The Bluebird Effect

by Julie Zickefoose

  Fledging Day

  It’s Monday, July 14. Because they need to be fed so frequently, and it’s an hour roundtrip to town, I have to take the birds with me to the store when we finally run out of human food. I put them in a plastic pet carrier and into the grocery basket, with Phoebe and Liam riding in a big plastic, carlike apparatus up front. It’s cumbersome but workable. I feel sorry for the hummingbirds, clinging to their nests through the bumps and jolts and sudden appearance of pineapples and boxes of Cheerios all around them. Two of the nestlings take this opportunity to become fledglings, and I thank the stars they’re in a carrier with its top fastened. I shudder at the thought of getting a baby hummingbird out of the rafters of a cavernous food warehouse. The birds are clinging to the paper towels in the carrier, buzzing their wings madly, as I labor through the shopping and loading. As soon as I get home and put the frozen food away, I’ll have to start preparing their aviary. If they’re ready to fly, they’ll need a place to practice.

  July 15 is a hard day’s labor, retrofitting the glassed-in room where my macaw, Charlie, lives, for hummingbird occupancy. I move Charlie’s cage out, tape newspaper over the walls, and affix some fine birch branches around the room. Finally, I move the hummingbirds’ covered tank into the aviary and remove the top. One baby lifts off its nest in a single smooth motion, flies two feet, and lands on my arm. I am almost limp with delight, to be a landing pad for this brave hummingbird child. A second bird rises and makes a perfect landing on a birch branch. The other two, younger birds will sit in their nest for another day before they work up the courage to leave. I spend most of the next day sketching and painting the youngest nestling. It’s a lovely thing to have a hummingbird nest stuck in a jar full of paintbrushes, a living, pulsing almost-fledgling sitting in it, looking back at me.

  It is a time of observation and contemplation for me, watching to see what makes a hummingbird what it is. Hummingbird nestlings explore everything, surprisingly enough, with their tongues, which they can extend like fine rice noodles, almost twice the length of the bill. If baby hummingbirds are curious about an object, they taste it. I cannot think of another bird that explores in this way, but most birds’ tongues can’t be extended much beyond the end of the bill. I wish I could peek into a woodpecker nest; I would bet that young woodpeckers use their long, bony-spined tongues in the same way. In the spring of 2010, I will get the answer when a pair of pileated woodpeckers excavates a nest in our orchard. From a pop-up blind near the nest tree, I will watch in delight as the two nestling woodpeckers run their tongues over everything they explore, just like the hummingbirds did. It’s bad enough to have a hummingbird run its tongue up your nostril while you’re trying to feed it; I’d hate to have a woodpecker try that.

  Such exploratory behavior is a presage of their time of independence, which is coming all too soon. Fledging would be a tricky time without the aviary, that’s for sure. As it is, I’m climbing atop the counter to feed the birds on their high twig perches. I’m thankful to have this confined space where they can fly but not fly away. Were I to let them go outside, I’d never be able to reach them, and I doubt I’ll be able to train them to come to me as I do most songbirds. I wonder how a hummingbird could grasp the concept that its big earthbound foster mother can’t fly to the top of a tree to feed it. Every other songbird I’ve raised has come to me for food after release, but hummingbirds seem so flight-oriented, so different, so independent, that I’m apprehensive about release day.

  I wonder if I’m underestimating them. I’ve got nothing to go on but instinct; I’ve got no model to copy here. I can only keep my eyes open and let the birds teach me how this will unfold. Even through the work and worry of being a hummingbird mother, I know I’m being pelted with diamonds. I’ve got an eight-by-ten-foot glassed-in room at home with four hummingbirds flying around inside it. For the next few weeks, they’re mine to care for, to sketch, and to paint. How lucky can you get?

