nesting season, with all of its attendant calamities, I had a dream. I was making my way through a dark and towering coniferous forest when I came upon a blue spruce rotating slowly on its axis, like a planet. The unusual motion captured my attention, magnetically drawing me into the tree’s orbit. As I cautiously approached the mysterious evergreen, everything around me, including the tangled vines encircling the bushes, the pine needles on the trees, and the stars in the sky, began to shimmer with a silver light, like a snowy landscape illuminated by the full moon on a winter night. I peered into the darkness, and my gaze alighted on several shiny, oval Christmas tree ornaments scattered on branches throughout the tree. When I edged in more closely, a glowing white light beamed through me and onto the crystalline figures, which sat frozen and inanimate. The light did not come from within but from beyond, propelled by a powerful force channeling through me like a river through a conduit. As the light infused the figurines, their obsidian eyes blinked and they began breathing and moving on the branches before bursting to life and spinning their wings rapidly in unison. Within seconds, the tree lit up with twenty-one radiant hummingbirds adorned in sapphire, emerald, amethyst, ruby, copper, silver, and gold. When the white light streaming through me and into them brightened to the blinding intensity of the sun, the birds slowly elevated themselves from their perches and hovered in front of me for a few seconds before swirling, in an evanescent flash, into the azure sky above. In an instant they were all gone into the world of light. And I was left standing alone below, gazing up in wonder, with both a twinge of sorrow at seeing them depart and a rush of exhilaration that I had been the agent who liberated them from their dark slumber. In the dream, I didn’t count the birds but instead felt the number, as one does in dreams. Later I recalled how many hummingbirds emerged from the enchanted tree only because I phoned Jean the next morning to describe the dream’s vivid imagery.