Tamed and Untamed

by Sy Montgomery

  It’s a feat that demands some of them store as much as 10 to 20 percent of their body weight in fat before they undertake the migration. They conserve their fuel wisely. Migrating raptors soar on winds deflected up and over hills and mountains. They ride high on rising currents of warm air called thermals. Dozens to hundreds of raptors of different species may gather to take advantage of a good thermal in large, swirling aggregations called kettles. These kettles of hawks are amazing to see—but it’s easy, if you’re patient and know where to go.

  There may be a hawk-watching site near you. (Daily counts at each site are posted at https://hawkcount.org, the database managed by the Hawk Migration Association of North America.) Each September my husband and I visit New Hampshire Audubon’s raptor observatory atop Pack Monadnock in Miller State Park in Peterborough and join the crew of hawk-watchers there. On one Saturday, an hour went by and we saw only one kestrel. But on the following Monday, hawk-watchers counted more than 3,000 broad-winged hawks alone, and another 1,858 broad-wingeds were counted on Thursday.

  Without a spotting scope, most of them looked like mere specks. But we knew what those specks really meant: thousands of tigers flying over our heads.

  Bubbles Wrapped in Feathers

  — Sy —

  They flash in front of flowers and feeders for seconds, wings a blur, and then whiz away. Next they’re back—but before you can gasp at the beauty, they’re off again. A glittering fragment of a rainbow; a flaming comet; a living gem: All of these metaphors struggle to describe the evanescent magic of hummingbirds.

  But what they are doing when we don’t see them is more wondrous yet—as I discovered several years ago. Working with a licensed wildlife rehabilitator, Brenda Sherburn, one summer I was privileged to help to feed, raise, and release orphaned baby hummingbirds.

  Too often, people “rescue” baby hummers prematurely, Brenda told me. It’s rare to find a hummingbird nest, but if you do, back off, leave the babies alone, and, using binoculars to watch from a safe distance, observe the nest without looking away for at least twenty minutes. “So few people can just sit still and watch anything that long,” said Brenda. But if you so much as blink, you could miss the mother’s return. A mother hummingbird leaves the nest from 10 to 110 times a day to find food for her nestlings.

  To survive, a hummingbird must consume the greatest amount of food per body weight of any vertebrate animal. A single bird may drink its own weight in a single visit to your feeder—and seconds later come back for more. That’s because a hummer breathes 250 times a minute. The resting heartbeat is 500 beats per minute, and the heart can rev to 1,500 a minute in flight. A film I watched claimed that a person as active as a hummingbird would need to consume 155,000 calories a day—and the body temperature would rise to 700°F and ignite!

  An adult hummer visits an average of 1,500 flowers in a day. If the nectar were converted to a human equivalent, that would be fifteen gallons a day. But few people realize that insects are equally essential. Each hummingbird needs to catch and eat six to seven hundred bugs a day. (So spraying insecticide in your yard is like hiring a hummingbird exterminator.)

  The food requirements mentioned above are for a single hummingbird. A mother caring for nestlings (there are usually two) needs even more. Lucky for us, Brenda had access to a fine compost pile with plenty of fruit flies, and her husband, Russ, was willing to catch fresh ones for us every day.

  Each morning, when normal people were grinding coffee beans, Brenda would take out her mortar and pestle to grind flash-frozen fruit flies. Then she’d mix them with nectar, vitamins, enzymes, and oils. Because this food spoils easily, we had to make a fresh batch several times a day. From dawn to dusk we would deliver this to the babies’ gaping beaks—by syringe—every twenty minutes.

  Brenda was one of a handful of specially trained and deeply committed wildlife rehabilitators qualified to do this. I was honored to help. But for these fragile nestlings, each moment was fraught with danger. Miss a feeding and the babies could starve. Worse, explained Brenda, was what could happen if you fed them too much. “They can actually pop,” she told me.

