from Literary Vision Magazine
BY DAVID MCGRATH
This is getting serious. Tuesday I filled the hummingbird feeder, which is a particularly large model that holds over a quart of sugar juice. Friday, today, it is already empty. It used to last two weeks.
As I stood on the ladder to take down the feeder, clean it, and refill it, four hummingbirds darted by my head.
Later this morning, I am watching 4, 5, and now 6 of the tiny birds circling the feeder. As many as 4 would land and feed at one time, as long as the maverick birds weren't there. The mavericks are aggressive hummers (males, I assume) who will not allow anyone else to feed when they are around. One maverick hummer will hover and strike at the incoming until they all retreat, and only then will he drink himself. If a rogue again approaches, maverick darts out and bumps chests with him or stabs him with his bill.
The mavericks don't look different from the others except that they are stouter, doubtlessly bursting with sugar juice that’s making them high. A sugar rage.
If you’ve never seen a humming bird, it’s because they are so small: about two and half inches from head to tail. They’re brown with greenish trim, with a ruby red throat that resembles a bib.
What is prominent when they’re perched is their long beak, like a swordfish bill, which they insert into a flower’s “bowl” to draw nectar, or which they dip into the orifice of a man-made feeder (usually painted red and resembling a tubular flower), to suck up sugar water.
What is prominent when they fly is the motor fast thrumming of their wings, whose speed and vibration cause the peculiar humming sound. And with such wing speed, they can hover in the air like a helicopter, not prostrate like Superman, but perpendicular the way the Peace Dove is often depicted.
Envision, for a moment, a brown bear with his back to a tree, fighting off 5 or 6 barking dogs. The way the bear stays put and paws at or lunges at individual dogs, is similar to the way the maverick hummer hovers over my feeder, his wings fanning in a blur, as he guards his position and thrusts at any intruder.
I need not even watch—can interpret the skirmishes by their sound. The humming grows in volume as an attacker plummets from the sky, and then there's the sudden pop and bang-buzz as the maverick intercepts the intruder. Like when you’re on a two lane highway, hearing the escalating whine of an oncoming semi-tractor trailer that finally explodes in a windy roar next to you, and then instantly dissipates into a diminishing drone as the truck disappears the opposite way.
Friday afternoon my feeder is empty. And there sure as hell is no leak. Has the cool summer, more like spring, prolonged the mating season, precipitating a feeding frenzy?
Dozens of hummers are circling the feeder, dozens more circling the house. You can hear humming from every room. Frank, my yellow lab whom thunder and lightning never fazed, hides under a table.
I go back up the ladder and fill the feeder wearing my bicycle helmet. As I clean up the pitcher and the funnel I used to blend food for the feeder, the humming spasmodically erupts into screeches. I finish in the kitchen and go to the window to see only one ounce left in the feeder. But even more shocking are about two dozen humming birds, mostly stout, helicoptering outside the windows, looking in.
I don't want to go up the ladder, so I fill several pots and pans with water and mix in sugar, stirring with the big soup ladle. I set them just outside the screen door and slam it shut. Frank is whimpering.
I go to bookcase and pull out the field guide to consult on humming bird behavior, when I hear clanging and wood crunching sounds out front. I drop the book and go to the phone to call someone, anyone, 9-1-1, and then there's an awful snarl like a chainsaw where I left the pots and pans. I hang on to the phone--it's ringing on the other end--and I walk to the front to see that a top-to-bottom seam has been ripped into screen door, and the birds are careening in, swooping and dive-bombing in the family room. Frank is in a corner, growling and snapping at the birds, tiny red feathers on his nose and his head. I put down the phone and grab for flyswatter hanging on the wall, and, wait, oh no, please...
David McGrath is a freelance writer last heard from in his cabin at Moose Lake in northwest Wisconsin.