In some ways, undertaking an explanation of the appeal of hummingbirds seems like one of the more superfluous of these essays. Everyone already loves hummingbirds – there is little need for me to make a case for them as I did for the superficially dull towhees or the superficially mean and violent scrub-jays. They need no defender.
“They need no defender” is also not a bad summary of the main impression that hummingbirds make on people. Extremely fast and maneuverable, they have a consequent boldness that exhibits little fear of predators or humans. They’ll fly right up to you. They have few enemies, or at least few that are capable of making a regular habit of catching them.
While being bold and fearless, they are also very small. This results in a safe mental categorization by us humans as safe and non-threatening. You can imagine how we might feel less at ease if these laser-flighted, pointed-billed creatures were the size of eagles:
Probably he was big
As mosses, and little lizards, they say were once big.
Probably he was a jabbing, terrifying monster.
We look at him through the wrong end of the long telescope of Time,
Luckily for us.
“Humming-Bird”, D.H. Lawrence
Fearless and small – people know these things. What’s left for me to say? I have three topics. First, I will recap some of the most astounding hummingbird facts in what is for me a perhaps atypically straightforward manner. Because unadorned hummingbird facts are astounding enough. Second, I’ll zoom in to our local perspective and clarify which hummingbirds we have in Novato, Marin, and the Bay Area, how to identify them, and when you will find them here. I’ll also indulge in a hearty dose of my favorite activity of discussing names, with the perennial goal of attaching some conviviality and personal stories to our interactions with our daily bird neighbors. Last, I’ll zoom out a bit – but not all the way – to engage in some broad regional pride, a more sane alternative to politicized nationalism that recognizes and celebrates the happy privilege of being in the New World, land of hummingbirds.
Documentary Evidence of Improbable Creatures
How big are they? Our local Anna’s hummingbird is a relatively large member of the family, weighing in between 0.1 and 0.2 oz. Allen’s hummingbirds are distinctly smaller, staying closer to the .1 oz. end of the scale. And the smallest known hummer is the bee hummingbird, standing in the Cuban corner and weighing in at .06 oz. When an Olympic weightlifter presses some 550 lbs. overhead, he is lifting a mass equivalent to some 150,000 bee hummingbirds. My bike weighs 6,000 hummingbirds and the car I used to have weighed over 500,000 hummingbirds. (Let’s measure everything in hummingbirds. It’s more fun and relates us to the world more than that abstraction known as a pound.)
How off the charts is their metabolism? Average hummingbirds might flap their wings some 50 times per second in normal flight, with their heart rate ranging from 50 bpm during nocturnal torpor, to 250 during normal daytime resting, to over 1000 beats per minute during intense activity. I’ve seen estimates that hummingbirds burn 400 times more calories per unit body mass than humans do and that the energy expenditure of the giant hummingbird during active flight would consume some 4300 calories per hour if maintained consistently. That’s what a diet high in sugar water is good for!
How much nectar do they consume? Hummingbirds might visit 1000-2000 flowers in a day, over the course of which they might take in some 160% of their body mass in water. In The Bird, Colin Tudge shares the helpful reflection that “scaled up to human size, they would pee about 100 liters a day, around 25 gallons. If they made such a ceremony of micturition as humans do, this would surely take them an hour or so a day. But hummingbirds just spray as they go.” Thank you, Mr. Tudge.
How fast can they fly? When studying Anna’s hummingbird courtship dives, Berkeley researchers measured their top speed at 61 mph, experiencing 10 Gs of force (in normal flight, they travel at 30-some mph). Now, on the one hand, this is far short of the top recorded animal speed, the 240 mph of a diving peregrine falcon. But it is extremely impressive considering their size: the researchers noted that this hummer speed converts to 385 body lengths per second, the highest known such figure. Usain Bolt can hit about 6.
Why don’t I see any at my hummingbird feeder? The short answer: keep your nectar fresh, changing it about once a week or twice a week in hot weather. Then be patient. Feeder activity can fluctuate throughout the year as natural food sources come and go, hummers nest, hummer migrate, hummers die. For more of this practical stuff which I don’t feel like rewriting in this appreciative article, see my bird store website or my Marin IJ column on Hummingbird 101.
