Words about Hummingbirds

Hey, just out of curiosity, how often do you guys have to duck to avoid sharp Hummingbird beaks from diving into and penetrating some side of your head? Actually, better question: how many of you have ever even actually SEEN a Hummingbird?

That's my boy!

Those are the two extreme ends of the “Hummingbird exposure” spectrum, and I can safely say after sitting down and pondering about it, I fall on the most extreme side of the former, I.E avoiding Hummingbird projectiles habitually and hoping their beaks don’t break on my head because I would feel eternally horrible. I am officially at the realisation that the high level in which I deal with Hummingbirds is staggering, and I feel compelled to write about this phenomenon now, to see if anybody else (and be honest when your comments, I don’t want this website to become a yahooanswers type deal filled with pompous fabricating braggarts) shares the same relationship I have with this species of tiny little fast birdies.

The following, I’d like to make clear, is not an exaggeration, and I can’t stress that enough. But, I will say I see Hummingbirds every single day during the Spring and Summer months and sometimes a little bit of Fall. Not only do I see them with such frequency, I think that quite honestly, I see Hummingbirds more than any single bird that exists. This includes Robins, Jays, Crows, Gulls, Cranes and even just a mere Finch, just a common finch bird. They don’t compete with Hummingbirds. In fact, no joke, as I write this there is one literally staring at me, hovering inches away from me in midair. I’m being very still to not scare it as I write.

Well, okay, it has since moved on to the feeder but I can still hear it and see it…and here’s the thing – I’m USED to this kind of thing!

To regress to the earlier days, my whole life has been filled with every neat animal you’d ever want, and that’s one of the highest marks I can give the Village I grew up in…and probably one of the ONLY high marks. This I can’t even say with much sincerity in 2011 given all of the changes and industrialization that took place in this red and old town, but it wasn’t always that way, I assure you.

As a boy, I couldn’t look outside without being treated to a neat animal. Almost all the good midwestern animals besides badgers, bears and wolves. Deer were most abundant (still are), but I could also count on Coyotes (one of the greatest), Raccoons, Possums, Gophers, Moles, Voles, Squirrels, the mean spirited Red Squirrels, Chipmunks, frogs, crawfishes, muskrats, turkeys, snakes, and of course, the elusive fox, to get in on the party. I only rarely saw Foxes, but I never will forget the exhilaration of when I did. One time in particular there was this one kooky Fox just whizzing and dashing around the neighborhood all day, and I only caught a few glimpses of it. It was just like a dog, particularly the Papillons I grew up with, and this probably contributed to a Fox becoming my favorite animal…well, next to a Dog of course.

Good men

I always consider that I more or less grew up in a threshold between Suburban and Rural, but I chose to trend rural. I say this because on one side of my house you’ve got insufferable neighbors,  coffee-drinkers, lawn-mowers, rightwing-voters, cop-callers, block-partiers and the typical pathetic “Hiya-Neighbor” wastes of a human existence that only serve to detract from the Earth we live on in an uncountable slew of ways until the day they die of their own cigarette-inflicted cancer or office-related high blood pressure or just pure unadulterated gluttony. This is the side I resent, the side I’d pity if they hadn’t made their own beds and slept in it in their constant suburban struggle to shun us for our refusal to build up their all-important curb appeal and their disgusting tendency to call the police on us if we so much as -

A) Mutter under our breath
B) Try to reclaim something they “finderskeepers” took from us
C) Own the blind, senile dog that ran into their yard in her confusion and crashed into the creek and almost drowned and froze to death in the dead of winter.

Yes, our neighbors actually called the police on us for trespassing because our confused dog almost killed herself in their yard and we were somehow supposed to prevent this. Admittedly, this ended on the side of my house I prefer but it started on the Suburban side. I realize I’ve gone off in a tangent, but those are the type of people my neighbors are. Awful, miserable people. People who are nosy, gossipy busybodies and will probably find themselves reading this very passage. To that, I stick to my convictions and say to them that they both ought to be ashamed of themselves for living the lives they live and that they are more than welcome to stay on that side of the house, because I much prefer the other one; the rural side.

This is my backyard, and touching it is a cornfield that leads to either a forest or a chicken and kitten riddled farm. I LOVE this forest, as it’s everything you’d ever find in a forest in some sort of coming of age movie. Cat corpses to poke with sticks, abandoned tree-houses, a long and winding creek with dilapidated bridges, stashes of 1980′s Playboys stowed in a hallowed log, mysterious footprints, rumors, relics, piles of burned George W. Bush yard-signs, coyote hideouts, snake-holes, and one of my personal favorite parts of my childhood: the crashed Nash Cosmopolitan pretty deep in the woods. I had all of those things. It was the perfect recipe for an interesting child. Connected to the woods was a beautiful flowery valley that I liked to spend time at. I lived the life of Christopher Robin, as the 100 Acre Woods was right in my backyard, vividly similar to a bizarre degree. I loved it.

