The CHIRP! Of Love Is In His Face

This is a fact. Dave has a history of being dive-bombed by birds. There are many reasons this could happen, but the primary one is that birds are shitty judges of character. Dave is not a threat to birds. Any bird should be able to read it in his face, but apparently his face is too far off the ground for their comfort. I can walk right next to him and they'll go for his head every time.

But until this week, we'd never seen him get threatened by a hummingbird.

Our local Anna's hummingbirds do an awesome courtship display that involves flying up to the stratosphere and then arrowing down at warp speed, pulling up a the last second before *splat*, and then zooming back up again. Moreover, there is a tremendous CHIRP! sound right there at the bottom end of the flight, coming in fact from the bottom end of the bird. Quite recognizable. Whenever we hear it, we look straight up to locate the aerobat and watch him do it again. He pulls out of his dive right at about eye level from a prospective mate, who is observing from a twig. It's attention-getting.

This time we heard the CHIRP! just off Dave's shoulder. And--we checked--there was no female hummingbird in sight. We stood still. We waited. And sure enough, a half minute later, that hummingbird swooped down within a foot of Dave's left ear.

He was impressed, but not enough to have sex with a hummer.

So we don't know what was going on. It felt threatening.  It felt like the bird was trying to chase Dave off, not get Dave off. But who knows? Either Dave looks like another male threatening his territory, in which case we would assume it would fly straight at his hat, and not do a courtship display. Or, he finds Dave very attractive, and he would like to have three seconds of sweet hummingbird bliss on some suitable orifice, several of which come to mind.

Because as far as I know, male hummingbirds do not defend the nest. They have nothing to do with the nest. They defend their own territory of flowers and hope to entice a girl into their territory and chase off rivals and go to considerable trouble for that three-second wham-bam and then it's Sayonara, Sis, and good luck with the kids. So although other kinds of birds might try to discourage Dave from getting near their nests, the male hummer has gotten all he wants out of the relationship and is back to looking out for Number One.

That leaves attraction as the only other possibility. Something about Dave appeals to a male Anna's hummingbird. The male makes that tremendous noise during his courtship display with just his tail feathers and maybe he senses a kindred spirit in Dave.

All alone and feeling blue, and green, and yellow, and...

But the ability to make remarkable noises from your tail end isn't much to go on in a relationship. Sure, it worked for us, but we're a special case.

We should ask Anna. It's her hummingbird. Anna Masséna, the Duchess of Rivoli, was probably pretty hot. At least she was all the rage in the ornithological community. Her husband, the Duke of Rivoli, was an amateur ornithologist, which is to say he had an enormous dead bird collection. John James Audubon took a fancy to her too, but it was another ornithologist who thought to name the hummingbird after her. Audubon was probably doing this long involved courtship thing and making a gigantic bird painting for her, and then René-Primivère Lesson swoops in all CHIRP! and says "Ma chérie, I give you zees hummingbaird." No one knows what the Duke of Rivoli was doing all this time, but apparently not defending his territory.

Hannibal And Noodle

Yeah, I don't remember.

I've complained before about my inability to recognize birds.  I'll no sooner get one solidly deposited in the memory bank than I see it again a week later and the best I can say is that I've seen it before. It's, you know--that one. That one. With the little thing on its--hold still, dammit. You know! That one.

Which is why I bake cookies for the Birdathon van. A person should contribute.

But it has come to my attention that many people, maybe even most people, don't see birds at all. They register only as flitters on the periphery, and unless they're making some kind of racket, they fly, as it were, under their radar. I realized this when my neighbor, who knew I had an affinity for the little fluffsters, reported with great excitement that he saw a pheasant in the tree outside my window.

So chalk one up for me: I did know enough to know he did not see a pheasant in the tree outside my window. He went on to describe a northern flicker, which is indeed a fine and fancy bird: a vest full of polka-dots, a necklace, an orange kilt, a red mustache. How my neighbor could have failed to notice such a large, snappy, well-turned-out bird before, even though it is dirt-common around here and perches on the wires going weeka weeka weeka and hammers on his chimney flashing just for giggles and looks like nothing else, not even a pheasant, I do not know.

So I have begun to appreciate that I have managed to accumulate some small measure of ID skills over time. I'm best at the fifteen or so species that are likely to show up outside my window. But I now recognize a ruby-crowned kinglet even when he's not showing his crown, and also a pine siskin, both of whom were mysteries to me not that long ago. I don't expect to gain a vast breadth of knowledge, but now I have a new aspiration. I want to be able to tell individual birds apart. You know, my birds. The ones in my tree.

I know it's possible because Julie Zickefoose knows all her birds by name, and their hat sizes, and whether they're drop-in people or she should call first, and everything. So when you're looking at the feeders on her deck, and ask what some bird is, she might say "juvenile semi-mottled snapplecrapper" or whatever, but she might also say "Oh, him? That's Fred." Fred looks a little different, or acts a little different. Fred has that arrogant cant to his shoulder, and a quelling eye. Julie knows. She's got something special in her pocket just for him.

