Fastest Things on Wings

by Terry Masear

  Even more interesting to me, they are only the second set of male twins I have received since I started doing rehab. Hummingbird chicks normally hatch one or two days apart. When I first began rehabbing hummingbirds, I noticed that the older twin was nearly always a female. Since the older sibling has a greater chance of survival, I concluded this was nature’s way of perpetuating the species, since it ensured that more females entered the breeding population. It also explained why we tend to get more male than female nestlings in rehab, as the older sister boots the younger brother out if the nest gets too tight for comfort.

  After noticing this gender distinction in 2007, I began paying attention. Since then, of the fifty sets of twins I have received, 80 percent consist of an older female and younger male. The other 20 percent have two males or two females, with the majority of the anomalies being twin girls. I have seen only one hummingbird nest with three chicks (Allen’s), and after I helped the caller add an extension to the nest, the two older females and younger male fledged successfully. The fact that nature has arrived at the conclusion that the oldest nestling has a greater chance of survival and therefore must be female in order to maximize the species’ numbers into the future blows people away. And despite all of our technological advances in studying wildlife, this is the kind of startling discovery that only rehabbers receiving a cross section of nests straight from their natural environment can make.

  On July 2, I get ten calls but no rescued birds. I take advantage of the calm before the Fourth of July firestorm to work with Pepper on her flight training. Pepper has graduated to a large flight cage that sits adjacent to Gabriel’s starter cage on the patio. Gabriel can fly low and forward for short distances now. When he is not exercising, he watches Pepper buzz up and down the tiered perches in her cage with obsessive attention. I approach Pepper’s cage with her twig, prompting her to dance expectantly on her highest perch. When I press the twig against her stomach, she hops onto it and spins her wings with startling speed. Encouraged by this sudden display of power, instead of lowering the twig slowly, I drop it to the bottom of the cage. The moment I let go Pepper releases her grip and flies to the far perch in a fraction of a second before lifting off and hovering in the center of the cage with ease. And in that brief and shining moment, her flight training is complete. Pepper doesn’t need me anymore.

  Watching her dart around inside the cage with fresh confidence, I feel a deep tenderness for Pepper, although I try to refrain from showing it. To make it in the wild, Pepper cannot trust humans too much. In reflecting on her two-month journey back to health, I recall the hundreds of times we worked together to regain the power of flight. And that last afternoon when she finally gets airborne and fulfills our dreams, I am reminded of a horse I rode as a child.

  As a skinny, eleven-year-old farm girl, I learned to ride on a blind horse. Being so young and mostly on my own, I had trouble with the other farm horses, which were too strong, willful, and, at times, unruly. But the blind horse, a palomino named Princie with a perfect upside-down white pyramid on her forehead, exuded Zen calm. Princie, given to us by a local farmer after a failed treatment for a severe eye infection, came to us gentle and well trained. Several years later, I inherited her when my sister went off to college. Princie had her own private fenced pasture and barn at an abandoned farmhouse a half mile down the road from our farm. I visited her every afternoon. Whenever Princie heard me pedaling down the country road on my bicycle, she would turn her head alertly in my direction with ears perked in rapt expectation. Princie lived to go riding because she could run freely only when a human functioned as her eyes. After getting home from school I would put on her bridle, a moth-eaten wool blanket with a colorful Native American pattern, and a small western saddle that was so light I could hoist it onto her back myself and then take her out.

