Release Day

The hummingbird had been sitting in a glass tank for nine days, and flying in the screen tent for two weeks. In all that time she'd never begun to calm down, never accepted me as a helper or friend; she just wanted out, out, out. She was wild, crazy. Still, even after release, I hoped she’d stay around, hoped I’d be able to pick her out of the throngs of hummingbirds around the front porch feeders. We rolled back the tent walls and tied them up.

I sat in the farthest corner with a camera in my hand and tears already starting in my eye. She perched, considering the void, then launched herself through the birch branches and up, up, up into the clear air. You can just see her disappearing in the top left corner. This is the last picture I took of her. She leveled off at about 70 feet and lined out for the northeast, and that was the last we ever saw of her. That was fine with me. Seeing her go was its own reward.

She'd never been the type to hang around to say thank you, anyway.

Hummingbird Hospital Part 3

The weather was kind in the two weeks the hummingbird was confined to the tent, no nasty wind or lightning storms, and I was able to leave her out around the clock to heal and feed and catch gnats in the air. Each day I sprayed her enclosure down with a fine mist from the hose, and she bathed on wet leaves and drank water from the netting. I’ve found hummingbirds in captivity to be most appreciative of opportunities to bathe.

Everyone was curious about the little captive, including the hummingbirds around the yard, who'd hover, eye to eye with her. This little male kept an eye on her from the porch.

She defended her feeders with swoops and chitters, even though nobody could get inside.

One afternoon as I was changing her feeder, a curious cardinal stopped to peek inside. I took this from inside the tent.

Chet Baker was fascinated by the tent, and always wanted to accompany me in when I’d come to photograph her. He remembered it from when we’d had phoebes in it, and he remembered how to get in if Mether forgot to leave the flap open for him. The little dog will not be denied.

I must lay my ears back to prepare my entrance.

Hello Mether. It is me, Chet Baker. Do not get up to unzip the tent. I know how to do it by myself.

It must be nice for you to have such an intelligent companion, who seeks you out wherever you go, and is so smart, sleek and agile. The hummingbird does not like me, but then she does not like you, either. So here I am.

There's your Chet Baker fix, and one for me too. I have now been without him for nine days, but who's counting? I am about desperate enough to run down a red-rumped agouti here in Trinidad and kiss it right on the lips. Still, there are tremendous benefits to being at the Asa Wright Nature Center. Hawk eagle, manakin, oilbird, cake.

Hummingbird Hospital Part 2

The injured hummingbird was feeding herself a much more wholesome preparation of Nektar-Plus by Tuesday afternoon, and when I saw her hobble over to the feeder and insert her bill for the first time, I smiled and said, “You can stay as long as you need to, as long as you can do that.”

She tried to fly, little buzzing sorties against the tank walls, and as she fussed it became clear that she had problems beyond simple starvation and exhaustion. Her head tilted to the right, and when she tired, she wound up in a heap again, tail spread, wings out, lying on her belly. It would be awhile before I’d know if she’d be releasable.

She was to spend nine days fretting in her tank, so excitable that I had to keep her in the back bedroom during the day lest she buzz and buzz herself to exhaustion. Her injury was a concussion with brain swelling, probably from banging her head on a ceiling while trying to find a way out of the chemical plant. She had trouble using her right foot, and her head canted well over to the right.



But the tilt lessened day by day, and when she was able to hold it straight most of the time, she graduated to the soft nylon flight tent that I’ve used for several other hummingbirds and most notably for six chimney swifts and a pair of orphaned phoebes. Available from Campmor, 17 x 19 x 7’, and intended to keep mosquitoes and flies off the picnic site, It’s the best $100 I’ve ever spent.

She was very happy to have more space, and happiest of all to see the pots of flowers I had moved into the tent before releasing her.
You can see her hovering right over my head just after release. I haven't even hung up her feeder yet.

