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speakup

One of my favourite websites in the early months of a new year, www.hummingbirds.net, posted its first hummingbird sighting in New Brunswick on the 27th of April this year.

That's really quite interesting, considering the severity of the weather until very recently. In the years before this we in this province saw the first hummingbirds at least a week later.

One would expect the first sighting would come in from somewhere on the Fundy shore as the birds work their way to us from along the Maine coast and the south shore of Nova Scotia. But on the 26th no sightings had been received from Nova Scotia except along the south shore and that same day the only ruby-throat in Maine (apparently) had shown up way down the Maine coast below Portland.

We clearly support a superior bunch of birds in this province, because the bird who made it here so early must not even have slowed down as he made land on this side of the Fundy and didn't slow down enough for anyone to notice him until he reached Fredericton. (The males come first, presumably to get the camp opened up and supplies laid in, so everything looks ship-shape when the little woman arrives.)

The news had me heading for the hummingbird feeders, the white sugar, measuring cups, window cleaner, and rag in about that order. The last two items have nothing to do with mixing up the sugar water (four parts water to one part white sugar, in case like me you can never remember from one year to the next what constitutes the proper mix).

Our feeders hang from little soft plastic thingys - suction cups really - and those will only adhere to windows that no longer sport the remains of winter's storms or dust or whatever messes up windows just after you finished getting them into tip-top shape the last time.

Before I discovered the website mentioned above which gives the watcher homesick for a sight of something that means winter is really on the way out a means to trace the progress of the birds up the eastern part of the US, the way we knew the hummingbirds had arrived on this farm involved either being stared at through the window by one of them who clearly remembered where that feeder had been last year and saw no reason why it shouldn't be there now, or by nearly being impaled, as we emerged onto the kitchen porch, by an outraged hummingbird beak driven by one male hummingbird in hot pursuit of some other male hummingbird who had had the flabbergasting impudence to think the territory was open to all comers.

Now our two feeders are up and open for business, carefully placed at some distance from each other and around a corner of the house from each other so as to give the non-dominant members of the tribe a chance to have a sip in relative comfort before the bull hummingbird notices the trespass. It doesn't work, of course. "Pop" (for such is his name around here) will arrange to sit on a bare twig somewhere in the yard where he can keep an eye on both sides of the house simultaneously. We could put the feeders on opposite sides of the house, of course, but then we couldn't keep an eye on both feeders simultaneously either.

Considering the level of discord and stress in the world, our interest in the lives of hummingbirds might appear as just too much more of the same. Do we think of Tennyson and his gloomy remarks about "nature red in tooth and claw"? I think not. In spite of all the dive bombing, strafing, twitterings and general threatenings, I've never seen one hummingbird actually impale another one. Nor have I seen anything like the hummingbird equivalent of anti-war protests.

In fact hummingbirds seem to behave as though life was going along quite normally. The trees and bushes do not contain numbers of poor down-trodden hummingbirds. As far as the outsider can tell, a hummingbird that gets the bum's rush from the irate Pop, simply waits until Pop has roared off in hot pursuit of some other interloper, and then drifts over to a feeder, has his drink and goes on about his business. And so we watch them with delight, shaking our heads at all the saber- (or beak–) rattling. Even from inside the house we duck instinctively as the avenging Pop roars in, intent on mayhem, but we don't attempt to enter into the fray on behalf of the weak.

I sometimes wonder if all the posturing and flag waving and warring that goes on in our own human world wouldn't be better dealt with by a good hearty and prolonged laugh at its fundamental silliness.