Right outside of my office window hang my hummingbird feeders. All day as I write these tiny birds zip in and out to feed. They can fly forwards, backwards and sideways; lift straight up or simply hover like a helicopter. They are the most acrobatic flyers in the whole bird community. Besides eating up all of my sugar they accomplish other things around the yard that are helpful. They help pollinate the flowers on the apple trees and bushes. There are so full of energy yet they are one of the tiniest birds in the kingdom, weighing less then an ounce. Come fall, like the other birds, they too make the long trip to a warmer climate. Its perilous but if they survive, they always come back where they came from.
I wonder if any of the accomplishments mankind has a made in ultra marathons and ironman competitions for endurance levels, can equal what happens when a bird that weighs less then an ounce, travels thousand of miles to Central America to winter. Ruby throated hummingbirds are solitary creatures and fly mostly by themselves, often up to 500 miles a day, their wings beating up to 80 times a second. They live three to five years before they wear their tiny bodies out and die.
These tiny birds build their nests, usually in a crotch of a tree, out of lichens held together with spider webs, which are sticky and hold the nest together. The nest seldom survives the winters so although they will come back to the same location each year, they build new nests every season. They usually lay two eggs that take about eighteen days to hatch. Only the female incubates the eggs. Hummingbirds do eat small insects and spiders and feed them to their young. I have witnessed them eating ants that made their way to the feeder drawn by the sugar water. The nests are hard to spot so watching a female go back to her nest is probably the best way to find a nest. The ruby throat hummingbird is the only one that ventures as far north as Minnesota. There are however many species in the southern United States.
I’m a nature freak when it comes to this stuff. I find this stuff so amazing but yet I never take it for granted. I know that in so much of this world, the habitat for these creatures is in peril. I know too that there are a lot of people on this earth that couldn’t care less. Their world revolves around drugs and alcohol or hedge funds and stock markets. This world is just a place to make money and take that money and play. Nature just gets in the way.
I have too, in front of me, pictures of my great grandchildren. It is my hope that they too will someday become in-tune with nature. That is, if there is anything left on earth worth looking at. If the waters we drink aren’t poisoned with chemicals, and the air we breathe with carbon monoxide. If the oceans aren’t filled with plastic and the polar ice caps melted away, then maybe they will have a chance. How can something that I started out writing about, on such a light side, turn into something so depressing. It’s when you can’t get around the truth that things, even like hummingbirds, gets this depressing.
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