by Gene Walz
It’s always exciting to see a rare bird in the flesh, or, should I say, in the feathers. The bird is something you’ve seen in bird books in two-dimensions as a photo or a hand-drawn and coloured depiction, in some cases (Peterson Field Guides) with arrows pointing at its distinguishing features. Suddenly it’s right in front of you, or through your binoculars, close enough, experienced in the now, as real as could be. Alive and in three quivering (or, in the case of quetzals, static) dimensions!
Finding a quetzal can be disconcerting as well. There’s something eerie in its majestic stillness. Until it moves, even slightly. Then it can snap you back into reality—like a photo suddenly coming to life or a busker, posing convincingly as a statue, involuntarily sneezing.
Quetzals were considered sacred or divine by the Mayan and Aztec cultures. Royalty and priests wore their tail feathers during ceremonies. Even today, Guatemala pays homage to the bird by calling its money quetzals.
What makes the quetzal extra-special for me is the personal story that goes with it. I saw one in the Cerro de la Muerte (Mountain of Death) along the Pan Am Highway in Costa Rica. I was staying with Lou and Anne Layman and a small group of others at a comfortable lodge owned by a frenetic, colourful guy who also served as the lodge’s bird guide. A stream full of trout passed right by the lodge and the owner reminded us daily that we could have fresh-caught trout, cooked by a master chef, for breakfast, lunch, and/or dinner. I did.
As a bird guide, Armando was unique. He carried a small, palm-sized mirror with him on our bird walks. If a bird was camouflaged against a tree trunk or high up in the thick canopy, he would find a shaft of sunlight and use the mirror to reflect up on the bird, putting it in the sunny spotlight. That’s how I saw my first quetzal after much searching: spectacularly spot-lighted on the end of a reflected sunbeam.
Armando’s most endearing quality, however, was not his reliability in finding birds, but his enthusiasm. If we were relaxing or scattered around the lodge, he would run crazily through the grounds announcing that a worthwhile bird had just been spotted. One afternoon, an American Dipper made an unexpected appearance. It’s a drab, grey bird with a unique behaviour; it searches for food underwater in fast-moving mountain streams. (Yes, you read that correctly: a bird— not a duck—walking purposefully and assuredly underwater!) Armando ran hither and yon yelling in his heavily accented Spanglish, “Eets a Deeper! Eets a Deeper!” I’ll remember that scene as long as I live.
We couldn’t understand what Armando was saying, but we were captivated by his energy. In seconds, we were all chasing him down the river. He already had his tiny mirror in hand, had found a glint of sunlight, and was focusing a beam of light on some rocks on the far side of the river. A chunky, grey bird walked confidently off the rock and into the swirling stream. Now we understood Armando’s excitement. An American Dipper was doing its thing: dipping under the water and walking assuredly against the current! It was as if the bird had magic suction cups on its feet.
Finding a rare bird—a bird that isn’t supposed to be in the place you’re in or a bird that doesn’t get seen very often because its numbers have been drastically reduced or because it’s in an inaccessible place—is the birding equivalent of finding a truly exceptional dinosaur bone, or an ancient Roman coin, relic, an old stamp or antique.
It’s a delightful moment, a thrilling moment.
You feel like the planets have somehow aligned in your favor, the birding gods have bestowed an unexpected gift on you—a fabulous bird, like something out of a fable.
Hummingbirds
A Divine Pash
It doesn’t take too much imagination to see that birds are descendants of dinosaurs. What baffles me is how Archeopteryx, the original avian dinosaur, the “Ur-vogel,” evolved all the way down to—or up to—the hummingbirds. I can see the 150-million-year link between the original avian dinosaurs and ostriches, emus, and even albatrosses and kiwis. The connection between Archeopteryx, this giant, ugly, prehistoric bird, and hummingbirds, however, seems impossible.
That’s what makes me think (I’m no evolutionary biologist) that hummingbirds might be rare visitors from another planet. Or they might be secret military drones created by some extra-terrestrial Lady Gaga channelling Salvador Dali and Fabergé. If earthly, they seem to have evolved from a cross between a bee and the lint created by a berserk clothes dryer after a tangle with a wildly coloured Peruvian dress and lots of loose sequins.
