By Janice Lindsay
Contributing Writer
Good things come in small packages, the saying goes. Good things also come in big packages. But it’s the arrival of tiny packages that I celebrate in May.
Those tiny, jeweled packages are hummingbirds, little miracles.
For me, summer starts when the first traveling hummer returns to my yard from Mexico or South America, usually the first week in May. Summer ends when the last one departs, around mid-September.
We had lived in our new home for only a few months, and I hadn’t given a thought to hummers, when, in early May 2004, an out-of-state friend visited and brought a blooming fuchsia plant, burgundy and pink splendor, saying, “This will attract the hummingbirds.” I doubted. The spring had been cold. I saw not a single wildflower, nothing in the neighborhood for hummers. When she left, I put the plant on the deck outside the kitchen sliding glass door. Within 15 minutes, a ruby-throated hummingbird busied itself among the blossoms.
I bought a feeder, made some nectar, and the hummers have been my guests ever since.
The ruby-throat – a flash of metallic green, the male with a red ascot – is the only hummingbird who normally summers in New England. It’s a bright tiny marvel. It weighs about as much as a nickel. It can fly up to 60 miles an hour, able to fly vertically and backwards and hover. Its wings beat up to 80 times a second, creating the hum; its teeny heart beats 1200 times a minute. In late summer, on the way to its winter hangout, it flies non-stop 500 miles over the Gulf of Mexico.
In the spring, hummers are likely to return to the place where they fledged. And they remember the feeders.
I usually start with one feeder. Then, if I have more than one pair of hummers, I hang another feeder nearby. Early one May, I had hung one feeder. I saw a hummer hovering at the very spot where the second feeder had been the year before.
The ruby-throats look so sweet and nice. But they are not. They are territorial and scrappy and generally inconsiderate of each others’ needs, spending much time and energy arguing about whose turn it is at the feeder.
The adult males are especially combative, protecting a food source (my feeder), sometimes from their own mate and offspring. But the females can be scrappy, too. When a hummer spots an interloper, both defender and interloper chatter and swoop and feint until one leaves. Very occasionally, I’ve seen two females feeding together, or two youngsters feeding together whom I assume are siblings.
I’ve seen photos of feeders with eight or more hummers dining peacefully. Those are not ruby-throats.
One summer I had a male I called Attila the Humm. The original Attila, the Hun, was known in fifth-century Rome as “the scourge of God,” as he tried, some say brutally, to claim most of Europe. Attila the Humm tried to claim our two feeders. One feeder hung from a crook on the kitchen deck, the other on the balcony outside the living room, about 30 feet away. For hours, Attila perched atop the deck crook, scanning the horizon for hungry hummers. When he spied one, he took off after it. Aerial acrobatics ensued. The other eventually gave up. Attila returned, triumphant, to his perch. Even Attila, though, occasionally had business elsewhere, when the others could dine in peace.
Who knows what adventures this summer’s hummers will bring? I know only that they will remind me, once again, of nature’s miracles that surround us, and that sometimes they come in very small packages.
Contact jlindsay@tidewater.net
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