Copper and Emerald
Birds Overheard: Issue 5
One morning in the spring of 2003, a wild hummingbird let me pet its head. I was eight years old, and Finding Nemo had just come out. I remember because Aunt Kay, my babysitter that morning, suggested a trip to the movies as we approached the little park outside our neighborhood swimming pool in Mira Mesa. I don’t remember why I had a babysitter that morning, or why it was Aunt Kay—a church friend who vanished from our lives within a few years, despite being one of the only two non-relatives to earn a familial appellation in our home. Both details seem unusual now, but the context eludes me. Instead, I remember the hummingbird, and the gnarled Aleppo pine I found it in. The fissures in the bark provided just enough traction to scramble up into the branches. I was happily peeling flakes off and tossing them to the ground when a flutter like shuffling cards flicked past, and I looked up.
The hummingbird had perched directly in front of me. The tiny feathers on its chin flashed copper and emerald as it turned, and for a moment neither of us breathed. Without breaking eye contact, I eased forward, summoning every ounce of patience my eight-year-old body could supply. I raised my hand. The hummingbird quivered on the branch. I reached out, and it remained. Still holding my breath, I stroked the back of its head and felt the tiny ridges of its feathers brush against my index finger. I withdrew my hand, and it looked at me a second longer. Then it was gone.
I think about this sometimes when my neighbor, the rufous hummingbird, perches on my string lights. He looks fabulous when his throat feathers catch the light, and he knows it. When a lady passes by, he bursts a hundred feet into the air, pivots on a dime, and dives, stopping directly in front of her to show them off. I don’t know how to calculate g-force, but this guy is only three inches long, and he performs his trick in less than two seconds. He could put Maverick out of work and look better doing it.
If you had asked me in 2003, I would have told you there was only one hummingbird species: “hummingbird.” It turns out there are at least 366, and ornithologists describe more every year. Five of those species live here in San Diego. Although they have different colors, behaviors, and ecological niches, each possesses the same gravity-defying powers. Over the past decade, scientists have combined data from high-speed cameras and pressure plates to build a model of hummingbird flight. Unlike other birds, they flap their wings in a figure eight pattern that generates lift on both the up and downstrokes. It only takes about 60 bpm to sustain a hover, and when my neighbor begins his courtship display, he can accelerate up to 200 bpm.
The more I watch these tiny aviators, the more questions I have. I recently edited a nature documentary with some spectacular footage of hummingbirds, and in one clip, shot at 30x slow motion, an Allen’s hummingbird swoops into the frame, stops directly in front of the camera, and holds her head perfectly still while her body swings around, tracing a circle behind her to counteract the force of her dive. Drone engineers would spend millions for a gimbal this dynamic, but there’s already one flying around my front yard.
Aunt Kay didn’t believe I touched the hummingbird. I can’t recall much about Aunt Kay—her perm, her floral perfume, and this conversation are the only traces she left in my memory, and today the hummingbird seems more real than she does. I’ve carried its image in my mind for twenty years. It feels good to share it.
Birds Overheard is a column and linocut series published in Mail Mag, a monthly zine by Burn All Books.