Hummingbirds are wondrous creatures, but I was a hummingbird-deprived kid. Maybe they were around, but I can’t remember ever seeing one. This is not necessarily a human rights issue, and I’m not looking for financial compensation. But, to see a child’s eyes light up when he or she sees their first hummer, is to remind me of just what I’ve missed. They just can’t believe their eyes as they see one flitting from one flower to another at Assiniboine Park in the late summer. Spotting another, and another, they are gob-smacked! It’s a treasured memory. Hummingbirds are perfect birds for kids.
My first sighting of a hummingbird, or at least my earliest, most vivid and indelible memory of one, happened one magical day in late April, 1972, in Amherst, Massachusetts.
A motley group of ten or fifteen members of a birdwatching course were traipsing through Amherst’s West Cemetery looking for returning warblers and such. We’d spotted some Juncos, White-throated Sparrows, and over-wintering birds. Not terribly exciting stuff until someone let out a yelp: “Hummer!” And there it was, a brilliant male Ruby-throated Hummingbird buzzing among the flowers set out around the tombstones.
When we’d entered the cemetery, our guide had immediately taken us to Emily Dickinson’s resting place. The hummingbird spotter mentioned that one of her most famous poems is about a hummingbird, and she wondered whether this hummingbird was the spirit of Emily D. I winced and bit my lip. I’m not a believer in this kind of “spiritual” stuff. But I have to admit that the occasion was magical for me. I almost felt like a five-year-old must feel when he or she first spots a hummer. Wow!
I’ll admit that I don’t always fully understand Emily D’s poetry, but her words regarding hummingbirds do strike a chord: “A Route of Evanescence / With a revolving Wheel / A Resonance of Emerald / A Rush of Cochineal.” Hmmmm! The colours are right—emerald on the back and a cochineal gorget (a red throat and breast cover—look it up). The nouns are suggestive and the alliteration interesting. As for “Evanescence”—that’s a perfect word for hummers. They are so agile and fast that they seem to vanish into thin air—a shimmering flash of colour one moment and then nothing. They’re like hockey pucks on American TV. Remember when one of the US networks tried putting a comet-like tail on the puck to help non-hockey fans follow it? Sometimes I think hummingbirds should leave a trail of fairy dust behind so that we can catch up to them.
I feel sorry for people who grow up in hummingbird-free zones, i.e., anywhere outside the Americas. They are our birds. I was made aware of this near Patagonia-Sonoita Creek Preserve in southern Arizona, at a famous backyard where I met birders from all over Europe and Asia. Fourteen sugar feeders were hung about the yard, all numbered. Someone would yell out “Costa’s at number six,” and all the binoculars would move in tandem to that feeder. Or “Blue-throat at ten.” And “Wow! Calliope at four. Rare one. Rare one! Calliope at four.” There was great excitement in the air—and great camaraderie; many people were seeing hummers for the very first time. I sat in a comfortable lawn chair for hours, drinking a coke from the homeowner’s vending machine, marvelling at the antics of these feisty little birds, and sharing stories with people from India, Israel, England, and Germany.
I saw sixteen different kinds of hummers that day, including that rare Calliope from Mexico. It was my first venture into prime hummingbird territory and one of the most memorable. I’ve chased these tiny, colourful mites to even farther and more exotic places ever since: Costa Rica, Ecuador, Brazil, Trinidad. It helps that
these are nice, warm, un-Winnipeg places.
For a kid from New York State and an adult living in Manitoba—with only one hummingbird (the Ruby-throated) to its credit—Costa Rica was almost too much. Fifty-seven varieties of hummers can be found there. Rancho Naturalista, a great birding lodge in the pre-montane rainforest, has a posted list of over 400 different species of birds seen from its famous, second-storey deck and fabulous set of hummingbird feeders. You can be a completely lazy birder and “tick” scores of birds over morning coffee, afternoon tea, or evening drinks. At my leisure, I counted Violet-crowned Woodnymphs, Green Hermits, Green Thorntails, Violet Sabrewings, and Green-crowned Brilliants. The birds are even more colourful than their names.
