Fastest Things on Wings

by Terry Masear

  “You will save him, Terry.” Gabriel nudges me from my reverie, as if sensing my misgivings.

  “I hope so.” I smile wistfully as my smartphone announces a new voicemail. “Sorry,” I apologize to him as I glance at the message marked Urgent! “Can you excuse me for a second?”

  “Of course.” Gabriel nods graciously while he tries to accommodate the three Abyssinian cats that have emerged from the bedroom and begun crawling all over him. Our cats possess that sixth sense that directs them to disappear when certain personalities come into the house. But they greet Gabriel like catnip, climbing into his arms and affectionately licking his tanned face and shiny black hair.

  After listening to the anguished message, I press the call-back button and get Mia, who is sobbing as she describes a pair of nestlings who are dying outside her house in Hollywood. “I found the mother dead under the nest this morning, and the babies are almost gone,” she says, weeping. “It’s killing me because I’ve been watching them for a month. I even bought a feeder and hung it by the nest so they’d have enough to eat, but she died anyway.”

  “Can you send me a picture of the nest?”

  “Sure,” Mia answers with faint hopefulness.

  “Okay. Take a picture from a distance using a zoom and no flash and send it to me,” I instruct her.

  A minute later I get a photo of two bright-eyed, two-week-old Anna’s nestlings with their bills up and no signs of distress. When I call Mia back, she is still in tears.

  “It’s all right, Mia,” I console her. “The dead hummingbird you found is not the mother. She’s still there.”

  “I don’t think so.” Mia sniffles. “I haven’t seen her all day.”

  “Trust me, she’s still there. But just so you can rest easy, I want you to sit out of sight and watch the nest until you see her come in and feed the chicks. And as soon as you do, call me back because there’s something else we need to talk about.”

  Mia agrees.

  When I get off the phone, Gabriel is still wrestling with the cats. “Thank you so much,” he says emphatically before rushing off to catch the bus.

  “My pleasure,” I tell him as the phone rings and Mia’s number pops up again.

  “Terry, she came back the second we hung up!”

  “She was never gone,” I assure her as I wave Gabriel out the door.

  “Thank you so much!”

  “You’re so welcome. Now, Mia, one more thing. Move that sugar feeder you put by the nest as far away as you can. Hummingbirds can fly very far, very fast, so the mother doesn’t need a juice bar two steps from her front door, okay?”

  “Okay.” Mia starts giggling.

  “All right. And on a more serious note”—I adjust my tone—“the dead hummingbird you found was killed by the mother because it tried to use the feeder and got too close to the nest. Female hummingbirds defend their babies fiercely, and the feeder is causing unnecessary tension and stress.”

  “Oh my God,” Mia gasps. “That was my fault, then.” She begins crying again.

  “Hummingbird lessons can be tough, but at least you know now. So move the feeder right away and bury the dead hummingbird somewhere else so we can get things back to normal around that nest, okay?”

  “Okay.” Mia pulls herself together. “I’m so sorry, Terry.”

  “No apologies. It’s great to know there are people like you out there who care so much.”

  “No, Terry, it’s you who are great.” Mia sniffles. “You’ve been so helpful, and I love you so much. I mean”—she pauses for a second—“I hope that didn’t sound too weird.”

  “No, I’ll take love. It’s a lot better than some of the other sentiments I get from people.”

  While caught up in addressing Mia’s drama, I had forgotten to get Gabriel’s contact information. I bolt out the front door, but he is already gone. I race back to the garage and find his hummingbird leaning on his side in the nest, barely breathing. I load another syringe and touch the top of his head, but he doesn’t respond, although the seven nestlings in the ICU pop up on tiptoes and begin swaying and peeping loudly for food. Nestlings in rehab have to be fed every thirty minutes, but they’ll eat every ten, five even, if you invite them to. I go down the line and give each gaping mouth a shot of formula before returning to Gabriel’s bird.