I understand flying and feeding. Can you explain the rest of hummingbird behavior now and wrap it up? Most of the other essential facets of hummingbird life that you will run into can be explained by an understanding of their courtship and nesting cycle. The story goes like this:
In California, spring starts in December and January when rain triggers flowering, plant growth, and increased insect life. That’s when many hummers ramp up their courtship displays (though you may see them throughout spring and into summer – as with other birds, hummingbirds often raise multiple broods over the course of the year). These consist of both perched songs with synchronized head bobbing to show off the shiny feathers of their gorget and in dramatic display flights.
Song, gorget iridescence, display dives, plus gratuitous music & cheesy commentary.
As noted in the intro above, the variable appearance of those iridescent head feathers can often cause confusion: what is this hummingbird with a black head? In our area, it’s usually it’s just an Anna’s in different light conditions. As Alexander Skutch described the importance of perspective:
Sooner or later, unless I have worse than average luck, he will poise before a flower whose position obliges him to assume the precise angle most favorable for displaying his splendors to me. Then, in a sudden burst of effulgence, like the light of some great revelation, what was previously black and lusterless stands unveiled in its true brilliance and glory. For it is with hummingbirds’ colors as with all true revelations; they resist eager importunities and cannot be compelled. We must bide our time, humbly and patiently, until the divine afflatus, or whatever it is that leavens and uplifts the spirits of men, finds it convenient, out of the fullness of its time and vastness of its resources, to inspire us; and it is more likely to do this when we are quietly receptive than when we go bustling about, intent upon the immediate achievement of our own narrow aims.
– Alexander Skutch, “The Charm of Hummingbirds” in A Bird Watcher’s Adventures in Tropical America
Just slow down and wait for the divine afflatus; you’ll see different colors if you are patient.
As for the display flights, they are both impressive to behold and useful for species identification. That of the Anna’s hummingbird is a simple climb-and-dive, in which a male bird ascends some 80 ft. in the air, hovers for a moment, then dives steeply down before pulling up with a loud pop! at the bottom. The display of the Allen’s hummingbird is slightly more complex, with a series of back-and-forth shuttle flights followed by a climb-and-dive, typically not as high as that of Anna’s.
For a long time, it was unknown how the Anna’s display pop! was produced. A few years ago, however, a team of Berkeley researchers recorded the dive in high frame rate video and noted a flaring of the tail feathers at the moment of the sound. They were also able to reproduce the sound by holding such feathers in the correct position in the wing tunnel: the sound does not come from their mouths. There’s a fact for you.
And while the males are performing these various songs, displays, and gorget preenings, what are the females doing? Eating, nest building, egg laying, incubation of the eggs, incubation of the young, catching food for the young and spitting it down their throats. In other words: all the work. Do you remember how I said that brown birds (California towhees) were both very plain and loyally monogamous, and that these traits often go together in contrast to the ephemeral peacockery of some other species? Ephemeral peacockery is exactly what male hummingbirds go in for, with lots of bright colors and bold display, followed up by… nothing, as far as family participation goes. The bigger the display, the more useless the father.
Our Hummingbirds:
The Princess, the Local Amateur, and the Iron-Blooded Midget
As touched on above, we have just three regularly-occurring hummingbird species here in Novato, Marin, and the Bay Area generally. By far the most common of these is the Anna’s hummingbird, which is present and abundant all year round. In summer, which for this earliest of migrants means January – July or so, it is joined by smaller numbers of the Allen’s hummingbird. We then have a third species, the rufous hummingbird, which is notoriously similar to the Allen’s and which passes through on both “spring” and “fall” migrations, but breeds in the northwest. Due to the extended leisurely migration window of successive waves of males, females, and young, however, you can see rufous hummingbirds from March into September.
Here are the identification basics:
Anna’s:
- 90%+ of our local hummingbirds
- Males have an iridescent red-magenta-black head, depending on angle.
- Both males and females are basically gray-bodied and green-backed
- A little bigger than the others
Allen’s:
- Mainly late January-July and always less common than Anna’s
- Compared to Anna’s: smaller, with rusty red belly and flanks. Males have iridescent lower part of head.
- Compared to rufous: Females generally indistinguishable, except in the hand. Males have mostly green backs, rather than red on rufous.
Rufous:
- Mainly March-September, but not local breeders.
- Females generally indistinguishable from Allen’s, except in the hand.
- Males have mostly red backs, compared to mostly green-backed Allen’s.