  Hummingbirds are little more than bubbles wrapped in feathers. Our bodies are filled with organs; theirs are full of air sacs. Their feathers weigh more than their skeletons, and both their bones and their feathers are hollow. It’s hard to imagine anything more fragile.

  And yet our fragile orphans, like the hummers at your feeder, were born to conquer the sky. Brenda lives in California, which boasts several species; as their feathers grew in, our babies revealed they were Allen’s hummingbirds. To impress a female, a male Allen’s performs a plunging flight that makes it the fastest bird for its size in the world. In terms of body lengths per second, it even bests the space shuttle!

  On the East Coast we have only the ruby-throated hummingbird, named for the flaming red throat patch on the males. These birds are equally spunky: Each fall they undertake a punishing migration across the Gulf of Mexico, which may demand twenty-one hours of nonstop flight.

  It’s shocking to realize that someone who hatches out of an egg the size of a navy bean is capable of such feats. But equally shocking is the gauntlet of dangers a hummingbird may face on an average day. Hawks, jays, squirrels, crows, even dragonflies eat them. They tangle in spiderwebs searching for insects (they also use the silk in their nests, to give them stretch as the nestlings grow). They fly into our windows; they’re hit by our cars; they’re poisoned by our pollutants. The most common reason for any bird’s admittance to wildlife rehab is also our fault. It’s abbreviated on forms as CBC: caught by cat.

  And yet we can help. Put out a feeder. Plant nectar-rich flowers. Keep a compost pile. Support a wildlife rehab center.

  Reasoning that surely a bird so tiny with feathers so brilliant must be born anew each day, the Spaniards who first encountered South America’s hummingbirds called them “resurrection birds.” This names the gift these birds offer us this summer, with each fleeting glimpse. They force us to see the world made new each time, and teach us to believe in ordinary miracles.

  Part Three

  Dogs and Cats

  How did we acquire dogs and cats? We didn’t. They acquired us. Early on they would have seen the benefit of relationships with our species, not knowing that we would credit ourselves for these new relationships. For instance, it’s often said that dogs developed from orphaned wolf puppies whom people adopted and raised. But back when we lived in the natural world, behavioral changes mostly resulted from the need for nourishment, never from the need of more mouths to feed. If the people who recently were hunter-gatherers—Namibia’s pre-contact San or Bushmen—serve as an example, they did not consider other species as companionable, and they expected the dogs they eventually acquired to feed themselves. Since there aren’t many ways to live by hunting and gathering, the culture of the people who joined with wolves to make dogs would in ways have resembled the culture of the pre-contact San, and if such people found an orphaned wolf pup, they’d kill it and make a hat out of the skin.

  As early as 100,000 years ago, human hunter-gatherers and a now-extinct species of gray wolves lived in northern Eurasia where winters were long and the meat of large game was an important part of the diet. Often in winter, when vegetable foods were unavailable, meat could be the only food the people had.

  They hunted the same game as the wolves, sometimes at the same time in the same places, as both would know when and where their game would be found. Wolves would have been quick to notice when the human hunters killed an animal such as a reindeer—the hunters would remove the guts, the hooves, and perhaps the head, and would cut up the meat to carry to their lodge or encampment. After they left, the wolves would move in to eat the bloody snow and the body parts the hunters had discarded.

  Both species hunted in groups and thus knew the value of cooperation, and both would have known about herding. Wolves are e
ndurance hunters (unlike cats and people, who are stealth hunters), and perhaps wolves would sometimes drive a reindeer toward some human hunters, perhaps accidentally but possibly intentionally. A wolf could run a reindeer to exhaustion, but wolves don’t always kill as the big cats do, by leaping on the victim with a choking bite to the neck. Wolves can bite the victim’s neck, but also they take bites from the victim as they run beside her; thus one wolf alone might have difficulty making the kill. People with spears had less difficulty. Wolves could have seen an advantage here. Perhaps the people did, too. It might have led to cooperative hunting.