Multi-Freds

But right here in the small birdscape outside my window, I'm starting to see individuals. I have a female house finch in residence who has cowlicks over both ears. She seems to be just fine but she has these little horns. So there's one. I probably won't be able to do this with my bushtits. If I hollered "Hey, Fred" to my bushtits, they'd all go off at once, and that's just a plain fact.

I thought my ability to distinguish hummingbirds would be confined to sexing them, which is easy, because of their hats. But there's way more going on than that. I don't like to cast nasturtiums, but this hummer that has dominated our feeder--Hannibal Nectar--is one rotund little ball of holy-hell. He has really packed on the grams. You fry up three of him and perch them on a bed of rice, you've got yourself an entree.

But then there's Noodle. She squeaks in any time Hannibal isn't looking. And she has the girth of a standard Ticonderoga pencil. She couldn't beat up Hannibal if she had brass knucklets, ten friends, and started last week. I'm accustomed to the proper size of an Anna's hummingbird, and there's variation, but I'm frankly worried about both of these. Soon Hannibal won't be able to lift off without dropping like a plumb-bob and Noodle could disappear in a shag carpet.

There's not only a size and coloration discrepancy. They act different. You know how non-cat people think cats are all alike? Right. Well neither are birds, as it turns out. Noodle always picks the port closest to the window so she can look out for the big jerk. She looks left, right, up, down, and then she lowers the hose in and sucks out everything she can. (Birds do not actually suck. They'd need lips, and they're all notoriously slim about the lips.) Hannibal comes way more often and drinks less at a time, because he knows he's in charge. He picks any port he wants and kicks back like he's in a recliner. But he's also the only hummingbird I've seen that makes a regular habit of checking out the nectar feeder from underneath. I know what he's doing. The fat little fuck is looking for Cheetos in the seat cushions.

Poor Noodle. She should be making a nest soon, and I hope she's real cozy in there, because that's one place she can get away from Hannibal. I'd love to bring her a welcome-wagon gift. Maybe a nice spider pot pie.

Sequins In The Snow

It's been snowing in Portland, so naturally I'm worried about the hummingbirds. Most folks in the U.S. do not worry about their hummingbirds when it's snowing. Their hummingbirds are sucking down Mai Tais in Costa Rica, but ours stick around.

Gosh, I remember years ago, I'd see a single hummingbird whiz by in my garden and totally lose my shit and blast off to the house to cook up some nectar and dig the feeder out of the closet. It would be all scuzzy from the year before when I'd done the exact same thing. I'd change out the nectar a couple times but the little bugger would never come back, and come winter I'd take down the feeder and pack it away moldy out of sheer irritation.

But now! Now we have hummingbirds. You have to broom them away sometimes if you want to get anywhere. Most of them are Anna's hummingbirds. And we get to keep them all winter. Unlike other sorts of hummers, they don't migrate. It's kind of a new thing. They used to hang out in southern California, but people started planting all those tropical trees and flowers and hanging out nectar stations and the hummers have approved of this all the way up to Canada.

Of course there aren't a ton of flowers to sip at here in the winter. The Anna's seem to get by mostly on the feeders and on bugs and spiders. They can poke around in the bark and leaves for bugs but the spider deal is a neat setup. If they've got a decently industrious spider around, they can just pop by and nab her cache right out of the web like picking up groceries. Or, of course, the spider herself. Boop! Spider deleted from web.

The Cornell Ornithology people, who fancy themselves experts, say a flock of hummingbirds is called a "bouquet," or a "glittering," or a "tune." Which sounds lovely, but there are no flocks of hummingbirds. Hummingbirds do not have a tiny social bone in their bodies. They're all assholes. The males perch on a high twig and natter on for hours: tweedle tweedle tweedle, snick snick snick. It's not much of a tune, but then again they don't have a lot to communicate. Just this is mine, and this is mine, and that over there is mine, and so is all this too, mine mine mine. Any given hummer will spend 10% of his time feeding and the rest of the time trying to spindle any other bird coming in.

They do get together briefly for the purpose of making new hummingbirds but there's not a lot of commitment to it. The male does a terrific courtship display by zipping up so high he looks like a sequin, and then swooping down and pulling up at the last second with a nice loud pop. According to the same Cornell Ornithology people, who are not to be trusted, this is a "curious burst of noise that they produce through their tail feathers." Because of course that is the way to a girl's heart. Academics don't get out much.

Your average hummingbird is all appetite and attitude because he's never that far away from dead. They can barely make it through the night. They are obstreperous narcissistic little pissants that would totally be tweeting at three in the morning if they weren't in a near-death state at the time, but they are. They spend the night hunkered down in a state of torpor, which is from the Latin for "might be dead, I don't know, poke it and see what happens." They'll barely breathe. Their hearts will sludge up. They might even be so logy they'll hang from a perch like an ornament.

A few weeks ago it finally got below freezing here. And as the dusk deepened into dark, I saw two females sitting right next to each other on my feeder and drinking nectar, inches a part. They stayed there for several minutes, tanking up, in an unprecedented display of mutual forbearance. I know what happened. Mercury started to plunge and those two looked at each other and said shit just got real and left each other alone.

