by Nick Neely
Photo by Christopher Clark
Slowly I discovered the males’ routine singing perches. The highest lay beyond the lemon bushes, over the deer fence, and above a tangle of scrub. My father built us a tree house twenty feet beyond our latched gate, in an oak leaning precariously above a small, dusty canyon with a horse trail running through. Two parallel planks ramped up the trunk. From there, a few wooden boards nailed to the bark served as a ladder to a deck with railings. Above the ravine’s steep slope, we rode currents of air. The canopy of oak leaves was our roof, broken with light, projecting green across the platform. In middle school, in pursuit of hummers, I would creep nervously out onto a twisting branch, hold tight with one hand, and with the other take photographs of a male Anna’s, half in shadow, crooning at the edge of the tree. It was as if he were looking out for signs of land.
Myths of origin, flights of fancy: The town where I was raised is named for Don Gaspar de Portolá, a man born in Catalonia, a soldier for the Spanish army in Italy and Portugal before he was named governor of Las Californias from 1768 to 1770. Between those years, he led an overland party of sixty-three soldiers, missionaries, Native converts, and muleteers north from San Diego to scout for mission sites on the coast, and hopefully find the fabled port of Monte Rey. But they didn’t quite recognize Monterey Bay, and after three and a half months, instead came to a perch on a coastal ridge where they saw a great swath of inland water. They called it Estero de San Francisco, thinking it an arm of the then Bahia de San Francisco (now Drakes Bay), so christened by another explorer in 1595. Though they didn’t realize it at the time, in fact Portolá and his party were the first Europeans to glimpse what lies inside today’s Golden Gate. It’s funny, I could have sworn I was taught that Portolá first saw the bay from the crest of my town, but actually he summited the ridge about twenty miles farther north, as the hummer flies. This much, at least, I hope is true: Saint Francis of Assisi, the patron of my home port, once turned to his companions and said, “Wait for me here by the way, whilst I go and preach to my little sisters the birds.”
In school, you are asked to relish facts, to pick apart passages, to hold them up to the light, arrange and cache them away. But they only live as you do. Not surprisingly, we often dove into California history, learning about the Franciscan missionaries, the gold rush, and the local Native Americans. The Bay Miwok called hummingbirds kulúpi, or “messenger.” Their glittering feathers were woven into baskets and ceremonial headbands. Some tribes said—say—that it was Hummingbird who poked bright holes in the ceiling of night. The Ohlone, who also lived by the bay, tell of how Hummingbird’s agility and cunning returned fire to the world: In the darkness, Eagle sent him on an epic mission to the underground Badger people. He was to reclaim flame for all the other animals. At his approach, the Badger people selfishly covered their glowing pit with a deer hide, but Hummingbird saw a slit of light where the arrowhead had originally passed. He poked his narrow beak through and clasped an ember, carrying the spoils away. But before he could tuck the coal under his armpit, his throat kindled and began to burn, long and slow, and even now in my backyard.
Europeans first thought the hummingbird a phoenix that could rise from the dead. The Spanish friar Bernardino de Sahagún, translating from the Aztec language in the sixteenth century, dubbed them pájaros resucitados—“revived birds.” The origin of this myth is understandable: At night, or if the cold is severe, hummingbirds fall into a torpor, a temporary hibernation to save energy. The body temperature of an Anna’s plunges from its normal 107 to as low as 48 degrees Fahrenheit, just enough for life. Then, two hours before dawn, the hummer begins to stir and vibrate its wing muscles, shivering to warm its blood for about twenty minutes before flight. Alexander Wilson was one of the first to note this trick in his 1831 American Ornithology; or The Natural History of the Birds of the United States, Volume Two. One cold day, he prodded a hummingbird in a shaded wire cage—not an Anna’s, but a ruby-throated, the only hummer found in eastern North America. “No motion whatever of the lungs could be perceived, on the closest inspection,” Wilson recalled, “though, at other times, this is remarkably observable; the eyes were shut; and, when touched by the finger, it gave no signs of life or motion.” So Wilson carried the bird outside and set it in the sunlight, where it must have glowed even in its stillness. He continued to watch: “In a few seconds, respiration became very apparent; the bird breathed faster and faster, opened its eyes, and began to look about, with as much seeming vivacity as ever. After it had completely recovered, I restored it to liberty; and it flew off to the withered top of a pear tree.”
