Sy Montgomery - The Hummingbirds Gift: Wonder, Beauty, and Renewal on Wings

The Hummingbirds Gift

Wonder, Beauty, and Renewal on Wings

Sy Montgomery

New York Times Bestselling Author of The Soul of an Octopus

Previously published as a chapter in Birdology

To mothers everywhere, who understand

T his is the story of a resurrection.

Its not the world-altering tale of Jesuss rise from the dead after crucifixion. (You already know that one.) Nor has this story the dramatic sweep of the saga of Persephone, daughter of the Greek goddess Demeter, whose yearly escape from the underworld brings us the seasons for planting and harvestspring, summer, and fallor the Egyptian myth of Osiris, the murdered king brought back to life by the love of his sister. But its a story of a miracle, nonetheless.

Granted, its a small miracle. How small? Not much bigger than two bumblebeesfor that was the size of Zuni and Maya, two infant, orphaned hummingbirds, so young we couldnt even tell their species, when I first met them more than ten years ago.

When these two baby birds (who turned out to belong to the species known as Allens hummingbird) arrived at rehabilitator Brenda Sherburn La Belles Fairfax, California home, they were at deaths door. Nobody knows what happened to their mother. For mere humans to restore them to the wild required an epic effort. It was my great good fortune that Brenda invited me to help.

Over the course of the weeks I spent helping Brenda, I learned just how demanding and fraught was our task. We were tending to tiny creatures as delicate as froth. In fact, they are bubbles: hummingbirds are made of air. Their tiny bodies are crammed with no fewer than nine air sacs, in addition to their two huge lungs and enormous heart. And yet, in order for them to survive, we had to repeatedly insert into their tiny, bubble-filled bodies a giant, pointy syringe that looked, compared to them, like the top of the Empire State Building.

If we didnt, they would starve. If we overdid it, they could pop.

As it was, I was fearful at first that my touch alone would break them. Everything about a hummingbird is diaphanous. Their delicate bones are exceptionally porous. Their legs are thinner than toothpicks; their feet as flimsy as embroidery thread. Scientists began attaching metal bands to the legs of birds to track and identify them as far back as 1890but the first bands deemed light and safe enough for hummingbirds fragile legs were not developed till 1960. And they, of course, were only deployed on adult birds. Our infants were more fragile yet.

Baby hummingbirds require constant, diligent, round-the-clock attention. They tax even their mothers, who may make more than a hundred flights a day to find food for their babies. Even with Brendas decade of experience, we knew we were no match for a mother hummingbird. We would have to work even harder and longer to make up for that. Saving those tiny babies was a big task.

But the rewards, as I was to learn, were even bigger.

Its been more than a decade since I last saw Brenda. Since then, a lot has happened. Her parents have died, as have her in-laws. She told me it set her thinking: What am I going to do the rest of my life? The answer was easy. Im going to focus on the two things that make me happy, besides my kids and husband and dog: making sculpture, and my hummingbirds.

She no longer rears orphansit took her two years to train people to take her placebut she is still deeply connected with these glittering sparks of life. She says she always will be. These days, she still fields calls from around the country, and from as far away as Guatemala. One person phoned her from a third-floor balcony, watching through binoculars to see if a mother hummingbird returned to a nest she feared was abandoned. In another case, the caller found a nest in a terrible neighborhood. No, the area was not afflicted with gangs or drugs. It suffered from a paucity of flowers. Brenda counseled the Samaritan to go out and buy nectar-rich, trumpet-shaped, red blooms and surround the tree with the nest with the plants. Now the mother hummer could tank up on the calories she needed to hunt for the bugs her babies craved.

Brendas house is still abuzz with hummers. Five nectar feeders set at different corners of the house nourish several dozen hummingbirds of four different species while minimizing fighting. Brenda logs in daily to report her sightings with Cornell Universitys national Project FeederWatch, to help scientists keep track of bird populations.

Recently, Brenda told me, she and her husband, Russ, bought property in Fort Bidwell, in the far northeastern corner of California at the western edge of the Great Basin. Its high desert, with a strip of rich grassland where ranchers pasture their cattlea mix of habitats that attracts animals from antelopes to foxes, and birds from sandhill cranes to hummingbirds. They are working to transform the old house into a collective studio, where she and other artistsincluding many Native American artistscan showcase their work. (Theyre calling the project Yampa Sculpture Path and Studio after the Paiute name for an edible tuber that sustained the first peoples, one that still grows wild.) I want it to be a bridge between art and naturesculpture within nature, Brenda explained, as well as common ground for artists without any prejudices. And they are turning the land into a paradise for pollinators.

Her love for hummers has spiraled out to now include bees, butterflies, and moths as well. (She particularly loves the sphinx moth, also sometimes called the hummingbird moth. Its got this funny, coiled tongue, she tells me. Its really hilarious! It looks like a bent strawand it hovers! The moth feeds by night on the same plants the hummingbirds feed on by day.)

On their new land, Brenda and Russ are planting groves and gardens. Pollinator plants will be everywhere: cornflowers, with their soft, fuzzy, blue double blossoms of fringed petals; Buddleias, or butterfly bush, with fragrant clusters of red, yellow, orange, pink, purple, and white petals at the tips of arching branches; columbine, bell-shaped, spurred flowers that dangle and nod with the breeze. Shes planting salvia, its tiny, tubular, usually scarlet flowers stacked on tall stalks; penstemon, or beard tongue, sporting towers of tubular flowers in colors ranging from crimson to electric blue. Gardens will be peppered with the shrublike spires of lupines, and dotted with paintbrush, its stalks of linear leaves topped with bright red bracts.

The plantings will not just feed pollinators. By planting trees and gardens, right down to itty-bitty hummingbird flowers, she says, we can generate microclimatic ecosystems. Creating little oases of shade and moisture, these carefully chosen communities of plants can importantly counter some of the damage from climate change. A University of Singapore researcher, in a paper in Global Change Biology, confirms that even small areas have extraordinary potential to buffer climate and likely reduce mortality during extreme climate events.

It will be beautiful, too: Brenda envisions visitors walking beneath a trellis covered with orange trumpet flowers, with Buddleias on the side and daisy-shaped bee balm on the bottom. Id love to walk through an arbor with hummingbirds and bees and butterflies buzzing all round, she says. Hummers, she says, especially love flowers on trellises: the way they bounce up and down from plant to plant reminds her of music. It looks like pure joy, she says. Theres something very musical about it, even though they dont sing. Maybe thats how they express their song.