Hummer Reading

Since moving to France I have had more time to read for leisure than probably at any other point in my entire life. What can I say; this is the first time since I have been old enough to work as a babysitter at age eleven that I no longer have paid employment. (And, I officially and tearfully resigned from my Alpine School District teaching job last week.) The upside to not having a job here is that I have more free time to read. My choices have been extremely varied, from the genre of science fiction/fantasy (which is one of my favs) to romance, thrillers, and even some nonfiction. Yesterday I finished a strange book called God Says No about a homosexual Christian man battling same sex attractions. Today I am half way through Superfreakonomics. A few weeks ago I read a book by science writer Richard Conniff called Swimming with Piranhas at Feeding Time, and I was enthralled by the chapter about hummingbirds. I hope you will indulge my geeky science side by letting me share what I found so fascinating about these little creatures.

For as long as I can remember, my mother has loved birds, especially beautiful little birds like hummingbirds. Every summer of my life, regardless of where we lived, she has put out multiple hummingbird feeders, so I have seen my fair share of hummingbirds and then some. But what I didn’t know was that although hummingbirds are among the smallest of warm-blooded animals on Earth, they are also among the meanest. I almost feel like I have to apologize to my mom for saying that, like it’s heresy to call such a cute little bird mean, but read on:


Most of us know hummingbirds can hover as they sip nectar, and in order to do this, their wings beat side to side in a figure-eight pattern, rather than up and down. In order to be able to hover in air, a hummingbird has to beat its wings around 2,280 revolutions a minute, and its heart beats around 1,200 times a minute. Conniff says that even though the average hummingbird weighs less than a nickel, it is a slave to its raging metabolism. They need around 7 to 12 calories a day, which sounds fine until you do the math. It’s the equivalent of a 180-pound human having to scrounge up 204,300 calories a day, or about 171 pounds of hamburger. Conniff says, “To keep itself alive, a hummingbird must manage to find as many as 1,000 flowers and drink almost twice its weight in nectar daily. It’s enough to give even a very pretty little bird the personality of a junkyard dog.”


He goes on to say how ferocious hummingbirds are and calls them “fighter pilots in small bodies.” Scientists observing hummingbirds have seen one hummingbird knock another hummingbird out of the air and stab it with its bill. One scientist named Tom Wood, who has studied the birds all his adult life, says it’s probably good they are small; “if they were the size of ravens, it wouldn’t be safe to walk in the woods.”  A scientific paper about the rufous hummingbird includes this endearing notation: "SOCIAL BEHAVIOR: None.  Individual survival seems only concern."


Hummingbirds can outmaneuver almost every other kind of bird. They have the largest flight muscles of any bird, relative to their size, and they are incredibly smart. Relative to body weight, the hummingbird brain is actually bigger than ours, and they can even remember individual flowers over the course of a day and how fast the flowers can replenish their nectar supply. One biologist complained that hummingbirds continued to show up at a regular feeder site for two years after she stopped putting out the feeder.

So Mom, I am glad you have always helped these beautiful birds with their voracious appetites and calorie requirements. Though I won’t ever think of them again as being “sweet” birds, they certainly have my respect. And after reading this book, I’ll certainly think twice before ever messing with one!