Who isn't amazed by the beauty and flying feats of the Ruby-Throated Hummingbird? However, I didn't fully appreciate them until reading an essay by the late Brian Doyle titled "Joyas Voladoras" or Flying Jewels. Here's a snippet:
"Each one visits a thousand flowers a day. They can dive at sixty miles an hour. They can fly backwards. They can fly more than five hundred miles without pausing to rest. . . . Hummingbirds, like all flying birds but more so, have incredible enormous immense ferocious metabolisms. To drive those metabolisms they have racecar hearts that eat oxygen at an eye-popping rate. . . . Their hearts are stripped to the skin for the war against gravity and inertia, the mad search for food, the insane idea of flight. The price of their ambition is a life closer to death; they suffer more heart attacks and aneurysms and ruptures than any other living creature."
In this essay Doyle writes about the hearts of the hummingbird and the blue whale. He examines the vastly different physical and metabolic characteristics of these two animals, concluding with a message for anyone with a heart: "We open windows to each other but we live alone in the house of the heart. "
Doyle's message, then, is one of emotion and love. If you love hummingbirds as I do, you'll likely regret their coming departure. Here in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the ruby-throat arrives each year in the last days of April and leave sometime around the Autumn Equinox. Today is September 8, and just moments ago, I was lucky enough to catch this female ruby-throat mid-air before the feeder.
If you put out sugar water for hummingbirds, they will come. But remember to change the water frequently, even daily on hot summer days, as sugar water quickly becomes slimy. And if hummingbirds sip on slimy water, fungus can grow on their tongues that can kill them. When the temperature is more temperate, say in the 70's, you can change the water every other day. It's a big responsibility but one you'll be happy to commit to for the enjoyment of sharing the summer (next summer now) with these amazing birds. Oh--don't forget--the sugar water recipes is one part sugar to four parts water or 1/4 cup of sugar to one cup of water.
Finally, if you love birds and want to read a middle-grade trilogy about a adolescent girl with a mystical tie to birds, then check out my web site:
Until next time . . . Keep birds in your heart!
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