  JULY 17. The last hummingbird—the youngest one—fledges today. Its uppity sibling, with its spotless plumage and persnickety feeding behavior, fledged on the morning of the sixteenth, at an estimated age of twenty days. Now they’re all hanging around on high perches in the aviary, preening and exercising. I still pop in to feed them every hour. Except for growing, flying, and gaining strength, I’m not sure what this period holds. The Birds of North America’s ruby-throated hummingbird account states that fledging occurs around Day 20 and that the female hummingbird feeds her young for another four to seven days after fledging. That would make their age at independence twenty-four to twenty-seven days. I wonder if, and how, that can be correct. For a bird with a specialized foraging technique (hovering while probing flowers, catching flying insects in the air), a four- to seven-day dependency period seems very short. Wouldn’t it take longer than that for a hummingbird to learn how to feed itself? Could this all-consuming nurturing exercise I’ve embarked upon hold part of the answer?

  Aviary Life

  JULY 18. I decide to hang a hummingbird feeder filled with protein formula from a branch in the aviary, just in case one of the birds wants to try using it. I feed them all day, every hour. They’re flying more today. I try spraying them with a fine mist of rainwater. They preen and fluff and look much better after their bath. I’ll bathe them every day, until they shine. This evening, I sketch them preening and resting. It’s such fun to be in the company of four hummingbirds that have no fear of me, that come to probe at the bright flowers on my shirt and poke their bills in its buttons. They’re like fairies—fairies that poop constantly. I have to shield my painting from the intermittent warm patter of their droppings. What I can’t wipe off, I incorporate into the painting. It occurs to me that hummingbirds would make charming but really lousy house pets. This evening I’m called away, and for the first time I let them go almost two hours between feedings. When I get home, I rush to the aviary and find them all peeping loudly. I’m hurrying to feed each bird, the most insistent one first, when I hear a humming sound behind me. The oldest bird, a rusty-tinged fellow I call Adventure Joe, is hovering at the little feeder I’d hung this morning. You go, Joe! Finally! A warm flush of pride and accomplishment washes over me. I’ve been feeding each of these four birds on average every half hour from dawn to dark for nine days. That’s one hundred and twenty feedings each fifteen-hour day, over one thousand feedings all told. I’m weary, but, like Adventure Joe, I can taste the sweet nectar of independence.

  However delightful raising hummingbirds is, it is like being under house arrest. Having to drop everything and feed them every thirty to sixty minutes certainly shapes one’s day. Now that they’ve fledged, I can’t take them in the little plastic pet carrier, so I can’t leave the house for more than two hours without starving them. Our home is a half-hour from town, so a roundtrip kills an hour. That gives me an hour to do my grocery shopping, banking, kid taxiing, all the things I do in town. No matter what I do, the hummingbirds are always in the front of my mind, needing to be fed. I’ll be so glad when they’re all feeding themselves.

  I think about how to introduce them to life at large. I’ll put different styles of feeders up, bring in cut flowers and hanging baskets and planters for them to investigate. I’ve got a fuchsia crawling with whiteflies that they’ll love for both nectar and insect food. They watch gnats, fruit flies, and flour moths with the greatest interest, snapping at them when they come close. I can’t wait until they’re skilled enough to snap up whiteflies. I’ll bring in some aging bananas and grapes. If only it were tomato season. I could feed a small army of hummingbirds off the fruit flies that swarm my countertops in canning season.

  Small Tragedy

  JULY 19. I walk into the aviary to find the last-fledged bird on the floor. I had seen quite a bit of chasing between it and its assertive nestmate, heard a light impact on the glass door earlier. The injured bird’s left wing is swollen around the wrist and doesn’t work properly. All I can do is confine the bird to a small tank and hope tha
t the injury resolves; it’s too small to splint, even if I knew what the problem was. The other three birds are flying like little helicopters, eagerly checking out the flowers I bring in for them, sipping occasionally from the feeder. The injured nestling sits still, left wing drooping. How can a hummingbird injure its wing and ever hope to fly again? These minuscule gossamer wings, which have to describe figure eights to propel the bird up, down, back, and sideways, must be perfect in every particular. I’m so distraught I can hardly sleep this night.

  As it turns out, I am right to be deeply concerned. Though I will do my best to support him, keep him clean and well fed, this injured bird will never fly again. I will keep him until November 24—four and a half months of support and care—when I finally euthanize him. Without variety or exercise, he’d simply wear out, run down like a little clock.