  “Come on,” I coax, rubbing the top of his head lightly with my index finger, “open up.” But he lays stone-still with his eyelids drooping heavily. I pry his bill open again and give him another dose of formula. This time he pulls back weakly, swallowing slow and hard, the way hummingbirds hanging in that uncertain balance between life and death do. I wait and watch. A few minutes later he wobbles back and forth slowly before righting himself in the nest. Seeing him respond this way is all the encouragement I need. I lift him out of the nest, wrap his still-damp body in a tissue in my hands, and exhale warm air onto him again. After a few minutes of this revitalizing therapy, he opens his eyes, looks up at me weakly, and blinks.

  “Welcome back, Gabriel.” As I’m tucking him into an especially thick, natural nest in the warm ICU, a vague recollection like déjà vu tugs at the edge of my consciousness. A familiar feeling that I have been through all this before. Then again, I have been through it, dozens of times, and maybe that’s all there is to it. And before I can grab hold of anything specific, I start mentally tallying feeders that need to be filled and cages that have to be cleaned, and the memory slips away like a dream upon waking.

  CHAPTER 7

  Hypnotized

  SINCE I BEGAN rescuing hummingbirds in Hollywood, in 2005, both the number of birds and the variety of species coming into rehab has been growing. While some 330 species of hummingbirds exist in the Americas, 95 percent reside south of the United States–Mexico border, and only sixteen breed in the United States. Of these, the Allen’s, Anna’s, black-chinned, broad-tailed, and rufous now nest in the Los Angeles area. Rufous and broad-tailed nestlings have begun showing up in Southern California rehab facilities only recently. Occasionally a calliope (at an endearing three inches from head to tail, the smallest breeding bird in the United States) or a Costa’s (a dazzling, violet-adorned desert denizen) finds its way into rehab from the far-reaching eastern outposts of Greater Los Angeles.

  Allen’s hummingbirds, once nearly nonexistent on the mainland in Southern California, made their way here from the Channel Islands off the coast of Ventura in the early twentieth century and now represent the most common species in Los Angeles. Jean’s mentor, Helen Bishop, the godmother of Southern California hummingbird rehabilitation, began rescuing birds in Anaheim in the early 1970s, and she didn’t see an Allen’s her first ten years. Allen’s didn’t begin appearing in Jean’s records with any regularity until the late 1980s. But once the Allen’s population gained a toehold on the mainland, there was no turning back. In 1990, Allen’s represented roughly 20 percent of Southland rehab intakes; in 2000, 40 percent. By 2012, Allen’s accounted for 60 percent of rescues admitted to Southern California hummingbird-rehabilitation facilities.

  The public’s growing awareness of the rescue option has resulted in more hummingbirds landing in rehab every year. Over the past two decades, annual intakes of Anna’s and black-chinned at rescue facilities have tripled, while the number of Allen’s have increased nearly tenfold. Although I suspect some young rescues reported as Allen’s may in fact be rufous, there is no way to determine how many are misidentified. At the same time, studies indicate that a certain number of hybrids appear in areas where nesting species overlap. And the occasional preference among female Allen’s for the phenomenal speed and glamorous iridescence of the rufous males may be creating a new species as a result of hybridization. Since juvenile Allen’s and rufous appear nearly identical in size, shape, color, and wing structure, without sophisticated genetic analysis, it would be almost impossible to determine how many hybrids are coming into rehab. But hummingbird rehabbers unanimously agree that the explosion of rust-hued Allen’s showing
up in Southern California facilities points to interbreeding.

  Whatever the case, nobody is certain why the Allen’s numbers are expanding so exponentially. It may have something to do with their ramped-up breeding season, which starts earlier in the year and extends later into the summer than that of other Southern California species. Additionally, whereas females of some species have just one nest per year, Allen’s females seem predisposed to nesting two or three times, known as double- and triple-brooding, each breeding season. Every summer, dozens of concerned Angelenos call hummingbird rescue to report an Allen’s female starting a new nest immediately after, and sometimes even before, the first clutch has fledged.