Calypte. Before he left Ogygia, Odysseus confessed to Calypso that he thought she was gorgeous, more beautiful than his wife. Still, he wanted desperately to go home. She sent him sailing with bread, wine, and water on a raft he’d built from the island’s largest trees. He navigated by the stars, those holes poked in the sky. It took Odysseus ten years, all told, to return home from Troy. Homer doesn’t mention any children between him and the sea nymph, but other classical accounts imagine one or two. Now I find myself wondering: Did René-Primevère Lesson, upon discovering this bird new to science in the duke’s collection, suddenly recall the story of the sea nymph? Did he name this creature for Anna Masséna in patronage, or with secret affection? Did he picture and long to see the bird floating, singing, above these greenbrown hillsides of a land he would never visit?
On the fringe of Silicon Valley, in the late 1990s, we learned to make clunky websites, feeling like pioneers. Eighth grade. If my memory serves, each of us picked a different animal, and mine, of course, was Anna’s. We searched field guides, textbooks, and other soon-to-be-extinct genres for vitals, and then we bracketed this natural history between simple code. Several of my best snapshots I scanned and cropped with precision; my friends, working on behalf of cheetahs and blue whales, couldn’t so easily include original art. And when I walked through the tinted-glass doors of the cool, cave-like computer lab into the warmth and glare of the school’s courtyard, how satisfying to hear that familiar voice from the oaks or the wisteria trained on a trellis overhead. That website is lost now, ether. I’m not entirely sure that it ever went live.
A further education: At school, there was this girl, Moriah. Several years in a row, she won a blue ribbon at our science fair for Anna’s Choice I, II, and III. Her motivating questions: Does Anna’s hummingbird have a feeder-color preference? Do Anna’s hummingbirds prefer feeders with perches? Does feeder exposure influence feeder choice by Anna’s hummingbirds? Her explorations and answers didn’t light my fire, but I admired and envied her immaculate poster board (fastidious, she was—or her parents) and her brilliant array of glass bottles hung upside down, each with sugar water. Anna’s hummingbirds, not surprisingly, are highly territorial. I hear she’s a geneticist now. It’s a shame that I was too proud, or shy, to talk to her about our mutual fascination with a creature whose heart can beat over a thousand times per minute.
To know, to understand. Our desire is for more. New heights: They’re always within reach. Stay, Odysseus. Several years ago, scientists anesthetized and performed minor surgery on a small flock—a hover, a glittering, a tune, a shimmer, a bouquet—of Anna’s, all caught near Los Angeles. They inserted .08-millimeter silver wires into their breasts, into the pectoralis major, in vivo, and flew them in a controlled setting—inside a box—to discover, by way of electromagnetic waves relayed along the wires, how their muscles are selectively fired depending on the intensity of flight. The scientists dialed back the air density to make the birds increase their exertion and lengthen their strokes. They also put tiny harnesses around the birds’ scintillating necks and attached them to weighted chains, to measure their ability to lift increasing loads. Cameras recorded it all. “These results suggest that hummingbirds recruit additional motor units (spatial recruitment) to regulate wing stroke amplitude but that temporal recruitment is also required to maintain maximum stroke amplitude at the high
est wingbeat frequencies.” I must confess I have only the foggiest notion of what this means; in essence, first more muscle fibers contract, and then they do so more quickly. But just imagine all those birds hovering, pulsing, at the end of their silver tethers.