  The next step may also have been taken by wolves. Fossilized wolf scats were found in human encampments, suggesting that wolves either were living with the people or came to scavenge when the people were away. The best guess here may be that they lived at the peripheries of the encampments, where they scavenged when they could, as do other animals in some areas.

  Here I look to Marcus Baynes-Rock, an anthropologist who studies not only people but also the animals with whom they associate, and who describes what one might see as an ideal situation for future hyena domestication in his wonderful book, Among the Bone Eaters. In Ethiopia clans of hyenas live near certain villages where they are sometimes fed as a tourist attraction. They hunt as do other hyenas, but they also roam the village paths at night, sometimes finding something to scavenge, and they seldom if ever bother the people. A somewhat similar situation can be found among the dogs of many villages in the developing world. These dogs are never fed by the people and have no food except what they scavenge. If thousands of years ago wolves scavenged those northern encampments without doing serious harm, the people probably tolerated them, especially if the wolves helped with hunting and alerted them to predators such as the oversize lions, Panthera leo spelaea, who inhabited the area at the time and probably ate wolves as well as people. Tolerance could have led to interdependence, which could have led to friendship, which could have led to dogs—at first to dogs who were very much like wolves, later to dogs with minor physical modifications due to interbreeding, and later still to different breeds where the breeding was controlled by humans.

  It’s hard not to like a dog. A doglike fossil from 33,000 years ago was found in a grave in Germany beside the fossil of a man. More such burials were discovered, these dating from 14,000 years ago, so the practice went on.

  Some of us continue the custom. Our family favors cremation, so after my death I’ll be ashes. All my dogs except those with me now are already ashes. When our ashes are mixed, we will all be together; thus I’m not so different from the guy in Germany who 33,000 years ago was buried with a dog.

  Cats have a similar history, also food-related. Cats descend from a small African wildcat, Felis silvestris, who lived in what’s known as the Fertile Crescent, the area that curved above the Red Sea from Egypt to Israel. It was here that people domesticated grass to make grain. Rats and mice ate the seeds of wild grasses, and people harvested the seeds as grain and stored them in their granaries. It can’t have taken the mice and rats more than a few days to find a seed-filled granary and not much longer for the little wildcats to find the mice and rats.

  For controlling the mouse and rat populations, the cats were greatly appreciated. They did no important damage and, unlike dogs, they didn’t steal or even scavenge for the people’s foods. As for living in a sheltered place where hawks and eagles couldn’t catch them, and where grain attracted mice and rats, a cat couldn’t ask for more. Cats and people made such a good fit that they became venerated in Egypt, but that was just two thousand years ago, and the trend began earlier. The fossil of a cat from eight thousand years ago was found on a Near Eastern island that could only be reached in a boat. The fossil looks like a wildcat’s but was probably a pet cat’s. Whoever rowed the boat had brought his cat along.

  In my house and perhaps in yours, too, we find a mini version of the Near Eastern ecosystem. Grain was distributed by ships worldwide, and the local mice, rats, and cats went with it. Our cats are modern versions of Felis silvestris, and the little gray mice (not the indigenous white-footed deer mice) who live in our houses, as well as the so-called brown rats or Norway rats (they’re not from Norway), descend from those Near Eastern ancestors, and the Near Eastern grain, by now somewhat modified, is the flour we use to make bread.

  —Liz

  Pets with Disabilities

  — Sy —

  We weren’t looking for a puppy. We were still grieving for Sally—the rescued border collie who had been the sweet, funny, demanding center of our family for nine years, who had died of a brain tumor. But then we got a call from our vet. He had just finished his exam of a litter of border collies from a nationally respected breeder, an admired acquaintance, whose pups famously grow up to work as professional herders. One of them had a blind eye. Would we take him?

  We named him Thurber, after James Thurber, the iconic New Yorker cartoonist and essay writer who loved to draw dogs and who also had a blind eye. (His brother shot his eye out with an arrow during a game of William Tell.)