  Over the past century, the Allen’s—smaller and quicker than the second most common Los Angeles species, the Anna’s—has migrated from its nesting territory in Southern California to its wintering grounds on the west coast of Mexico. In recent years, however, many have elected to remain in the city year-round, breeding from January through May. Every year as the Southern California air warms in late winter, I hear the unmistakable whirring of the males performing their courtship display just outside the house. Unlike many birds—including species as varied as red-tailed hawks, crows, ducks, doves, robins, finches, and swifts—hummingbirds don’t pair-bond; they breed. And their breeding, like everything else they do, is quick and to the point.

  Allen’s and rufous males have perfected a lightning-fast courtship ritual referred to as the shuttle display. The male buzzes thirty feet into the air and then swoops down toward a perched female, creating a metallic whirring sound with his feathers in the process. The male then swings in front of his potential mate in a series of shallow, ten- to twenty-foot arcs before executing a higher arc that ends with him shaking his rust-colored tail feathers rapidly from side to side at the apex, producing a high-pitched tinkling sound like the ringing of tiny bells. Having witnessed this display on numerous occasions, I can testify to its hypnotic effect on females, even those of the featherless variety.

  I’ve spent years observing the antics of hummingbirds in Hollywood, and the mesmerizing jingle of these bells ringing in the spring has become hauntingly familiar; it fills me with both eager anticipation and a vague sense of dread. Because once nature’s bacchanalian celebration of renewal begins, things are bound to go wrong, and some of the misfires invariably end up at my front door.

  While male hummingbirds produce sound with their wing feathers to draw female attention, their tail feathers play the most significant role in attracting the opposite sex. Whereas females and young birds sport rounded tail feathers that allow them to fly in the safety of silence, the adult males’ tail feathers, with their spiky tips, have been designed to create a musical attraction. After their first-year feather molt, Allen’s and rufous males can be distinguished by the color of their backs, which runs toward green on the Allen’s and rust on the rufous. And unlike the Allen’s, the mature male rufous has notches at the tips of the second pair of tail feathers (counting from the center), which ornithologists use to identify the species.

  After observing rufous and Allen’s males in the wild for several years, I had an epiphany: since males create music with their tail feathers during courtship, these tiny notches must give the rufous a unique sound designed to appeal particularly to females of their species. I had this breakthrough after years of listening to the Allen’s males in Los Angeles ring their tails in courtship and combat. But it wasn’t until I spent a summer in Portland, Oregon, that I noticed the rufous males at my feeders seemed to produce a buzzier zing while courting than the Allen’s, whose tail feathers whistle like the wind rushing over stabilizer fins on a falling bomb. Research indicates that the shape of the male’s tail feathers determines the pitch produced in courtship displays. Since the tail feathers of the Allen’s and rufous males appear nearly identical, the notch likely plays a key role in differentiating the sound each creates.

  This musical distinction also explains why, in places where the breeding territories of these species overlap, like Southern California, rufous females may be unimpressed with the overtures of Allen’s males, who serenade at a different pitch. That this barely visible notch on the rufous male’s tail feathers could, over millions of years of evolution, play a pivotal role in delineating one species from another attests to the powerful influence the most subtle distinctions in nature can exert on the physical world.

  During courtship, male hummingbirds of every species use their dazzling iridescence to increase their attractiveness. When a male dances in front of a prospective mate, he flares his gorget, or throat feathers, which reflect various colors like a disco-ball strobe depending on the angle at which the sunlight hits them. In the rufous and Allen’s, the male’s sequined gorget can shift from gold and copper to orange and a brilliant scarlet. A male will sometimes spend days courting the same female in his territory, with varying degrees of success. As is the case with humans, the female’s reactions to the male’s sexual advances range from annoyed indifference to hypnotic fascination.