She took right to the Million Bells petunias, the blue Laurentia, my peach hibiscus named Mary Alice, and the upright fuchsia called Gartenmeister. When she’d drained them of nectar, she came back for her Nektar-Plus.

Here, Phoebe and Liam wait excitedly for the moment of release. First we must zip the sides closed!

Hummingbird Hospital

She came to me as they all do, over the phone, with a worried, uncertain voice describing her predicament. She’d blundered into a chemical plant and was found, disabled, around 11 at night. Who knows how long she’d been there, circling the ceiling, bumping her tiny head until she fell senseless at someone’s feet? Repeated efforts to get her to drink nectar had failed, and she was fading fast. I met the caller in town, he on his lunch break, and he opened a makeshift containment system that consisted of two Chinet bowls, lined with tissues and taped together. She was lying on her side, curled in a C, as I would be were I a hummingbird who had been without food for 18 hours. I took the syringe of bright red nectar and inserted her bill into it, as he had repeatedly tried. I held her until she began to struggle, and in struggling her bill opened slightly. Some nectar flowed in and her tongue at last began to flicker, then lash, and red nectar poured out of the corners of her mouth as she took sustenance for the first time. Poor little thing. I smiled at the man. “The key is to piss them off enough so they cuss at you, and their bill opens, and then they get what you’re trying to do.”


He told me that she’d been able to fly when they first found her, as high as 12 feet in the air, but only in a tight spiral. That’s OK, as long as she can fly and get altitude, I thought. As long as her wings work, she has a chance at being a hummingbird again, instead of a sad little scrap of feathers like she is now.

I took her home and made a place for her in a ten-gallon tank, lined with paper towels and fitted with low perches and a feeder.


I filled it with Nektar-Plus, a hummingbird maintenance diet that includes proteins and vital nutrients—a far cry from the dyed commercial “hummingbird food” she’d been offered. I don’t fault people for buying it; the labeling makes it seem so much better than simple table sugar and water, but it’s not. It’s horrid. If you didn’t have doubts about feeding commercial preparations, check this out. She’d last had commercial nectar around 2 pm on Tuesday. At 2 pm on Wednesday, her droppings still were dyed vivid red.



Red dye that is used to color commercial “hummingbird food” is derived from coal tar, and that dye is banned in Europe, a place where people think harder about such things than we do here in the Land of Plenty. Why would anyone in their right mind give something made from poisonous coal tar to a hummingbird? Because they’ve been misled by the manufacturers to believe it’s better than homemade nectar made with white sugar, that’s why. Bad manufacturers. All commercial nectars are is sugar with coal tar dye. It’s up to you whether you want to give that to the hummingbirds in your yard. From there, think about whether you want to give your children “foods” that dye their lips and tongues bright red and blue. Bit of a pet peeve, I guess.

Posting with a high quotient of difficulty (might be the rum, dunno) from the Veranda at Asa Wright Nature Center in Trinidad, I remain your faithful blogservant

JZ

Life Around the Wren Nest

Dead Laptop Update: Apple has it as of this morning, and has ordered the part(s). Zick Update: Coping fine with Old Slow iMac and her ancient browsers. Keeps me off Facebook, and that's a good thing. I'm painting up a storm. Amazing what else you can get done when pages take minutes to load.

You may have gathered by now that I was rather single-minded about documenting wren family life. I loved it. It was exactly what my Science Chimpy brain loves to do, especially after two weeks of frenetic travel. Just to settle down and watch some birds--the same birds--doing what they do is my idea of heaven.

Watching any nest is really interesting, but there was so much else going on around this one that, while the parents were away foraging and the babies were sleeping, I took a few snapshots of other creatures on my front porch.

A silver-spotted skipper probes Geranium "Maverick Pink." I keep wanting to call it "Renegade Pink." I have a distinct aversion to the word "maverick."



A great spangled fritillary works on the Lobelia "Laguna Blue" in the wren basket.