  During our first few months together, Princie walked cautiously up and down the ditches and hay fields as we adjusted to each other’s touch and motion. Plodding through the prairie grass in the late-afternoon sun, we bonded deeply. Since my sister had been training her for years, Princie was hypersensitive to the slightest tug on the reins prompting her to turn left, right, or walk downhill. When I lifted the reins slightly, she would raise her knees high in the air, as if prancing, to scale the steep incline of the ditch running alongside the old country road we frequented. Eventually Princie began trotting, then galloping, and finally she trusted me enough to run at full speed as I deftly guided her around obstacles and potential dangers. Running flat out with Princie brought a rare feeling of exuberance, as though we were some fantastical centaur floating across the prairie with her legs and my eyes. Sometimes, after surveying the approaching terrain in advance, I would close my eyes briefly to get a sense of her experience. And it was even more thrilling racing through darkness with the rhythmic pounding of hooves in our ears on our way toward some lighter being that transcends the sensory world. I never felt as free as when we were gliding along with the wind at our backs as one entity. And I sensed Princie felt the same way, as she ran faster and faster toward some imaginary destination that could be felt but not seen. Amazingly, during the four years we sprinted together across the fields and prairies, we never had an accident.

  After Princie died of old age, I inherited a solidly built, dappled-gray quarter horse built for speed and with perfect vision. The first time I took her riding, I loosened the reins and let her run flat out back to the barn; halfway home she accidentally stepped in a gopher hole in the lawn alongside the driveway and tumbled head over heels, and I somersaulted over her ears before slamming flat on my back on the hard ground about ten feet in front of her. After pulling ourselves up to sitting positions and staring at each other in stunned silence for a few minutes, we got up and limped back to the barn. Back then, people didn’t wear helmets or padding the way kids do today; I wore nothing but faded blue jeans, a T-shirt, and old Keds sneakers. Remarkably, except for a little blood from superficial abrasions, neither of us was injured, though I moved with robotic stiffness for a few days and she seemed content to be left alone grazing in her pasture for a month. After the accident, the dappled-gray mare, also named Pepper, became my horse in the same way Princie had been before her.

  Some early indigenous cultures believed that if you share a powerful and affecting experience with an animal, your spirit becomes forever entwined with that creature. I feel I have connected deeply with hummingbirds many times, through hours of joy and sorrow. Pepper’s inauspicious arrival in rescue and her gradual return to the exhilarating world of flight make me feel the pull of something higher. Just as I once functioned as Princie’s eyes, I served as Pepper’s wings during those long weeks of renewal. And now that she is back in the air, I wonder what part of her I have become and how she might fly me to freedom just as Princie had let me run.

  CHAPTER 23

  Cruel Summer

  PREDICTABLY, THE FOURTH OF JULY marks a day of freedom for hummingbird fledglings throughout Southern California, and I receive eight young birds and fifty phone calls over the weekend. I also get my cell phone bill for June. In a typical off-season month I talk for less than 1,000 minutes. Today my service provider sends me a text informing me that I have used 8,000 minutes in June, exacts a painful overage charge, and encourages me to upgrade to a more suitable plan. But if I have to spend another month coaching frantic callers through 8,000 minutes of hummingbird crises, there is no doubt in my mind I will go mad, a victim of my extraordinary success in reaching the public. I pay the penalty and respectfully decline the offer for more talk time.

  Although I have an aviary full of restless young adults raring to go, I have to wait until after the Fourth of July to grant my birds their independence because the noisy explosions of fireworks can alarm inexperienced hummingbirds when they are sleeping at night, prompting them to bolt off their perches into the darkness and injure themselves. So I tend to the young, read Lao Tzu, and wait patiently, because when life becomes too heated, the mast
er points out, Stillness and tranquility set things in order in the universe.

  On July 6 I release fifteen immaculate adults, seven of which came from city animal shelters. And in a rare display of collective confidence, every bird in the aviary shoots into the wide July sky with ease and does not come back. And now, for the first time since early May, more birds are going out than coming in. The end is in sight.

  After the release and mandatory scrub-down, I move twenty fledglings into the aviary, including the burly Santa Clarita brothers who are racing ahead of schedule, the Anna’s dumpster twins from Century City, the sugar baby from the shelter who came in with the ducks, the stunning black-chinned female who arrived with the kitten, the UCLA hybrid, and an Allen’s female brought in six weeks ago after being fed sugar water far too long by a Los Angeles veterinarian.