But it's that bad attitude what's going to get them out of their state of torpor in the morning. Right around dawn they're going to be thinking well, one option would be to just die, but then they'll get that mental image of the feeder with somebody else already at it and zzing. They're off to kick some tiny fuzzy ass again.

The Tweedle Of Doom

I am working in my garden when all of a sudden I hear the distinctive, furious tweedling of a pissed-off hummingbird. Or, as I like to call it, a hummingbird.

They're all pissed off. They start out life with just a couple of cells like everyone else, but by the time they've hit the eighteenth cell division or so--at which point we have achieved about two-thirds of a hummingbird--our hero has discovered he's jammed into a pellet the size of a Tic-Tac and there's not going to be a lot to him. He's pissed.

I kind of know how he feels. I remember a soaring, optimistic time when I actually seemed to be growing. The annual pencil marks on the door jamb were getting farther apart for a while, and then the increments began to ratchet down, until finally the last mark just got darker and darker. I had beached myself somewhere just south of 5'4", and I said "oh well" and "that's that" because I am a pragmatic person, but the hummer takes it personally.

He has about two weeks in the egg to think about it, and he thinks if he ever gets out of here, there'll be hell to pay. By the time he has hammered his way out of the egg, he is a model of obstrepery. He takes a good look around, which takes hardly any time at all, and assesses the situation. The situation is that he has hatched with all of the attitude but none of the feathers of an adult hummingbird, and, in his last act of discretion and diplomacy, he bides his time. And then it's all Goodbye, Mama, and Who The Hell Are You People?

He isn't interested in making friends. And he'll be go-to-hell if any of those other pointy-headed bastards are going to dip their diddlers in his flower patch.  Mine, mine, mine. That's the hummingbird motto. And then he cuts loose with the Tweedle Of Doom followed by a sound like the sharpening of the bill against a steel: tweedle tweedle tweedle, snick...snick snick.

He needs the nectar from the flowers, or from the feeder he has yet to thank me for, in order to power his remarkable wings. What he's really after is spider meat. If he's got enough fuel for the wings, he can delete a spider from her web before she has a chance to mount an objection. He'll get what nectar he needs and park himself on a nearby branch to conduct personal hygiene and stand guard. Anyone approaches his stash and he's all over his ass, and off they go like the Blue Angels in an air show. If they had any concept of sharing, they wouldn't need so much damn fuel. Tweedle tweedle tweedle, snick...snick snick.

I wouldn't take him on. I know he's an Anna's Hummingbird, but I'm keeping it to myself. He isn't claiming allegiance to anyone.

Foggy With A Chance Of Inspiration

It's January, it's gray, it's somewhere just above freezing and there's enough moisture in the air to annoy moss. The sun has already indicated a lack of interest in this part of the world. It is not pouting so much as it has decided that its talents are better appreciated elsewhere. Oregonian rods and cones have shut down so tightly that the oven light makes us squint. In short, it's the dead of winter. I like to call it that because it made my sister Margaret splutter and hoot so comically. She was from Maine where the sun shines and the snow sparkles and the air is filled with the gentle bloop bloop, plip plip of tits and balls freezing off.

This is my season, the damp dead of western Oregon winter. Many scamper off to Mexico this time of year, and others install a portable sun-in-a-box in their houses from which they hope to reabsorb their will to live, but I am among the group that thrives under cloud cover, even if the cover reaches the ground. If I do dream of a vacation, my thoughts drift north. I've got friends in Alaska now and the sun barely sniffs the horizon there before snapping back into its shell, and it sounds lovely to me.

It makes me wonder if my temperament is congenital, a sturdy Scandinavian legacy. My neighbor John is half Cuban, and he's got his house painted in eye-slapping yellow and spank-me red and seizure-purple and so on, inside and out. It's a neighborhood attraction and I admire it a lot, but I couldn't live there. It would feel like my house was shouting at me. John's tropical blood was kindled with parrots and flowers and other stimulants. He tried to show us proper Cuban motion in the hips when we were taking salsa lessons, and it was so easy for him, but my hips were suspicious of the whole venture, and I could only eke out a sad little chaotic waggle like a drunk walking a line. It just isn't in me. The further from the equator you get, the more the color drains out of the birds and flowers and animals and people. Even my own blood is not quite red but more of a light terra-cotta, due to the butter bits. My people spent a thousand years bumping along the edge of an ice sheet in frozen underwear and anything resembling Cuban motion dropped off the genome. I guess the horned helmets were enough of a compensation, because nobody thought to turn south.

Here, we confine the tropics to hummingbird-sized pieces. Anna's hummingbirds are here all winter, brilliant bits of punctuation. But we all have some light from within and mine, at least, burns brighter against the gray. Bare branches finger and rearrange the sky, and sometimes stars drill it and mountains sharpen themselves against it. Summer is nice enough and all, an attentive butler with a platter of pleasures, and heat for free right on the very air, but it's in winter I make my own pleasures and bundle up my own warmth and thrum with compressed energy, like a daffodil bulb yearning for the light.