Hummingbirds Are in Rapid Decline
The Aztecs believed hummingbirds,
who are furious fighters, are reincarnated warriors. They’ve returned to life
with swords as beaks, continuing their battles forever in the sky. They called
them huitzitzil and ourbiri—“rays of the sun” and
“tresses of the day star.”
Early Spanish visitors to the New
World, seeing hummingbirds for the first time (they only live in this half of
the globe), called them “resurrection birds.” They believed that anything that
glittered so brightly had to have been made new each day.
In the Dominican Republic, people
call them suma flor—“buzzing flower.” The Portuguese called
them beija-flor, or “flower kisser.”
Today, perhaps more than ever before, we thirst for community. We hanker for transformation. We long to reconnect with the incandescence of life. We need to make those inner journeys. But what if there are no bees or butterflies or hummingbirds to accompany us?
It’s a growing possibility. A
shocking number of pollinators, including hummingbirds, are in dire danger.
Honeybees are suffering from colony collapse disorder. Bumblebee populations are crashing. You are 50 percent less likely to see a bumblebee
than you were in 1974.
Butterfly populations have
decreased, according to one estimate, by 33 percent since 2000.
Three billion birds—one in four—have
disappeared from North American skies since 1970. Audubon’s “Birds and Climate Change Report” (2014) warns that half of all
birds in North America are at risk, and it singles out four species of
hummingbirds—including the Allen’s hummingbird (Selasphorus sasin)—projected
to lose 90 percent of their small breeding range due to human-induced climate
disruption by 2080.
Birds: Made for and of Air
Hummingbirds embody so many
opposites that their very existence seems a miracle. They are the lightest
birds in the sky—and also, for their size, the fastest. These tiny, fragile
birds undertake perilous, long-distance migrations. The rufous hummingbird (Selasphorus rufus) flies on
gossamer wings from Mexican wintering grounds to nesting areas in Alaska.
Birds are physiologically very
different from us. Humans and our fellow mammals are fluid-filled creatures.
Early Greek physicians believed all medicine could be based on an understanding
of these fluids, which they called humors. But birds, in order to
be freed for flight, cannot afford to be loaded down with heavy fluids.
Birds are made of air.
Unlike our thick, marrow-filled
bones, most birds’ bones are hollow. Even their skulls are scaffolded with
passageways for air. Their feather shafts are hollow, and the feathers
themselves, like strips of Velcro, are interlocking barbules for catching air.
Their bodies are filled with air
sacs, which originate in and function, in part, as extensions of the lungs. No
fewer than nine of these filmy bladders fill the tiny body of a hummingbird:
one pair in the chest cavity, another under each shoulder blade, another pair
in the abdomen, one under each wing, and one along the neck.
Hummingbirds are the lightest birds
in the sky. Of their roughly 240 species, all confined to the Western
Hemisphere, the largest, the Andean Giant Hummingbird (genus Patagona), is
only eight inches long; the smallest, the bee hummingbird (Mellisuga helenae) of Cuba, is
just over two inches long and weighs a single gram.
Pure Magic: A Hummingbird in Flight
Delicacy is the trade-off
hummingbirds have made for their unrivaled powers of flight. Alone among birds,
they can hover, fly backward, and even fly upside down.
For such small birds, their speed is
astonishing: in his courtship display to impress a female, a male Allen’s
hummingbird, for instance, can dive out of the sky, reaching sixty-one miles
per hour, plunging from fifty feet at a rate of more than sixty feet per
second—and pulling out of his plunge, he experiences more than nine times the
force of gravity.
Adjusted for body length, the
Allen’s is the fastest bird in the world. Diving at 385 body lengths per
second, this hummer beats the peregrine falcon’s dives at 200 body lengths per
second—and even bests the space shuttle as it screams down through the atmosphere
at 207 body lengths per second.
And because of—not in spite of—their
delicacy, hummingbirds can execute acrobatics that no other bird can approach.
Alone among the world’s ten thousand avian species, only those in the
hummingbird family, Trochilidae, can hover in midair. For
centuries, nobody knew how they did it. They were considered pure magic.
This adapted excerpt is from The Hummingbirds’ Gift by Sy
Montgomery (Atria Books, 2021) and is licensed under Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC
BY-NC-SA 4.0) by permission of Atria Books.
It was adapted and produced for the web by Earth • Food
• Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
“Hummingbirds Are in Rapid Decline” by Sy Montgomery is licensed by the Observatory under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). For permissions requests beyond the scope of this license, please see Observatory.wiki’s Reuse and Reprint Rights guidance. Last edited: July 15, 2024