Hear the Hum? Watch Out Texas, They're Comin'
I’ve been reading about it (studying?) since I was six years old. That was when in Charlestown, Maryland, smack on the edge of Chesapeake Bay one “city” block from our house, I spotted what I came to know as a black and white warbler on the side of a tree down by the water where I was fishing.
It was close enough that I could see all of its dramatic markings, so close that I had the feeling I was holding the “new” (to me) bird in my hand. I didn’t know what kind of bird it was, nor did Miss Wright, my teacher, when I asked her about it the next day.
She handed me a bird I.D. book, showed me the index, made me promise to bring it back (which I did), and I took it home, not knowing I had begun a lifelong journey that continues to this moment. Well, think about it: You are reading about it, my interest, as we speak. So it’s still going on, right?
I had only just begun “The Adventures of Dick and Jane”, a book no longer in print (sadly, as it actually taught kids to read), so I couldn’t read much, but Mom, and Dad, when he was home from the sea, filled in where the book’s pictures didn’t suffice. We found the black and white warbler, and a good many other things as well.
Why do birds migrate? Miss Wright’s book didn’t know back in 1951. Conrad had to start reading like a crazy kid, and then a crazy man, to find out.
Now I know they move because of drastic weather changes; food supply problems; that the arctic tern moves the farthest every year, pole to pole and back again; that all birds move to some degree, even crows and snowy owls; and that humming birds defied what appeared to be certain death by flying, non-stop, across the Gulf of Mexico to get to their wintering grounds in Mexico and Central America.
Imagine that tiny bird, suspended in space, as it were, and thousands of miles from the nearest resting perch or food. Incredible, or to me it was.
We feed humming birds out here on Baker’s Branch. For over thirty years we have never averaged more than an adult couple and the one or two hatchlings they bring off. I have friends that have dozens, but not us.
One day, mentioning to Pam the paucity of our humming bird contingency compared to that of folks we knew, she said, “Maybe the snakes are eating them up.” Funny, funny, funny, but then I remembered that in Borneo there are snakes that fly. Poisonous ones.
God gives us blessings we never acknowledge. Bad as the snakes are out here on Baker’s Branch, what if they could fly?
One day last week, we had our usual summertime-two-plus-one at the feeder. I watched them feed two or three times that day when I thought to do it, wondering when they might migrate allowing us to put the feeder up for the year; noting each time that the sugar water food supply had hardly been dented. We can easily go two weeks on a fill-up; sometimes longer.
A cool front, almost an honest cold front, blew through during the night, pushed by winds so strong I was kept off the lake from a planned fishing trip. I’m glad it happened. I caught the hummer migration. I had never seen it. Or at least I never suspected they migrated, en masse as it were, like ducks, geese and other well known migrators.
If I went to bed the night before with three hummers at the feeder at sundown, now there were a hundred and three, or so it seemed, at daylight. There were so many hummingbirds at our little, solitary feeder, that they did not have the time or inclination for the specie’s typical “pig trough” squabbles and position battles.
The danged things were so thick they had to wait in line to feed, every station occupied, and more hummers than I could count when I searched the yard trees for them.
I tried taking pictures of the constantly moving critters, but the most I could get in one frame at one time was nine, although there were literally dozens circling, humming, buzzing about the feeder and my head. Had they been under Alfred Hitchcock’s control, and been ordered to attack, they could’ve killed me in about six seconds.
The feeder went dry as I watched; big, bagurbling bubbles burping to its top, and, I suppose, down into the bellies of hundreds of frenzied hummers; every man for himself. I hollered at Pam to start another batch of the four-to-one sugar water mix, and she did. They went through that one in about a half-hour, and then we did it again, and again, spelling one another like ammunition suppliers on the walls of the Alamo in that hectic last moment.
The next day, the wind changed back to the south; warm, sultry almost, and we were back to our original three summertime hummers. It was plain that somewhere, deep down in Texas, with Mexico on the horizon, was a swirling, black, green, and red hummingbird tornado. Watch out, Texas. Get out of the way. They’re comin’ through.
I sat on the front porch with a glass of ice tea in my hand last night, watching our three summer hummers finishing up their day, everything back to normal. I was looking right through the hummers, seeing Miss Wright. She was eighty-one when she handed me the bird book, and wished me luck.
She’s 145 years old this year, and still alive. Oh, yes she is. Do the math if you don’t believe it.
© 2015 Conrad M. Vollertsen
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