Rufous hummingbirds are extremely similar to Allen’s hummingbirds in most respects. (“Selasphorus species” is what you call them when you can’t tell, including most females.) Unlike the locally-breeding Allen’s, rufouses just pass through California on their 3,000 mile trip from Mexico to as far north as Alaska. This unmatched feat of hummingbird migration to atypically northern latitudes earned them the best hummer sobriquet from W.L. Dawson: “the iron-blooded midget.” Which is really the one thing I feel personally compelled to tell you about them.
That leaves us with two birds to discuss: Anna’s and Allen’s.
There are very few of our common birds that are named after people. Which is generally good. When some seemingly arbitrary name is attached to a living creature, there is always the risk of superfluousness, of a distancing from essentials and common sense. As Thoreau pointed out apropos of a favorite huckleberry species:
By botanists it is called of late, but I think without good reason, Gaylussacia resinosa, after the celebrated French chemist. If he had been the first to distil its juices and put them in this globular bag, he would deserve this honor, or if he had been a celebrated picker of huckleberries, perchance paid for his schooling so, or only notoriously a lover of them, we should not so much object. But it does not appear that he ever saw one. What if a committee of Parisian naturalists had been appointed to break this important news to an Indian maiden who had just filled her basket on the shore of Lake Huron! It is as if we should hear that the Daguerreotype had been finally named after the distinguished Chippeway conjurer, The-Wind-that-Blows.
Are the names of our hummingbirds equally ill-bestowed?
The name of the Anna’s hummingbird is unusual in at least two respects: the use of a first name and having a female eponym. I can’t think of any other local birds for whom either circumstance is true. The Anna in question was Anna Masséna, Duchess of Rivoli, and wife to a prince and natural history enthusiast with a large collection of bird specimens, which he made available to scientists. The prince therefore received a good deal of taxonomic thank you notes, with various birds named after “Masséna” or “Rivoli” and this hummingbird named after la princesse.
As far as I know, Anna Masséna never visited the Americas, saw a hummingbird, or expressed any particular interest in them. Which might seem to put her firmly in the category of Thoreauvian disdain. Do we have any compensatory factors to weigh on the other side? As it happens, we do have one piece of ornithologically-tinged testimony in her favor, from Audubon’s journal of a trip to France:
I took my pamphlet in my arms and entered a fine room, where [the Prince of Masséna] was lying on a sofa; he rose at once, bowed, and presented his beautiful wife. As soon as I had untied my portfolio, and a print was seen, both exclaimed, “Ah! c’est bien beau!” I was asked if I did not know Charles Bonaparte, and when I said yes, they again both exclaimed, “Ah! c’est lui, the gentleman of whom we have heard so much, the man of the woods, who has made so many and such wonderful drawings.” … This prince, son of the famous marshal, is about thirty years of age, apparently delicate, pale, slender, and yet good-looking, entirely devoted to Natural History; his wife a beautiful young woman, not more than twenty, extremely graceful and polite. They both complimented me on the purity of my French, and wished me all success.
So at least she sounds nice. Is polite and beautiful graciousness a slender basis for naming a California hummingbird? Undoubtedly. Is it as good a basis as being a rich guy who owns a few thousand dead birds of unknown identity? I think so.
Because that’s what we would be commemorating if our namer had simply followed the typical pattern of patron recognition by calling it Masséna’s or Rivoli’s hummingbird. Instead, he opted to discard the titles and choose a simple woman’s name, to skip dry scientific deference, to deflect the conventions of financial obligation, and instead, when given the opportunity to select a name for this wondrous new bird, to be carried with it through succeeding generations into a limitless future, decided it would be better graced by an homage to the kind and beautiful princess he had met in his patron’s house.
The naming of birds has known enough men of wealth and patronage. And otherwise forgotten surnames are as dry and unconvivial as anything the taxonomists have come up with. So even if she never saw a hummingbird in her life, I’ll take the variety of a woman’s name, I’ll take the personal touch of a first name, and I’ll take the simple fact of a warm and lovely human being as equally worthy of commemoration as any collector of corpses.
* * *
Then we have the Allen’s hummingbird. Charles Andrew Allen was no prince, rich man, or trained ornithologist. His resume included furniture maker, Union soldier, and chocolate factory laborer. There are no anecdotes about him from Parisian salons. Instead, he was a dedicated amateur, eventually finding congenial work as a “sort of timber guard” in a Nicasio cabin and engaging in his passion for natural history whenever he could.
But his claim to the name is very solid in the most straightforward scientific manner: he was the man who figured out that the bird that bears his name was indeed a separate species from the rufous hummingbird, a fact revealed by close examination of their respective tail feathers. This is among the most minute and subtle of species differentiations among our California birds and Allen was the man with the perceptiveness to see it.
