She witnessed the ensuing four-way fight but it was such a bedlam of noise and color and speed in and out of the arbutus tree and around and around the house, that it was impossible to declare a winner. It was, however, quite obvious which bird had been defeated: the lower half of A I’s bill was now at a 90 ° angle to the upper half. He appeared so pitifully wounded that Mrs. Garvin was in an agony of remorse for having started the whole thing.
Among most wild creatures the custom is for the defeated to shrink away and lick his wounds in hiding. A I evidently didn’t think much of this custom. Instead of stealing quietly away, he became even more pugnacious, and while his broken bill may have looked pitiful to Mrs. Garvin, to the other hummingbirds it appeared more formidable with its double thrust. In fact, his injury wasn’t actually very serious. It did not, for instance, interfere with his eating since he did that with his tongue, which was protected quite satisfactorily by the upper bill. In time, his lower bill atrophied and fell off and he grew a new one in much the same way as we grow a new fingernail.
A I may have lost the battle but he won the war. He became, at least temporarily, the undisputed owner of the original feeder.
Hummingbirds mate as they live, with great speed and intensity. In our part of California, courtship begins as early as December for the Annas, February for the Allens.
I kept a daily record of a pair of Allen hummers who arrived at the beginning of February, 1965: the male on the 3rd, the female two days later. Courtship began immediately. On February 8, I watched the female gathering material for her nest from one of the wicker cornucopias I had filled with cotton balls and hung in a tree. She was a dainty little freckle-faced creature, most meticulous about what went into her nest. If she pulled out a piece of cotton which she considered too large, she promptly spit it out. If it wasn’t large enough she added to it until it was exactly right.
On March 10, thirty days after I first observed Mrs. Allen gathering cotton, I learned by chance that she had completed her mission. Looking out at a dead ceanothus tree, I observed what I thought were two female Allen’s hummingbirds sitting on adjoining twigs, each peacefully minding her own business. This was such an unlikely situation that I went running to get my binoculars. They told the story: in the center of each white throat a small red spot was revealed. As the weeks passed, these spots would enlarge until they became the flaming orange-red throats of the male Allen’s hummingbird. The two peace-loving “ladies” on adjoining twigs were Mrs. Allen’s fine young twin sons, who hadn’t yet been introduced to the joys of combat.
Of the 319 known species of hummingbird, in only one is the male believed to help with the incubation and raising of his family. Some hummingbird admirer had tried to explain this male absenteeism with the theory that if the male hung around the nest his brilliant beauty would draw too much attention to it and so endanger the young. I find it difficult to subscribe to this. Few birds are more conspicuously beautiful than the males of the hooded oriole and the black-headed grosbeak, both of whom are devoted fathers. Perhaps the real answer lies in the nature of the female hummer. She needs no help from anyone in looking after her family. I’ve watched her rout sparrow hawks, harass crows and drive off turkey vultures. The only opponent really worthy of her is another female hummingbird.
The third week of March also brought the first wave of migrating rufous hummingbirds on their way to the breeding grounds further north. The rufous shares with Allen the scientific name Selasphorus, flame-bearer, but it is even more applicable to him. During the five or six weeks the members of his family frequented our yard, we used to see them shooting through the trees and bushes like tiny balls of fire, so bright they hurt the eyes. Although they used our feeders and fought over them, they never took possession of one the way the Anna, Allen and black-chinned hummers did. Perhaps they knew they were just transients and could not afford to linger, no matter how sweet the honey.
Before the rufous hummers had finished migrating through our area, the black-chins began arriving to spend the spring and summer, nearly always within sight of a sycamore tree. The down on the underside of sycamore leaves was their favorite nest-building material; I’ve never seen a black-chin use the cotton which I provided and which seemed to please the other breeding hummers.
The courtship of these tiny creatures with the white-and-violet bibs involves the technique, used by other members of the family, of lightning-fast ascents and descents before the watching female. The black-chin has added something of its own to the mating ritual. While the female waits in a shrub or small tree, the male begins swinging rapidly and noisily back and forth in front of her like a pendulum, a performance intended to bedazzle his lady. It is not intended to bedizzy the human observer, but that’s the effect it has.
The hummingbird characteristic which I find irresistible is its fearlessness. When I went out into their territory they not only showed no fear of me, they ignored my presence altogether except as an object that was in their way. I might have been a short tree or a tall stump. They shot past my nose, skimmed my ear lobes, wheeled round and round my head like animated corkscrews while I dodged and ducked. If I had on red nail polish they touched it with their bills to make sure it wasn’t a rare flower or a new type of feeder. One of their favorite targets was a sweater of mine which had strawberries embroidered around the collar. It was, at first, an unnerving experience to be prodded on the back of the neck by a hummingbird.
The hopper-type feeder Harry had sold me I nailed to the main trunk of a young blue gum eucalyptus. This location was convenient to the drip bath I’d arranged on the lower terrace. But it had a serious disadvantage not apparent at the beginning — blue gums grow at a great clip. The feeder is halfway to heaven by this time and utilized only as a perch for sleepy doves to sun on. We’re still asked some rather naive questions about why we put a feeder up so high and how we put seed in it, and so on. The full explanation we used to offer has been minimized with the passing of the years: “Trees grow.”
And so began my initial week of bird watching. While my husband was in Mexico, I entered an even more foreign and more fascinating world. No day began soon enough or lasted long enough. The field guides were never closed, the binoculars never returned to their case. Letters from Ken arrived and I would just be sitting down to answer them when some bird would fly past the window and I’d be off, perhaps only as far as the porch or the driveway, perhaps completely around the block.
The dogs always followed me on these excursions. They were well aware of my preoccupation, and they resented it and took a stand against it in the only way they knew how. Whenever our little caravan paused long enough, they staged a fight to attract my attention.
But all three of our dogs eventually became bird watchers. The davenport in front of the picture window facing the front yard was their favorite lookout. This window always bore evidence of their new hobby. At the bottom were the noseprints of Johnny, the Scottish terrier; a few inches above, the prints of Rolls Royce, the cocker spaniel; and a foot or so above these, Brandy, the German shepherd, left his unmistakable traces. The birds very quickly took stock of the dogs and judged them harmless. Right outside our back door, in a cotoneaster tree, I hung a plastic sunflower-seed feeder. When I opened this door to let the dogs out, the birds simply went on eating, but if they caught sight of me they flew away.