  The Allen’s high-voltage, in-your-face courtship display is nearly indistinguishable from the war dance males execute when seeking to intimidate rivals in their territory. It’s an impressive commotion that, from a distance, looks like a miniature green-and-orange pendulum swinging wildly in midair. Although callers consistently describe the hummingbirds they rescue as cute and sweet, people who have observed hummingbird shootouts around sugar feeders recognize their mean streak. When two hummingbirds are grounded and one flies off, callers often speculate that the mate or partner was trying to help the bird that couldn’t get up. When I explain to the callers that they witnessed two males engaged in mortal combat, and the one that fled the scene of the crime was the victorious assailant, people gasp in horror that hummingbirds can be so barbaric.

  Hummingbirds fight over the same three things—food, sex, and territory—as all competitors in the wild. Watching them tussling at sugar feeders, you might think that hummingbirds inhabit a pure Hobbesian state of nature. But like Lemurian crystals, these intrepid birds are multifaceted creations with complex dimensions that imbue each with a unique, dynamic energy. In rehab, no two hummingbirds are alike. Among aviary rehabs and new releases, I have witnessed as much acceptance as contention. That said, when males are breeding and competing for territory in the wild, it’s a war of all against all. And these winged warriors are hardwired to fight to the death.

  As with human beings in Southern California, the greatest threat to a hummingbird’s survival is not other animals but members of its own species. No small number of adult males land in rehab after losing battles to faster, more experienced, or more aggressive challengers. A shocked caller recently reported seeing a male broad-tailed antagonist driving his rival to the ground and violently whacking him over the head, killing his victim before the woman could get outside to chase him off. Sparring males wield their rapier bills with samurai precision, using them like sabers to spear the skulls and impale the hearts of adversaries in combat. Despite hummingbirds’ violent impulses, most people continue to regard them as adorable, proving that if something is small and pretty enough, it can get away with murder.

  Some species, like the Allen’s and rufous, can be especially belligerent. During the spring breeding season in Los Angeles, Allen’s males are regularly found locked together on the ground in a deadly embrace that often has fatal consequences for one, if not both, opponents. Allen’s males sometimes employ these same violent tactics when pursuing females. Watching their raucous performance from afar, you might find it difficult to tell if Allen’s are engaged in courtship, combat, or some combination of the two.

  Anna’s males have a somewhat grander and more spectacular approach to the courtship game. From my patio, I see the male spiral high in the sky over a female preening her feathers at the top of the thirty-foot ficus tree overhanging the driveway. When the male reaches the apex of his ascent at one hundred feet, he dives fifty miles per hour in a U
-shaped arc. The moment he reaches the bottom of his descent, directly over the female’s head, he spreads his tail for one-twentieth of a second and emits a high-pitched schoop as the downdraft causes the inside edges of his tail feathers to vibrate like a guitar string. Wind on the downdraft amplifies sound, so the faster the dive, the more resonant the tone, helping the female make her decision. At the same time, the male, who has positioned himself to maximize reflection from the sun, flares his magenta gorget in a blinding iridescent flash. After a dozen repeat performances, this explosion of color, along with the rush of whirring wings and the seductive thrill of his one-note “song,” has a hypnotic effect that drives the female into a breeding frenzy.

  Chris Clark has documented this stunning juxtaposition of sound, color, and velocity using cameras with shutter speeds of five hundred frames per second. A zoology professor who has spent the past several years researching the mechanics of hummingbird flight, Clark has filmed male Anna’s on courtship dives traveling at an unfathomable 385 body lengths per second. (This is the equivalent of a six-foot human dropping nearly eight hundred yards per second.) Although diving peregrine falcons can reach a higher speed in miles per hour, when measured in body lengths per second, hummingbirds travel almost twice as fast, making them the fastest things on wings.

  When a female is sufficiently impressed with her suitor’s skydiving prowess, she levitates a few feet off her branch, and the two lock together and spiral to the ground in an aerial ballet. Though both appear dazed and exhausted after their brief encounter, no time is wasted on the tender touches of romance. Each has to get on with the business at hand: he to locating other willing females and she to finishing the demanding task of nest-building she began before her quick impregnation.