  Our Thurber is cheerful, handsome, smart, and eager to please. The minute we brought him home, he filled my bottomless sorrow with endless elation. Folks tell us he’s the cutest puppy they’ve ever seen. We forget he has a blind eye.

  And one blind eye isn’t much of a disability (unless you’re an “eye dog” like a working border collie, who must move dozens, sometimes hundreds, of other animals by the force of your stare). But what often seems remarkable to us humans is that other animals who acquire disabilities later in life—losing a leg, an eye, their hearing—seem to get on with life just as joyously as Thurber has started his.

  At an animal sanctuary in Lanzenhainer, Germany, half a dozen paralyzed dogs—using wheel carts in place of their back legs—play fetch in a field with as many able-bodied dogs . . . and one woman who’s getting plenty of upper-body exercise throwing the stick. The woman, Gritta Goetz, is the director of the sanctuary, and she’s hosted as many as eight paralyzed dogs at a time. Thanks to their wheel carts, she says, the disabled dogs “are fast enough to get [the stick]. And the smallest paralyzed dog is the one who can protect the stick against anybody,” she says. “If she gets it, even the leader has no chance anymore.”

  These dogs clearly love their lives. But as well-known veterinarian Mark Pokras told me, some people automatically insist that an animal with a disability is better off put down. An associate professor at Tufts, he also ran the university’s Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine’s wildlife clinic for more than a decade, and he’s had many spirited discussions with his medical colleagues, arguing for an animal’s life. He knows firsthand that life can continue undiminished—or even enhanced—after a seemingly catastrophic illness or injury. He lost a leg to cancer in his twenties and it never stopped him from doing what he loves. If anything, it may have increased his compassion for his patients.

  Though some people may feel sorry for animals with disabilities, the animals don’t feel sorry for themselves. (Animals “do not sweat and whine about their condition,” Walt Whitman correctly understood; nor do they “lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.”) Take Faith, the dog born with deformed forelegs, who learned to walk and run on her two hind legs in the posture of a person. Faith wowed Oprah when she appeared on her show in 2008. “She’s a demonstration of what it looks like to persevere,” her owner told the audience.

  Animals like Faith don’t need our pity. They have much to teach us.

  Thurber is not the only one-eyed pup who lives on our street. Down the road August, a golden retriever, was born with such severe glaucoma that one of her eyes had to be removed. The puppy accompanies her owner, a psychologist who specializes in trauma, to the office. Of course, the clients love having a puppy around. But as August’s owner tells me, the folks seeking help for their problems also love being around “someone else who isn’t perfect.”


  As for our Thurber, every once in a while, when the light is right, we can see a greenish cast to his right eye to remind us it’s blind. But I never think of it as a “bad” eye. It’s his beautiful, blessed, beloved eye—the eye that brought him to us, and changed my sorrow to joy.

  Breeding Dogs

  — Liz —

  Why do cats live longer than dogs? And why are most cats free of the bone deformities, respiratory problems, and other serious deficiencies found in dogs? The answer is that cats choose their own mates. Or most of them did until it became important to spay or neuter cats, partly because the shelters became overcrowded with unwanted cats who had to be euthanized to make space for more unwanted cats, and partly because the feral cat populations were mostly successful, thus too many cats were outdoors killing birds.

  Choosing one’s mate is the best way of breeding by far, and mostly it’s up to the females. Yes, males come sniffing around as interested suitors, but females choose whom to accept. We humans do this, dogs once did it, and cats still do it if they can, choosing strength, good health, and high status.

  Dog breeders have different agendas, encouraged by the various kennel clubs and dog-show providers to produce animals who are grossly distorted and seldom live as long as dogs bred for other purposes. As for me, I had dogs who were not spayed or neutered, and two of them, both Siberian huskies, produced three puppies so fit and healthy that as young adults they won just about everything there was to win in the New Hampshire three-dog races. Other contenders hated to see them coming.