But the best birding experiences happen on the trails into the hills adjacent to the lodge. Late one afternoon we were guided to a hummingbird lek where scores of the combative little creatures sang and preened and jousted and buzzed about like crazed teenagers at a rave. Since I didn’t know anything about hummingbird “lek-ing,” it was a real eye-opener.
We then trudged up to a “hummingbird pool” where a ten- or twelve-foot stretch of a forest stream widened to about four feet of cold, darkened water. To our utter astonishment, hummingbirds would approach this fresh water stream, hover about five or six feet above it for a second or two, and then plummet in. By some miracle, they would struggle up, shake off the water, and zoom away, apparently refreshed—or at least cleansed of the mites and debris collected in a day’s work. It was like watching the very private ablutions of a fairy tale or mythic creature: a rare and thrilling treat.
Most amazing of all were the Purple-crowned Fairies and especially the Snowcaps. In the dimness of evening, the iridescent purple colours of the fairies’ caps were barely visible, but the luminous white underparts and green backs made identification of these uncommon hummers very easy. The tiny Snowcaps were unmistakeable. Smaller than my thumb and lighter than a Loonie, they seemed to smash into a million deep purple pieces when they hit the water. Their brilliant white caps, tipped forward towards their short bills like a jaunty sailor’s, shone in the dusk like powerful, miniscule penlights. Sometimes that was all you’d see.
Costa Rica is nothing compared to Ecuador, however. Some birders call it Hummingbird Heaven. Of the estimated 328 species of hummingbirds (probably the second largest family of birds in the world), Ecuador has 135. When John Weier and I went there, we were lucky enough to spot sixty-two different kinds. However, on our first dedicated hummer search, we missed the extremely rare Black-breasted Puffleg at the Yanacocha Reserve. Of course, fewer than 300 still exist, so we had no great expectations. Besides, our next stop at Tandayapa Bird Lodge more than made up for it.
Tandayapa is probably Hummingbird Central; the area has the highest concentration of hummingbirds in all of Ecuador. The lodge itself has a dozen feeders outside its porches, and the hummingbirds there are as thick as mosquitoes in a Manitoba bog in June. Not quite the concentration of a Biblical plague of locusts, but it seemed so at first. There were so many swarming about at one time and battling each other for feeder supremacy that John (a poet) and I tried to come up with an apt descriptor—like the hummingbird equivalent of a murder of crows: a dazzle of hummingbirds, a sparkle, a frenzy, a whelming, a confetti-swirl, a shattered crayon-box, a rainbow blizzard, a … We gave up. Nothing quite captured the experience. (Google lists “a charm of hummingbirds” as the collective—inadequate.)
Because there were so many of them, because they buzzed around so fast, and because they kept darting in and out of the sunlight, losing their distinctive iridescence, identifying them became an almost impossible task. We just had to sit there, sated, besotted. The easiest to identify was the Booted Racquet-tail. It’s a small, emerald green hummer with puffy, white “booties” and a long, elaborate tail (longer than its body). That tail looks like its barbs have been stripped down to just two thin stems (rachises) except for two flat racquets at the very end, as if it’s got two dark blue ping pong paddles at the end of long, skinny broomsticks. Its function must be a challenge to all evolutionary biologists.
Since it was raining lightly, I was wearing my fire engine red rain jacket—a mistake, as it turned out. As I rose to head in for dinner, I must have seemed like a giant walking tropical flower. I was immediately swarmed by several hummers. If I were an ornithophobe, I would have freaked! They brushed my face and ears and neck with their blurry wings and long bills. It was thrilling but almost creepy. A priest who had to hear the confessions of Catholic nuns every week once described that drudgery as “being stoned to death with ping pong balls.” My experience being mobbed by hummers reminded me of that, but it was far from drudgery. I was ecstatic! I almost felt that I could fly away with them. (I would make a very bad hummingbird!)
