Close Encounters of the Bird Kind

It’s amazing what you see if you take time to be there for natural events.

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Hummingbirds are among the most amazing flying critters to teach us about airborne direction control.  Joe Forma Photo

A while back, as I sat working on an article, two hummingbirds were playing keep-away with the nectar feeder outside my office window.  One would be peacefully sipping away when the other would scream in from nowhere, doing a passable imitation of an F-16.  Not much later, the roles would be reversed.  Sometimes they banked so sharply that their wings produced a sound exactly like rubber tires squealing on a tight turn.  I enjoyed this show all day long and around sunset, when the intensity of the light outside and in my office were roughly equal, I heard another squeal of wings and glanced up just in time to see one of the hummers fly straight into the screen on my office window!

I thought it would bounce off with a broken neck, but to my amazement, his momentum had merely pushed his beak through the screen’s nylon mesh nearly up to his eyeballs.  As I watched in wonder, the trapped hummer continued the hovering pace of his wingbeats, holding his rear half in the air.  I immediately shouted to my wife to come quick, but nothing short of warp speed would have been quick enough.  After regaining his composure, the little guy threw his transmission in reverse and revved the throttle to full speed.  His beak came unstuck with an audible “Poik!” and after fixing me with his gaze for a nanosecond he was off like a shot.

This fantastic glimpse into the world of hummingbirds required no special equipment of knowledge, only being there to witness it.  That’s often the way with natural revelations.  Some of my most memorable nature experiences have been only peripherally related to hunting, fishing or whatever other pretext took me outdoors.

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Another one that sticks in my mind occurred as I sat in a tree stand waiting for an unsuspecting deer to wander within arrow range.  I was cold enough to begin thinking of breakfast when a barred owl hooted a couple hundred yards away.  Since I was about to climb down anyway, I hooted back.  Moments later, the owl glided silently past, alighting on a branch a few feet higher than me, perhaps 30 yards away.  He immediately turned on the branch and stared directly at me.  I knew that an owl has the uncanny ability to fix the distance and direction of sound.  I guess that’s not surprising, since they hunt in the dark.  But for this bird to have pinpointed my location from such a distance startled me.  I was in full camouflage, including a face mask, so I didn’t look particularly like a human.  Nevertheless, he had me pegged.

We stared at each other for a long time, neither blinking.  I finally decided that since the jig clearly was up, I might just as well have a little fun.  I hooted at him again.  Within a moment, he launched from his perch with his wings partially folded, quickly gaining speed in his downward swoop on a trajectory right toward my tree.  Unfolding his wings, he completed a parabola that brought him straight up at me.  I might have flinched if I hadn’t been so fascinated.  Just as he came up to my eye level he banked subtly to my right, ticking the tree trunk behind my ear with the tip of his outermost, right wing feather.  The message, as I understood it was, “You’ve been warned.”

Another incident that comes to mind involved a guy I wrote an article about many years ago.  He was going through several hundred gallons of sugar water each year feeding hummingbirds and I paid him a visit to see the swarms of ruby-throats that visited his feeders each day in September.  He would sit in a lawn chair beneath three of his many feeders just enjoying the show.  Sometimes he could get hummers to land on his outstretched finger.

Years later I got a call from the guy.  He thought I would be interested in something he had seen that day.  A roadrunner had taken up residence at his house, and he was really enjoying watching it run down lizards, snakes, grasshoppers and other stuff.  Then, one evening the roadrunner sidled up beneath a nectar feeder and stood still as a statue as birds zoomed in and out.  Then with lightning speed, it jumped up and snatched one of the hummer’s in mid-air.  “Imagine,” he said, “An animal fast enough to catch a hummingbird!”

If you are like me, you might be wondering if the last thing the ill-fated hummer heard was, BEEP-BEEP!