  I get a lot of calls from veterinarians in Southern California seeking advice about hummingbirds that clients have dropped off at their offices. Although a state regulation prohibits animal hospitals from keeping wildlife without a permit, it’s a law without teeth and many veterinarians assume, erroneously, that they know how to care for hummingbirds. To their credit, most vets make the responsible decision to call rescue right away. But like the general public, a few vets become enthralled with the magical young birds and don’t contact us until things are down to the wire. In this case the veterinarian kept the fledgling on sugar water for two weeks, leaving her so weak and undernourished that she fell on her side whenever she tried to fly. When the vet had her husband drop off the starving bird because she was too afraid to bring it in herself, I called him out.

  “This bird is suffering horribly. Why didn’t you call someone sooner?”

  “Well, we c-couldn’t find anybody,” he stammered halfheartedly.

  Reflecting on the countless calls I get from teenagers whose parents can’t speak English and recalling the six-year-old son of the blind man’s housekeeper who found my number in under a minute, I shook my head. “I don’t buy it. How long did it take you to find me once you started looking on the Internet?”

  He stared at the floor uncomfortably.

  “Tell your wife I can understand this kind of thing from people with no education or experience with animals, but in the case of a professional with her credentials and years of training”—I shook my head—“there’s no excuse, so please don’t do it again.”

  “I’ll give her the message,” he replied stonily, avoiding my eyes.

  “Thank you for bringing her in,” I said and shook his hand before he hurried out the door.

  As with the female Allen’s who became Iris’s cage mate the year before, the vet’s bird, whom I named Powder for the dried sugar residue on her feathers, began flying after a week of protein-infused formula. Despite damage to her flight feathers resulting from a lack of protein during crucial growth stages, the determined fledgling has moved through rehab steadily and now, because of her strong spirit, seems ready for the aviary.

  After filling the aviary with twenty restless young adults and moving the fledglings in starter cages up a level, I observe Pepper flying in quick circles around her large flight cage. As much as I hate to pull her away from Gabriel, who watches her with an obsessive fixation, it’s getting late in the summer and she appears more than ready to take the last step toward freedom.

  “What do you think, Pepper?” I ask, lifting her cage as she zips effortlessly between perches. “Let’s try it.” I carry Pepper’s cage into the aviary and open the top. Pepper flies out confidently and alights on a perch next to Powder. I am surprised to see the Santa Clarita brothers begin snapping up fruit flies as if they have been doing it all their lives. They display an adequate level of skill and proficiency their first day out, and again I marvel at these two forces of nature who seem to have sprung from some exceptional tribe of hummingbirds. The other birds in the aviary sit motionlessly on their perches, watching the twins in rapt silence. I think this is a good thing. But I am wrong.

  Twenty minutes later, while washing cages, I hear a loud commotion in the aviary and hurry over to find the older Santa Clarita twin body-slamming every bird within range. Unlike the notorious Chucky, who selected his individual targets carefully, this take-no-prisoners shooter blasts through the aviary like an armed assassin, randomly knocking off four and five birds at a time while leaving collateral damage in his wake. The fierce aggression behind his assaults makes Chucky look like an international diplomat. Before I can get inside, I notice he has Pepper pinned to the bars and is pecking her head violently. I race inside, chase him off, slide Pepper off the bars, and let her go near a perch in the back of the aviary. Checking the ground for victims, I linger inside for a few minutes until things settle down. As is sometimes the case with new aviary cohorts, I hope the brazen bully simply needed to display his formidable prowess and will relax now that he has made it clear who’s in charge. But the second I exit the aviary, before I can close the security door behind me, the Santa Clarita assassin hooks the male dumpster twin, a substantial Anna’s who is not easily intimidated, and drags him to the ground.

  “That’s it.” I rush back inside. “You’re so out of here,” I announce, herding the bloodthirsty killer into the security area and opening the door, prompting him to shoot fifty feet straight in the air before disappearing north into the hills.