Then, one day I saw them tow the truck from the woods, and that was the start. The Farmer, who in typical kid fashion I called “Old Man Zimmer,” died and the new Farmers were violent and scary reckless good-ole-boy types. Then, the sucker punch, they quite literally took my flowery valley paradise and put up a parking lot. Maybe that was around the time in 5th grade when my childhood innocence was simultaneously being sucked away by my racist, sexist and morbidly obese teacher who told me I wasn’t amusing, called me a bad actor and writer and forced me to stop doing my favorite hobby, drawing cartoons, because I “wasn’t even good at it.” Either way, that’s when I stopped being a boy. They took away my places of refuge and my teacher was making me suicidal. The worst aspect was that the wondrous animals began to go away when the ubiquitous construction around here hit the scene. The foxes left first, all the woodland creatures followed, the turkeys went home, crawfishes swam away and just as recently as last summer, my favorite coyotes took their advice and found better places to live. I’m afraid I’m the next animal in line slated to go away as well. But for now we seem delegated to just loads and loads of deer and your squirrels and chipmunks. None of the rest liked the racket of kids playing baseball and their stupid parents on the sidewalk. Bigger picture, the animals probably left the whole village for the same reason I’ll leave – sick of Walmart and lawnmowers, there’s a better life to be had elsewhere.

However, the animals that will forever stick around are the birds. Oodles and oodles of birds, you guys. Birds, birds, birds. The only birds that got the memo to leave are the turkeys, the rest are quite content. Eagles, vultures, chickadees, cardinals, finches, the bird equivalent of foxes to me, ducks, herrings, redwing blackbirds, bluebirds, orioles, golds, waxwings, grosbeaks, the whole crew. But none quite like the very subject of this post – Hummingbirds.

In the summer, I wake up to Hummingbirds buzzing around the phlox, I go to the living room and see a hummingbird drinking from the feeder and another one watching on a specific Hunmingbird branch on the tree they seem to love, if I just walk anywhere around the house, I just expect Hummingbirds. The things are everywhere, and it’s fantastic! I am so accustomed to these tiny birdies that I can recognize their hums to a T and especially their chirps. Did you even know Hummingbirds chirp? I, too, was astounded at first, but now I’m just used to it. Both sides, me and Hummingbirds, are so used to one another that they will just fly up to me and stare me straight in the eyes, no fear to be detected whatsoever. In fact, as you saw, just earlier in this very post one of them did that. They’ve done it like 3 more times since I wrote that part, and I’ve only eaten dinner in between. They just like to check out what I’m doing, and I just get to look at them, soaking in every detail. Their slender little petite bodies, their unreal fan-like wings, their svelte heads with their emerald feathers and shimmery ruby throats, and for the ladies, a very specific hue of purple I’ve only seen in Hummingbirds. Perhaps most striking are their incredibly expressive eyes, against all odds. Beady black eyes are not generally an outlet for expression, but the beautiful Hummingbird defies this. I am so in tune to these little guys that I often lose sight of it. Therefore, I take it for granted. I had to sit down and come to the conclusion that this is simply not normal, it’s not even vaguely common, at least to my knowledge. Hummingbirds come as a commodity to people, a very rare good luck charm, and then here I am with Hummingbirds very much a part of my day-to-day life. But, duly note this; I have always appreciated it and appreciate it even more after thinking what a seemingly unique situation I am in with these birds.

I think much of this comes from years, almost two decades, of establishing trust with the birds, thanks entirely to my mother. It all boils down to the Hummingbird feeder. For those who aren’t familiar, the concept is just filling a clear little vial with bright-red sugar water to hang on a gutter. There are tiny grids for the Hummingbird’s delicate beaks to penetrate so they can drink the juice.

My advice to those doing this is to keep the juice FRESH, because they will thank you. I would say like with many things, my Mom is the one with the golden touch for the juice, because the Hummingbirds will and always do drink down the entire feeder in less than 3 weeks, which is insane. Look at it this way: for a HUMAN, the feeder is about the size of a generous cup of water. For a Hummingbird, it’s about the size of 6 or 7 of them tall, and I have no idea how many of them you could stuff in there, but it’s no small number. So, in three weeks, any number of Hummingbirds drink several, several times their weight in juice. I guess this is just because they really like this juice…and they remember it from year to year. This is evidenced by the fact that in Spring, the tell-tale sign it’s Hummingbird season is when Hummingbirds fly up to our living-room window and just look at is. Just levitating and looking at us through the glass, basically beckoning to us that we better get our shit together and put the feeder outside already. They actually tell us. Every year.

Why this strikes me is because I know damn well that Hummingbirds don’t live for 20 years. So, how the heck do they know that there will be fresh H-bird juice waiting for them every single year? My theory comes from something I read about crows. I think it’s entirely possible that somehow, a genetic memory of this feeder location might be passed down from generation to generation. Now, THAT is flattery. I think it’s safe to say that our yard more or less is the monopoly on Hummingbirds around here as well, because whereas our deck has become some sort of a hub, our neighbor has the same feeder…and the levels of juice have stayed the same all summer. Just no takers…although, it sure wouldn’t hurt to give them some fresh juice like they love!

So, let’s talk about Hummingbirds in the comments. Do you guys get them so much? I always consider it a special honor, but I felt the same way about being able to crack walnuts with my hands, which the Internet wasted no time in telling me everybody could do it and that I’m not special. So, tell me about your experiences with this special bird I love so much…and don’t worry, feel free to brag. It’s no secret I just did!

And here's this for some reason