A local amateur bird-lover who defied the conventional wisdom to discover a new species: Thoreau would have little to protest and I would not begrudge him the honor. Plus, now whenever I pass through Nicasio I can reflect that here, here was where that ex-chocolate maker defied the odds and staked his position in the annals of ornithological history. They could put up a town welcome sign: Nicasio, Birthplace of the Allen’s Hummingbird. That’s how I’ll think of the place anyways.
“Our” Hummingbirds: Pride of the New World
So, we have a fairly nice local hummingbird heritage. We are blessed year-round by the Anna’s hummingbird, “the Hyperion of the Golden West,” as Dawson has it. In early spring we are joined by the Allen’s hummingbird, extracted from invisibility by a bird-crazy amateur from just over the hills in Nicasio. And his partner in miniscule pugnancity arrives soon after in the rufous hummingbird, “the iron-blooded midget,” who we see in regular transit to and from his breeding grounds in the northwest.
But I’d like to end by zooming out a little bit. I constantly celebrate the local, but it’s worth remembering that the local has many different scales that nestle inside one another in increasing geographic extension. I enjoy contemplating the birds around my home or around Novato or around the county. I also like to consider my good fortune in living in California, that somewhat larger conglomeration of humans that together share the company of oak titmice or California quail. But when it comes to hummingbirds, the correct scale is arguably continental, recognizing them as a special wonder of the Americas, broadly considered. We are citizens of the New World, and few things mark that fact with more clarity in my mind than the presence of hummingbirds.
Many of our bird families are represented in Europe or Asia with a fair degree of commonality with the species we see here. But not hummingbirds. They are an American specialty, one which we can be proud of. People fly off to see the wildlife of Africa or the paintings of Italy. But they have no hummingbirds over there! This is a fact we can embrace along with our fellow members of the American community, a solid basis for redeclaring our forward-looking independence. “We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe” as Emerson said. And I don’t just mean the United States: “Mex-i-co, you are my neighbor” as the Chili Peppers put it. We’re all part of the hummingbird fraternity, we Californians and our neighbors to the south.
Hummingbirds are part of our everyday lives. Contrast this with the experience of those tame Europeans, residents of an dewilded continent. This is how the great nature showman William Bullock (of Bullock’s oriole fame) described the wondrous Humming Birds of America that the sooty 19th century Londoners could experience in his exhibit:
This little being, who flutters from flower to flower, breathes their freshness, wantons on the wings of the cooling zephyrs, sips the nectar of a thousand sweets, and resides in climes where reigns the beauty of eternal spring…
There is not, it may safely be asserted, in all the varied works of nature in her zoogical productions, any family that can bear a comparison, for singularity of form, splendour of colour, or number and variety of species, with this the smallest of the feathered creation… no subject of Natural History has, since the discovery of the New World, excited admiration of mankind more than this diminutive favorite of nature… all the precious stones and metals polished by our art, cannot be compared to this jewel of nature.
You, modern Californian, get to see this jewel of nature every day, this bird that has excited the admiration of mankind more than any other. And you too get to reside in climes where reigns the beauty of eternal spring while you wanton on the wings of the cooling zephyrs. Lucky you.
The rest of the world has nothing on redwoods and sequoias – if those poor ghosts of past glories living in the shadows of European ruins are jealous of our trees, they’re not wrong. Their cathedral columns are comparatively puny; we walk among the mightiest temples of nature. Likewise, by a combination of good luck and personal choice (I can think of worse reasons to move to California), we have obtained a share in the company of this most incredible of birds as well. The envy or wondering admiration of travellers from Europe or Asia is not the source of the pleasure of seeing a hummingbird, but it is a reminder of our good fortune.
Of course, we here in Alta California are really on the periphery of hummingbird kingdom. There are over 300 species of hummingbirds and we regularly see three. I’ve talked about our Anna’s and Allen’s as if they are special names in the hummer pantheon. But as you go south, you run into the best-named birds in all the world: the crowned woodnymph! The amethyst-throated sunangel! The blue-throated mountaingem and the bronze-tailed plumeleteer! The purple-backed sunbeam and the Andean blossom crown! Not just “hummingbirds,” but emeralds and hermits and starthroats, brilliants and metaltails, woodstars and sabrewings.
