BIRD OF THE WEEK NO. 27

Rufous Hummingbird

FROM BEHIND a tree in our backyard, I watched this Rufous Hummingbird tap every flower on a five-foot-round rosemary bush. It took a half hour. Hummingbirds also tap nearly every bird superlative. Their heart rate starts about where ours ends at two hundred beats per minute and ranges upwards of 1,200 beats per minute. They have the highest metabolism of any warm-blooded animal and wings that can flap up to two hundred beats per second during courtship displays. And, uniquely, hummers can fly backwards. To keep it up, these birds must eat their body weight in nectar, and they can starve a rival by harassing the other bird away from a food source. (If you have feeder, you’ve probably seen this behavior.) We think of owls and eagles as aggressive, but I once saw a hummer chase a gray squirrel ten times its size off our deck. The squirrel, apparently intruding on the bird’s territory, looked like it was running for its life. On another occasion, I was the intruder. I had stopped on a grassy trail when a hummer approached and flew straight up for fifty feet before dive-bombing me, missing my head by a calculated inch. When I failed to move, it did it again. That close to my ear, it sounded like the world’s biggest bumblebee.

AND YET, like many, I have a great affection for hummingbirds. They are the most delicate and the most colorful group of birds on the planet. Their miniaturized markings and brilliant, iridescent feathers can shift color depending on the angle of view. According to Cornell Ornithology, they do this by “capturing, bending, and reflecting beams of sunlight using almost inconceivably tiny structures built into their feathers.” I often shift positions to see that effect on the two species common here. One is the Anna’s Hummingbird. The other, the Rufous Hummingbird, migrates up to four thousand miles from Mexico in a circular route that takes it along the Pacific coast in the spring and through the Rockies in the fall. Both paths are timed to the blooming of local flowers. Many of them summer here in the Pacific Northwest and it is mesmerizing to sit and watch one devour a flowering bush on a warm day.