Leaving a basketball game once, I spotted a male Anna’s lying in the gutter among the curled oak leaves of winter. How old was I? It slips my mind. But from the rush of spectators heading toward their cars, I stepped off the curb and scavenged it with the pinch of my fingers. A little gummy mass, stuck with bits of sand, had spilled from its feathers and congealed: not an oxygen-rich red, but darkness, the way its hood and gorget look in life when the bird turns its head and the blaze disappears. I placed the bird in my palm and carried its weightless body home. It was the first time I’d held a hummingbird. On the desk in my room, I laid the specimen on a clean sheet of watercolor paper and bent my lamp low. With a black felt-tip pen, I ruled out several inches and took photographs of the bird beside the ticks of the line. I measured those wings, its compact emerald body, its slightly decurved bill: discovered and documented such fineness. Then I set it—him, because of the scarlet crown—on a windowsill outside the laundry room, in a lidless Tupperware so air would circulate (a hint of sulfur). A few weeks later, he was gone, as if he’d flown away. I was surprisingly hurt. Sick to my stomach, even. Around and around the driveway I wandered, looking, wondering if he might have blown again to some far corner, some island or pile of leaves.
Safe passage is not guaranteed. In 1670, the governor of Connecticut, John Winthrop, delivered an emblem of the Americas to the English naturalist Francis Willughby with a note: “I send you withal a little Box with a Curiosity in it which perhaps will be counted a trifle, yet ’tis rarely to be met with even here. It is the curiously contrived Nest of a Humming Bird, so called from the humming noise it maketh whilst it flies. ’Tis an exceeding little Bird, and only seen in summer, and mostly in Gardens, flying from flower to flower, sucking with its long Bill a sweet substance. . . . I never saw but one of these Nests before; and that was sent over formerly, with some other Rarities, but the Vessel miscarrying, you received them not.”
All that time I spent watching Anna’s in the backyard, I never found a nest. I knew his territorial perches, each and every twig, but I was never quite on her wavelength. In contrast to the male, she is quiet, gray and green, truly concealed except for a small, irregular iridescent spot on her throat, a discreet touch of flare as if a gift from him. She is very independent: Anna’s hummingbirds don’t pair. The male doesn’t help rear. But there’s this early note, suddenly, a rekindled memory: Six or seven years old, I’m at a park when, at my feet, I chance upon a half-dollar-size nest on the lawn. A thimble of down, woven with lichen scales and spider’s silk—the prize of any collection. But it never reached the bureau; it must have foundered, slipped out of my hand somewhere between the grass and the car, and I’m remembering it now for the first time in a long while.
Then this fact, not at all strange, but wonderful: In the first half of the twentieth century, Anna’s didn’t range north of Southern California. In winter, they wandered into Arizona, but not much farther afield. Since then, however, their numbers have boomed, right alongside California’s great water projects, which gave rise to orchards, to urban and suburban gardens with flowers when all else is quiescent. Eucalyptus also proliferated, which the birds love (rightly so, since the tree shares their name, calypte: Its tasseled flowers are well “concealed” by a hard cup). Sugary feeders grew in popularity as well. Thus Anna’s irrupted elsewhere, tied to us. They’ve colonized the whole coast and are now across the border into British Columbia. Onward and upward, into their dive.
How often our strongest memories seem to take shape at a fence line, some edge: I am standing in the lemon bushes below the adobe retaining wall of our tiered vegetable garden. The lemons are soulful, aromatic, so close their waxy, puckered surfaces fill my peripheral vision. But I’m peering through the fence’s wire windows into a wash of sinuous, drought-tolerant scrub taller than me. I’m birding, I imagine—looking out for California quail or thrashers, and Anna’s. Suddenly one arrives from behind, startling me. So close, the camera useless. I hold my breath as if submerged, while the hummer dangles inches from my face. I imagine its black, wiry toes clasping the freckled bridge of my nose. It twists slightly, an ornament hanging, shifting as if to see its reflection in the glistening leaves. It hangs there. Then whir.
