Heartless Hummingbirds, Revisited

I wrote the following post before my mother’s health turned. I post it here as originally written. An epilogue follows…

November 11, 2008

You might say my history with hummingbirds is one of wary distance and mutual disrespect (see Heartless Hummingbirds).

Since that single hummingbird visit to my feeder — clearly an act of desperation by a starving bird, followed by marked distain for all of my further attempts at hospitality, I began to see and hear hummingbirds all over town. Whipping from flower to flower, chasing each other around, sitting still in bushes and trees. They were everywhere, but not at my back porch. I decided it was time to release my resentment. My mother was the magical one who attracted her hummingbird disciples, I would have to settle for enjoying their presence in the world.

A few months later, everything changed.

It’s 7:30 am, my phone rings. I hear the machine pick up and the voice of my downstairs neighbor. “Loretta,” she tells my machine, “I’m late for work, but I wanted to let you know we have a dead bird on our steps. Would you deal with it?”

I hear her slam her door shut, head down the stairs, and close the gate.

A dead bird? Good morning to you, too, world. After an unhappy moment, I crawl out of bed to investigate.

I go down the stairs and see nothing. I figure Jane had hallucinated and head back up. Then I see it – a very small, very dead-looking hummingbird huddled in a tight ball on our cold brick steps.

It was a message from the universe: You get the dead ones – Ha ha!

I run upstairs for a box small enough for a bird-coffin, line it with a tissue, and come down to collect the body. The bird must have flown into our stairwell, gotten disoriented, maybe hit a wall in the dark, then collapsed and frozen in the cold. It was its time, and this was the place.

The body was so light, I could almost blow it into the box.

Back upstairs, I stared down at the small bird, sad and a little afraid to touch it. Emerald green feathers on his back and wings, he had a black neck and a shimmering red breast – a Ruby Necked, I thought, just like the ones that visit my mom.*

The sun streamed through the window onto the kitchen counter, so I figured – Well, it couldn’t hurt. I put the box on the counter and started washing the dishes and making coffee.

Mark wanders in, looks over my shoulder at the bird and says, “Sorry baby, it’s dead. Want me to take care of it?”

I’m gonna give it a minute, I tell him. Mark takes another look at the bird’s lifeless body, pats my shoulder, and heads to the shower.

I stand there, listening to the coffee brew and staring at the bird when it jerks, like struck by a defibrillator. Still prone, eyes shut, he slowly opens his wings to the warm sun, looking like an exhausted cormorant.

He’s alive! What do I do? My mind races, stories of my mom’s hummingbird rescues flash through my head. I rummage through my kitchen cabinet – sugar, I need sugar. I had not baked in a year – did I even have sugar?

I did! Organic turbinado sugar — not enough for a cake, but plenty for a half-dead hummingbird. But what was the ratio – one to one, one to four? I wasn’t going to let him die while I figured it out, but I didn’t want to shock his system either.

I mixed some sugar and warm water and put it in a small shallow dish I use for dipping dumplings. The hummingbird had retracted his wings, a loose bundle now, still on his side, eyes closed. Had I just seen his last gasp?

I gently shifted him so his beak lay in the sugar water. His body was lifeless. Mark wandered in for coffee, saw the situation and said, “Well, don’t drown him.”

Drown him? Did hummingbirds breathe through their beaks? Didn’t they have nostrils? I realized that for all my fondness for birds, I had no real idea about their physiology. So I raised his beak just above the syrup, just in case.

Suddenly, he started to drink. The tiniest sliver of a tongue whipped in and out, his tiny throat moving in concert. And then he stopped.

Long minutes went by with voracious drinking followed by long, maybe-he’s-really-dead-this-time breaks. But I was finally hopeful that he might make it. Then I realized I should get him outside or I might end up with an amped-up hummingbird trapped in my house. So I went to open the door to my back porch.

The storm door swung open with a bang, and he was up! Flying like a maniac, but fortunately trapping himself under the kitchen cabinet, he hit his head repeatedly against the cabinet then the wall — completely baffled by this huge, solid tree. I grabbed a tissue and trapped him gently in the corner, closing the tissue around him like a net. He was so light, I couldn’t tell if I had him, but I saw no more crazed hummingbirds whipping around the kitchen.

I stepped outside, put the tissue on the handrail, and carefully unfolded the bundle. He blinked a long moment, then he zipped up a few feet, got his bearings, and zoomed off towards the trees, dipping and swerving like someone recovering from a rough and boozy night.

I got teary-eyed, standing there staring at his trail back to life. I had saved a hummingbird — I had, perhaps, inherited the hummingbird gene from my mother.

Re-inspired, I filled my feeder with organic turbinado sugar syrup. And a week or two later, I had my first visitor.

I imagine someone spread the word, because I have several regulars now: A Calliope who likes to try the nectar from each hole in my feeder, buzzing around in a stuttering circle. A small female who always starts off hovering, then takes a seat for a good long meal. And a super-sized Black-Chinned with a flashing red neck – my mom can’t believe his size. I like to think this is my guy.

Now there are days when I am on the phone with my mom, and she says, Oh, a hummingbird! And I get to say — I have one too!

* I was wrong, it was a black-chinned hummingbird. The only local bird with a black and red neck.

Black-chinned drinking deep:

 

Epilogue: June 12, 2009

In February, I was called home. My mom was losing her long battle with cancer and before anyone could believe it, she was gone.

I returned to San Francisco a few weeks later. One of the first things I did was refresh the nectar in my hummingbird feeder. Over and over, every few days, I cleaned the feeder and added fresh nectar, but no one came. Ants swarmed the feeder and a rat took over the seed I put out for the blue jays and sparrows. It was a very dark time in my corner of the city.  

I figured I would never get to post the lighthearted sequel to my hummingbird saga. But just last week, from nowhere, a single hummingbird came back to the feeder. It felt like a sign, but I’m not sure of what. In any case, with this, I close this story.

My world is still dark and stormy at times, but the hummingbirds, at least, have found a way to keep flying.