  The most heartbreaking part of nursing grounded hummingbirds—and this is the fourth I’ve kept since I started practicing bird rehabilitation, in 1982—is watching them rage against their condition. The hummingbird temperament has no provision for enforced inactivity. An injured hummingbird knows what it should be doing: hovering, zipping from flower to flower, investigating anything that piques its curiosity—and it will try again and again to do it, until it wears all the feathers off its wings and bleeds from the stubs, until it flips over on its back, buzzing like an angry bee, and has to be righted ten times a day. A life of stasis is no life for a hummingbird, and I gently explain that to people who contact me for advice. “Make sure the injury is irreparable, that there’s no chance the bird will regain its power of flight. As soon as you know that, euthanize it.” Would that I could take my own advice. My heart is an intractable organ, and my head is no match for it.

  By July 21, I’ve finally got them all named. The injured bird becomes Buzz, since that’s all he can do now. His arrogant sibling, the one who stopped gaping first and chased Buzz into the aviary glass, is Bela. Adventure Joe is the eldest, first out of the nest and first to try self-feeding. Rufus, his nestmate, is heavily marked with reddish brown, retiring and shy. I need to name them if I’m to release them and keep track of them afterward. Naming them honors their distinct personalities, proclivities, and idiosyncrasies. Mostly, though, I need to name them because I’m their mother.

  Graduation

  I begin bringing commercial hummingbird feeders into the aviary. I wash them thoroughly before introducing them, and one is beaded with water. Bela flies over to inspect it, feeds at one of the ports, then rubs his breast against the feeder’s droplet-dotted surface. I dash outdoors to get a couple of hosta leaves and spray them with water. Within seconds, Bela is down and rolling like a minuscule green mallard in the puddles on the quilted leaves. Adventure Joe and Rufus crane their necks in wonder, then helicopter down to join him. It’s a hummingbird bathing orgy. I chortle in delight at the bizarre poses the birds strike as they revel in their first real bath. Who would imagine that hummingbirds would lie down on their breasts and scoot along like penguins, roll on their sides, or close their eyes and rub their faces on the damp leaves like luxuriating cats?

  By the time they’re twenty-nine days old, the fledglings are all sipping sporadically at the small plastic feeder. I’m supplementing them with dropper feedings, and I notice that Rufus and Adventure Joe are always hungry, always peeping for subsidy. Testosterone has kicked in. Bela is dominating the feeder, guarding it from the other two fledglings, locking feet in flight and twirling to the floor with any other bird that tries to feed there. He’s chasing them around the aviary. He performs a shuttle display flight to a birch leaf on one of the twig perches, zooming side to side in a perfect (and clearly instinctual) precopulatory display. He lands and tries to copulate with the leaf. Though his throat is still clear white, he’s indubitably male, and he’s messing up my peaceable kingdom in the glassed-in room. He’s already driven Buzz into the glass door and grounded him forever. It’s from this hard lesson that I decide to invest in an outdoor, nylon-screened tent for all future rehabilitation projects. I can’t take the chance that Bela will injure one of the other birds. It’s time to release them.

  Release Day is July 29, 2003. It dawns bright and clear. All three hummingbirds, even shy Rufus, are feeding themselves. Both Joe and Bela are performing shuttle displays and mounting birch leaves, proof of their maleness. Rufus is spatting with both of them, and I’m encouraged by his newfound moxie. I remove the screen from the aviary window and crank it all the way open. This does not go unnoticed. Within seconds, Bela darts into the open air, returns to the room, and suddenly is gone, headed out to the orchard. Adventure Joe follows, feigning interest in some spider webs in the corner of the open window, then making a beeline out over the house chimney. I’m breathless with the speed of their exit. Rufus follows within seconds. He hovers, then vanishes to the orchard. The little aviary is suddenly, oddly silent. Buzz spins in a little circle around his broken wing, wanting so badly to follow the others. Just like that, it’s over.