As it turns out, a male Anna’s dives headlong toward the sun. They have evolved to do this, we think, so that their vermilion reflects exactly into the eyes of the beloved or the intruder. The biologist who first wrote of this azimuthal tendency carried a stuffed specimen mounted on a wire into the Berkeley Hills and held it up, like a lightning rod, for the living. I imagine him crouching as a hummer bears down. “In this circumstance,” wrote William J. Hamilton, “the orientation of the dive was easily determined. . . . The effect is one of a tiny ember, suddenly descending upon the observer, growing in brilliance and dimension as it approaches, to burst with a pop as it passes over.” They are such jealous birds, extremely competitive. When I was a boy, three or four Anna’s at a time would dart overhead, chasing each other, rattling their high-pitched calls like cans trailing from a marriage car, like sirens. They seemed to call to me as they defined and furiously defended their territories in a yard I would eventually learn wasn’t really mine. Then, exhausted, that hover or shimmer of birds would fall away to separate twigs, each to sing. The Spanish, as you know, gave up California. The tree house oak fell down. Our actual house was sold.
What’s odd about a hummingbird is that, even as it lingers, you anticipate its departure. Sometimes this distracts you from the present. My hometown is this way, now. Small, green, zipping through. Iridescent, from certain angles. I still visit. There are still photos, boxed away, of a shadowy figure framed among the foliage. But it’s unlikely I’ll live there again, where the dust and amber light are so entwined as the sun lifts from the oaks and, across the valley, withdraws into the redwood crown of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Such is the J dive of discovery: Again and again (and again), there is also loss. But more is found.
Gone Rogue, or Suck It Up
On a cloudy Sunday in July, traveling through southern Oregon with no firm destination in mind, I peeled off I-5 into the small town of Gold Hill, whose streets declare its history by way of businesses like The Miner’s Roost (the local watering hole) and Nugget Auto Parts. I was hoping for a glimpse of the town’s latest boom, but was unsure of what I would find, or if anyone would talk to me. Swing a left on Upper River Road, and you trail the rough-hewn Rogue River through a neighborhood of unpresuming ranch houses until the pavement gives up, turns to dirt, and skirts buffy Bureau of Land Management hills studded with oak. There are thirty-seven miles of free mining access along the Rogue, and this stretch is apparently far from panned out: About forty suction dredges were moored along the willowy, rocky banks or anchored midstream.
Most were idle. In suction dredging, a diver wields a hose underwater to siphon up the riverbed and its potential pay dirt, but the day was cold, intermittently drizzly, and most of the miners—dredgers, I should say—were at home, or in their comfy RVs, rather than in the 49-degree water. But I encountered a few. First, Dave, a silver-haired man in dripping red hibiscus board shorts and neoprene booties. He’d just dragged his six-foot dredge off the river and, with the aid of a local friend (whose name I didn’t catch), was corralling its tentacular parts into his truck bed, cursing and groaning, and clanging; the thing looked like a hybrid of a go-kart and a central vacuum. He lived in Newport, a town on the coast, and had to drive the four hours home to return to his day job on Monday.
“You writing a book?” Dave asked me, after a minute, as he shoved his gear one last time and slammed the tailgate. “Cause you’re sure asking a lot of questions.” He’d only just peeled off his wetsuit, and I suppose it wasn’t the best time to nervously ask
about dredging, or whether he was getting into any gold. Probably he just wanted an Irish coffee.
“Not yet,” I said.
“Well, do you want to know what I call my mining business?”
I nodded.
“Mining my own business.”
John, a guy from Portland, was friendlier and voluble, more forthcoming. Sort of. He was mining “somewhere on Earth” “about fifty minutes away,” and he looked flat-exhausted, his eyes slightly bloodshot, maybe because he’d spent the previous afternoon belaying his dredge (“a giant underwater hookah,” he said) down a remote cliff to his private claim. That’s how mining rights work on most Oregon rivers; the open access on the Rogue is rare. John had blown the day off to recover and, already, scout fresh stretches. I ran into him along a rippling bend with a view of Lower Table Rock: one of two sheer volcanic mesas that rise like curtains above the agricultural Rogue Valley. “Is it worth it!” he called out, optimistically, to another miner who had surfaced midriver to rest on a boulder like a mink, a small universal dive flag—red with a white diagonal stripe—waving over his dredge. “Sorry, I can’t hear you,” the miner shouted. Fifty-fifty that was true.