And that’s just how we’ve rendered them in English. The diverse countries of the Spanish-speaking world have naturally come up with a great many more names. Our “hummingbird” is rather tame by their standards. Consider picaflor (flower-pecker), visitaflor (flower-visitor), besaflor (flower-kisser), florimulgo (flower-milker), chuparrosa (rose-sucker), aviape (bird-bee), and colibrí (thought to be brought from the Occitane colubro, or grass snake, due to their sudden-striking aggression, though it’s a bit unclear). And all we can talk about is a humming sound?
And so, while I might quote ancient Romans on swallows and Japanese poets on jays, talk of Chaucer’s grand-niece in regards to titmice, and turn to belated Californians for the humble towhee, when we look for the great celebrants of hummingbirds, we have to go south and Hispanic (at least as far as accessible written records go). And when you want Whitmanian expansion on the wonders of the Andes, Pablo Neruda is the obvious candidate:
Al colibrí
volante
chispa de agua,
incandescente gota
de fuego
americano,
resumen
encendido
de la selva,
arco iris
de precisión
celeste:
al picaflor
un arco,
un hilo
de oro,
¡una fogota
verde!
…
pequeño ser supremo,
eres milagro,
y ardes
desde
California caliente
hasta el silbido
del viento amargo de la Patagonia.
Semilla del sol
eres,
fuego
emplumado…
To the hummingbird,
flying
spark of water,
incandescent drop
of
American fire,
burning
encapsulation
of the jungle,
rainbow
of celestial
precision:
to the hummingbird
an arc,
a golden
strand,
a blaze
of green!
…
little supreme being,
you are a miracle,
and you burn
from
scorching California
to the hissing
of Patagonia’s bitter wind.
You are
a seed of the sun,
a fire
dressed in feathers…
“Ode to the Hummingbird”
Ah-ha! We made it into the poem – desde California caliente the hummingbird burns – and we can count ourselves members of the fellowship of the flower-milking bee-birds. It’s an extraordinary thing, a distinct privilege, and a selective club (6.5 billion people are not in it). And for all my exaltation of the commonplace, for all my celebration of the plain titmice and towhees, I’m not one to deny the remarkable when it hovers in front of my face. If the most incredible bird in the world – the fastest, smallest, most agile, and most intensely, heart-beatingly alive of all creatures – happens to be among my daily companions, I will not insist on the perfect equality of all birds. Amid all his chain of iterated fiery metaphors, Neruda comes back to a simple statement: eres milagro, you are a miracle. When you meet a miracle, embrace it.
To retreat into the jaded unimpressibility of the expert, to hide behind the blasé exterior of one who’s seen so many birds – what’s the point? We think we’re demonstrating ourselves as experienced and wised up, beyond childish naive pleasures and aware of the reality of things. Really, we’re denying reality, denying the strangeness of beings that don’t fit into our human notions and narratives.
We like to think we’re the heroes of a movie: we plug our soundtrack into our ears, even if we grow deaf to those alien pops and crackles spitting from the tree branches. We conceive our experiences in neat cinematic rectangles and consider twelves frames per second adequate for the containing of reality, even if we lose the bird that travels too fast for our eyes and rises in a sudden climb beyond our cramped horizontals. We restrict our palette like a black and white movie that makes a puff of smoke appear stylish and meaningful, even if we have to excise the uncatchable glimmer of those shimmering magenta scales, that fuego emplumado.
Imagine seeing a hummingbird for the first time, as if you were one of those sooty Londoners, admitted not into a museum of pinned specimens, but transported into the living California you know. Imagine seeing that weightless hovering bird as an unthought of impossibility or as a rumor and fairy tale come to life. Then step outside, look with those eyes, and realize that you are surrounded by inconceivable wonders.
Header photo: Anna’s hummingbird by Allan Hack.
I had a male hummingbird hover right in front of my face yesterday. It was as if he was studying my face. They’re so fascinating!!
Astounding birds, remarkable essay – & lovely poetry, photos/illustrations – thanks so much, Jack!
Love all your articles, Jack….I learn so much! (But no test, I hope!)
Jack … Your writings are amazing … not only providing intricate and well-researched information, but eloquently transforming the bird world … so it becomes a portal into the whole world of poetry and prose that most of us were never exposed to or have long forgotten. Thanks!
Thank you Donna! By the time I get through all of the local birds, it will indeed constitute a complete education in the western literary canon. And thanks to everyone else for the kind comments!