A male ruby-throated hummingbird takes the morning sun on the wren basket bail.


And another feeds from a Little Beginner in the foreground. They like to catch the drips all around the cap.

Just so you can see where the nest was in relation to the front door, and to give you another mini-Chet Baker fix, here it is. It's the topmost, leftmost basket, the one with all the blue lobelia and pink gerania.

In case you're wondering, I don't pose Chet. He walks into whatever picture I'm trying to frame, and that's the truth. He walks in and looks right at the camera and tells me when he's ready for his closeup. How is this, Mether? I will stand by this pedestal and smile. I, Chet Baker, will transform your picture of plants from boring to charming.

Watching at the Window

Lately, I've been tethered to the drawing table, doing a journal cover. I don't know why my number keeps coming up for the Auk, but it does, and I'm not arguing. If they're not sick of me yet, I'll do another cover for them. I've had the ivory-billed woodpecker flying through the fall bayou, the long-tailed manakins dancing, and now I'm working on a subtly beautiful fringillid. Fun!

It's a terrific hummingbird summer, after a horrible one last year. Last year, my high count at the feeder all summer was four birds at once. This year, it's 14, and the humming and bickering and thrumming and chittering never stop. I LOVE it. I stand right next to the feeder and play with my camera and the willing subjects. I've got endless flight pictures of hummingbirds now. Like this one. I know it's no prizewinner, because I was too lazy to make sure there was a nice background, but I like seeing them frozen in mid hummm.

I like even more seeing them sitting on favored perches, and feeding from the flowers in my garden. This little dude sits in the birch right outside the studio window most all day, every day. He's guarding the cardinalflower bed directly below him. Oh, how I love to take pictures of him, trying to get his gorget flashing. Almost:

And better:I sneak glances out the window every time I go to dip a brush back into the paint. And I see the most wonderful things, so I keep the camera with its 300 mm. zoom lens on and ready at hand. I especially like watching the bath on these dry, late-summer days. It's almost never empty, especially when it's just been cleaned. The birds really appreciate my scrubbing it with Comet to get all the slime and droppings out of it, so I do that about every fourth day. Then, they literally line up to bathe there. Birds know from clean: they have to, to keep those flight feathers in top condition. They hate to be dirty, and they don't like dirty water or feeders, either.
This time of year, we've got oodles of young scarlet tanagers, as well as molting adults in every motley plumage. We've noticed that scarlet tanagers are very feisty birds. They love to chase and fight and defend what they believe to be theirs. Like the entire Bird Spa. Bad judgement on this young tufted titmouse's part to challenge Miss Bossy Boots. Titmice are feisty, too. This one gives a mewling call and threatens with open bill. But it still won't go in the water with that big toothed bill pointed at it. And finally: the shot I guess I was waiting for. I was waiting for all of them, really, but this is the kicker. The titmouse reminds me of Garuda.
The tanager won, as it has in every confrontation I've witnessed. Notice that she is sitting right on the bubbler, turning the spa into a tanager bidet. And feeling not one bit apologetic about it, either. Maybe she just had a birthday and is feeling like she's entitled. The titmouse had to wait to bathe until she went up to to the birch to scratch and preen. Note: tanagers are overwing scratchers--they bring the leg behind and over the wing to scratch the face. So are hummingbirds. Raptors, parrots and waterfowl, to name just a few, are underwing scratchers. Just another little thing to notice and watch for...Hmm. What are woodpeckers? Doves? I can't remember. Must watch and see.
The wingbars are a function of the bird's youth. I'm not even sure this is a female, though her bathing habits might suggest as much.
When we go away, one of the things I ask our housesitters to do is to keep the bath full. Running out of seed or suet dough is no big deal, but on this dry ridge, water is the most precious commodity we offer the birds, and we take the responsibility seriously. If you do nothing else in your backyard, get some clean moving water going. The rewards, like the water, continually recirculate.