In Hummingbirdland….

2 days ago , by Richard Lutz

Dateline: Olympic Peninsula, USA (always admired a good dateline)

Hummingbirds are drawn to the colour red (writes RICHARD LUTZ). That’s why they like the big fuschia tucked near the backyard deck. They zip in and out and hum around it, dipping long bills into the flowers to suck out the sugary nectar.

Sometimes, these tiny birds, no more than three inches in length, hover like helicopters, fly in reverse or upside down. It helps them check out the small maple entwined with the fuschia just to see if any insects can add a side dish or two.

Hummingbirds populate the American west coast from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. Here where I am, near Seattle, I’ve seen them not only go for red plants but the blue blossom of sage. They’re impossible for a guy like me with a rudimentary iPhone and a lousy eye to capture as a photograph. I’ll defer, m’lord, to Wikicommons for another snap:

Another reason a bumbler like me with a meagre phone lens can’t film a hummingbird is because it’s so quick. In a mating ritual, they’ve been clocked at 50mph as they dance in the sky and move in those jerky quasi-geometric patterns. And those sharp shifting movements can produce sudden iridescent green or flashing blue plumage. Another twist and the flourishing colours vanish.

But however they appear or disappear, you can certainly hear them. Their vibrating wings, moving as quickly as 99 beats per second, DO hum. Actually hum. It sounds like a barber’s electric trimmer, or a wind up kid’s model plane. Or one of those cheap handheld fans. Birdologists say it’s to communicate with others about feeding hotspots such as that beflowered fuschia that they’re so mad about today.

As they poke about and plunder for nectar, they suddenly seem intrigued if not unafraid of me sitting next to their red feeding grounds. I look up from a book and am startled to see one hovering and humming right in front of me, face to face so to speak, nose to bill.

It’s unsettling. It seems to be checking out my eyes. Maybe it’s wondering if they contain its next meal. Maybe I’m suddenly relieved I wear glasses for protection as I imagine being rushed to a hospital with a hummingbird stuck in an optical socket. Try explaining that to an overstretched junior medic. “Well, doctor, it’s like this..a Selasphorus rufus just kind of hummed up to me and inserted its beak into my right cornea.” I wonder how that’ll look on my health insurance form. I feel back office staff won’t buy it.

But things swiftly turn in hummingbirdland. Suddenly, the tiny thing changes gear, charges skyward and whirrs off. It moves so quickly I wonder if its internal clock is overwound, working in a different time system. Back to fuschia and lunch.

Blacktail tales…

Meanwhile, outside the garden and around the house, away from the fuschia, small deer are everywhere. They’re Blacktail. They don’t so much stride or roam as spookily glide through life. Even soft grass is carefully approached as if it will swallow them. Each step, whether from a doe or a fawn, is taken cautiously, almost as if it’s worried it will disappear into the earth. Stags, by the way, stay away.

The Blacktail deer seem to almost slide silently and effortlessly into unguarded gardens, onto roads, on verges, into orchards, into public playing fields. I saw a mother and baby on a street corner silently standing as if patiently waiting for a traffic light to turn. For all I know, the pair are still there, vacantly waiting for …something. Anything.

The Blacktail don’t mind if you stop and stare. They don’t get jumpy or skittish or vanish into deep brush, into the woods.They don’t so much as look back as look through you, big ears twitching. Not worried about you. Not caring. Looking through you as if you were a window, a moveable rock, a tree, another part of a landscape. They are simply living in another dimension. Or, to think it through, maybe we are.

These deer endlessly forage and so fence builders, I take it, must make a bomb around here erecting garden barriers to protect flowers beds and vegetables patches.

But even with well guarded allotments, here in the Olympic Peninsula west of Seattle, there are always trees with their strange evenly trimmed low branches which have been cut back by the grazing deer who stand on their hind legs to grab low lying fruit such as early (very early) apples.

Being summer, the baby fawns follow their mothers, the does. Little ones gambol and sometimes hop. Some shake a bit while walking on their wobbly legs. And like lambs, somehow, as they grow, they lose their friskiness, their lightness and slow down…and slow down. And then begin peering through you, a bit zombie-ish, down suburban streets, into unprotected backyards, emerging and submerging back down into the deep woods of oak, madrone, spruce, cedar, redwood and hemlock.

*credit to Wikicommons Images and also Birds of the Puget Sound