  I stand inside and monitor the visibly shaken aviary birds for a short time. After everyone calms down, I go back to washing cages. Within five minutes, the same ruckus breaks out. I sprint back to the aviary and see that the younger Santa Clarita twin has appointed himself the new bouncer and picked up where his abusive brother left off, hooking the other birds and slamming them to the ground with the ferocity of a professional wrestler.

  “Damn it,” I mutter under my breath as I race inside, corner the second outlaw in the security area, and kick him out. He too shoots into the sky before heading due north and back to the land of the larger-than-life hummingbirds. When I survey the aviary, I notice Pepper hanging on the bars again, this time crying hysterically. I hurry over and slide her off the bars before letting her go. But it’s too late. Out of her mind with fear, she flies onto the bars, drops her head back, and wails like a banshee. I slide her off the bars and return her to a large flight cage.

  It takes the petrified Pepper, who is panting laboriously, an hour to decompress enough to eat. I set her cage next to Gabriel’s and leave her there for the rest of the day. The next morning, Pepper seems fully recovered from her giant ordeal and flies around her cage assertively. I take her back into the aviary and open the top. This time she doesn’t waste any time before heading straight to the bars, dropping her head back, and screaming in terror. Again, after an hour back in her flight cage she relaxes. A few days later I try again, but each time I put Pepper in the aviary, she suffers the same panic attack. None of the other birds in the aviary has displayed aggression toward Pepper or one another. In fact, the remaining group proves so even-tempered that even the underpowered Powder can easily hold her own.

  Observing Pepper lounging in her flight cage after her fourth emotional breakdown in the aviary, I suddenly see clearly what is causing her to freak out. She remembers being assaulted in the park as a teenager and is suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder. Pepper’s first run-in with an adult male was so violent it proved nearly fatal. So getting attacked a second time by a male, particularly the vicious Santa Clarita twin, was her worst nightmare. Now Pepper associates the aviary trauma with her initial assault and the long road back from her injury. As I stare at Pepper in amazement and recall the famous Brad and her extended battle with dark memories of the crows, I start to wonder if hummingbirds ever forget anything. Pondering the options, I decide to hold Pepper back and try to reintroduce her to the aviary with the next cohort.

  Later that afternoon, I get a call from a bird lover named Maggie asking about the sugar feeders hanging in her yard. As with false alarms over abandoned nests, sugar feeders someti
mes become the source of family conflict too.

  “My daughter says feeding hummingbirds sugar water is like giving them crack.”

  “Crack?” I repeat. “Like cocaine?”

  “Yeah, she says it’s like a drug for them and it destroys their brains. And that’s why they fight so much around the feeders.”

  “Your daughter has a lively imagination.”

  “She’s always been different.”

  “And how old is she?”

  “Thirty-nine.”

  I laugh, having expected her to say fifteen. “Well, if she means they get addicted to it, she may be right. But sugar is a staple of their diet in the wild, so it’s like a person getting addicted to rice or potatoes, I suppose.”

  “Well, I didn’t think she was right because my hummingbirds don’t act like crazed maniacs or anything.”

  “You must be doing something right, then, because a lot of hummingbirds do. The most important thing with feeders is to keep them clean, which can require extreme vigilance in a hot climate like Los Angeles. Hummingbirds get fungal infections from dirty feeders and it’s the most horrible way for them to die, so you have to make sure you change the feeders before the sugar water goes bad. It’s better not to hang feeders at all than to leave rotten ones out.”

  “How often should I change them, then?”

  “A rule of thumb is every three days in the summer in LA because the sun and heat make them go bad fast. If the sugar water gets a milky haze, it means the feeder is slimy inside and the sugar water has gone sour. And if you see black spots on the glass that’s fungus and then the feeder becomes a deathtrap.”

  “I never buy that sugar with the red dye in it. But should I?”

  “Absolutely not. It’s entirely unnecessary and may be harmful. White table sugar is the best option.”

  “How about in the winter when it gets cold?” Maggie quizzes me with bullet-point precision, as if she’s interviewing me on a radio talk show. “Should I put more sugar in the water?”