The only other hummingbird experience that comes close to this was when I participated in a hummingbird banding project with Sheri Williamson, the Arizonian woman who authored the Peterson Field Guide on hummers. After the birds were caught and carefully banded, Sheri handed them to me. I held the tiny mites upside down in the palm of my hand for a second to let them recover. Their glossy feathers felt almost like fur. I could feel the rapid beating of their hearts run through my hand to my own heart and right down to the tips of my toes. That feeling of my own strength and tenderness was akin to the sensations I had holding my infant daughters for the very first time. Overwhelming! I was almost in tears.
After a second or two, I opened my hand and the birds invariably righted themselves, paused on my thumb, and then buzzed away. I must admit I had some second thoughts about participating in the banding. Even a light-weight band, attached to trace the birds in the name of science, seemed an imposition. I imagined them flying lopsided, teetering from the extra weight. I hope we did them no harm.
Some people think hummingbirds are exuberant. I see them as impatient, purposeful little creatures, always in a hurry, darting off to someplace on a direct line, as if buzzed on amphetamines. Though they are sentimentalized on greeting cards and wall hangings, I don’t think they’re romantic figures at all; they’re more tragic-comic—tiny, animated clowns in colourful costumes that belie, perhaps, an inner torment. It’s their contradictions that fascinate me: cute but feisty, tiny but energetic, frantic by day and torpid at night, colourful in the sunlight and drab without it.
Any creature that is so beautiful in itself and helps to create beauty in the world (by pollinating flowers) is something to be revered. I suppose I have a passion for hummingbirds. Someone once called it “a divine pash.” I don’t know where the term comes from, but I’ll accept it. Hummingbirds seem to have something of the divine in them, or at least something otherworldly or preternatural.
I’d like to live out my days chasing all 328 hummingbird species in the warm, flower-filled spots in the Western Hemisphere. Even when there are scores of them around me, even when they are easy to see, they are rare beings, the rarest of birds.
Once in a Lifetime
Birding Experiences
Broad-winged Hawks
An Unexpected Spectacle
East Africa is amazing! You can run out of exclamation points describing it.
I went there with my wife and twenty-five others on a safari led by Bob Taylor. Bob has organized more than thirty safaris to Kenya and Tanzania. He’s an excellent birder, but he knows the people, the places, the birds and the animals of East Africa as well as anybody. So we saw a leopard drag a freshly killed zebra carcass up into an acacia tree five metres off the ground to keep it away from his competitors—lions and hyenas and vultures. Wow! We watched a wildebeest give birth, right in front of our eyes, and then nudge the calf to its feet so that they could rejoin the hundred thousand others on their annual migration—all in the space of thirty minutes. Unbelievable!
We shuddered inside our safari vehicle as a cheetah stampeded a herd of hundreds of zebras and impalas right past us; somehow they saw u
s in the nick of time, despite the dust and panic, and avoided us by mere inches. Whew!
A female elephant that we surprised at the back end of a line of babies and juveniles snorted, flapped her big ears, and charged our vehicle; she stopped before she got to us, but a couple of days later we gaped in awe at the battered hulk of a Range Rover destroyed by an angry elephant. Thank God for our driver!
We had many memorable, close-up experiences like this, often more than one a day. We saw all the “charismatic megafauna:” huffing and pawing rhinos, angry giraffes battering each other with their long necks, mud-lounging Cape buffalo shooing off elephants from a waterhole, teams of skulking lionesses on the hunt, hippos sleeping against our tent stakes (“Don’t arouse them; they wake up miserable and mean!”), elephants picking fruit off of trees right over our tent, so close that we could hear their stomachs growling as they digested the fruit, baboons pounding on our roof, a giant constrictor swallowing a hyrax right outside our dining room, and much, much more.
But some of us came to Africa to look for the birds as well as the animals. And right up there on our list of memorable occurrences was the sight of hundreds of thousands of bright pink flamingos, mostly Lesser but with some Greaters scattered among them, feeding on algae and plankton at Lake Natron in northern Tanzania. With the exception of sentries standing upright and scanning for predators, they were bent over and feeding with their hooked beaks in that odd, upside down way that flamingos graze. There were enough of them to almost fill Transcona, Winnipeg with the real deal, not just the small, plastic ones plunked in the front yards of unsuspecting birthday boys and girls. What is it about huge concentrations of birds that grab hold of our imaginations?