  Return of the Prodigals

  I wander around the house, newly free but oddly empty. What was I doing with my days before there were hummingbirds to care for? I decide to do some laundry. There’s always laundry, and there’s been more of it piling up since this hummingbird summer unfolded. Shadows are getting long as I emerge from the basement with a load of wet clothes to hang out. I’m arranging them on the line when I hear a familiar peep. In the line of clothespins, no bigger than one of them, perches Adventure Joe. Phoebe, who’s helping me, skedaddles up to the house to fetch a dropper full of nectar. Joe gapes widely, and I fill his crop. He looks tired, his eyelids are droopy, and he is famished. When he’s full, he buzzes off to perch high in a birch tree. My mind races. Maybe they’re not old enough to be on their own. Maybe I’ve released them too soon. I trot around the yard, listening. There’s a peep from a birch tree on the opposite side of the yard. It’s Bela. He’s hungry, but he ignores the dropper I wave at him, swooping down to feed at the cardinal flowers like he’s been doing it all his life. I’m delighted at the sight. I wonder, panicked, where Rufus could be. I can’t find him, and I know he’ll be needing me.

  I go out to pick string beans for our dinner, and there is a peep from the garden fence behind me. It’s Rufus, begging. I’m beyond delighted to see him at last. By now, I have a vial of nectar in my pants pocket, and I roam around the yard like a sheepdog, listening for my flock. Near sundown, Bela finally comes and perches on a low trellis on the back deck, where I give him a few drops of nectar. He’s clearly not hungry; he’s been at the garden flowers all day. I’m knocked back with the wonder of it all—that these birds could disappear into the clear blue sky, then come to find me in the vast yard, peeping to get my attention. It’s behavior that I would anticipate from any other hand-raised bird, but somehow I didn’t expect it from these hummingbirds. When they took off, I thought they were gone.

  It’s becoming ever clearer to me that the existing ornithological literature on ruby-throated hummingbirds is woefully inadequate. The Birds of North America states that female ruby-throats feed fledglings for four to seven days after they leave the nest. My foundlings left the nest at Days 20 and 21. By the literature, they should have been independent by Day 27, but they were incapable of sustained hovering flight by then, and they spent most of the day sitting around begging for food. They’re thirty-three days old now, and it’s clear that they aren’t through with me, nor I with them. In the end, I feed them out in the yard until Day 37. Corresponding with hummingbird rehabilitators in 2007, I learn that most don’t recommend release until Day 41. I wish I’d known that in 2003! Even though I fed them well past the supposed age of independence as stated in the literature, I’d jumped the gun on my birds’ release. No wonder they’d hunted me down, peeping!

  Far be it from me to cast aspersions on the observational skills of field ornithologists. There can’t be a more difficult species to observe than a hummingbird, and following just-fledged birds to see ho
w long they’re subsidized by their mothers would be virtually impossible in the field. I can only surmise that the literature on the ruby-throat’s age at independence is based on best guesses rather than direct observation. If captive-raised hummingbirds are any indication, the female hummingbird may feed her fledglings another two weeks longer than we surmise.

  Released before they were ready, the hummingbirds came back to find me. Why was I so flabbergasted at that? Why did I so underestimate them? You’d think, having raised them, that I’d expect them to return for feedings just like the mourning doves, bluebirds, robin, wood thrush, catbird, rose-breasted grosbeak, cedar waxwing, and other birds I’ve raised. And yet somehow I thought that, being hummingbirds, they’d fly out the window and be absorbed into the vast population, jockeying for a place at the feeders with the other hundred and fifty or so hummingbirds that slurp down a half gallon of nectar each day. I didn’t know how I would ever pick them out of the throng. But they aren’t up to the jostling and poking and bickering, and they see a much better way to get their feet wet in the world.

  Hummingbird Mother

  They’ve set up little duchies around the yard—Joe and Bela hanging out in the backyard willow, retiring Rufus in a vine tangle on a hill to the east—and they sit and wait until I emerge from the house, then peep and come to me to be fed. And it turns out that I find them in this vast, eighty-acre sanctuary just as their mother would—by their voices. I am hard-wired to listen for their peeps, just as they are to utter them. Mowing on the riding tractor, I have a hummingbird escort. They buzz my head and sit tight as I thunder past, spraying grass bits and exhaust. To them, it’s perfectly normal that their mother would climb on a tractor and cut the grass. They’re unperturbed, and still seek my company. I ponder this as I round the yard again and again. I wonder if the other birds are taunting them: “Yer muddah rides a lawn tractor!”