Hummingbird Magic

Every festival has its clientele. I've worked a few birding and nature festivals, and there's a slightly different cut of people at each one.

I really liked the people I met at the Sedona Hummingbird Festival in early August. There was a kind of magic about them. And why not? The little beasts they hold so dear are magic themselves. 

This is Beth Kingsley Hawkins, artist, photographer, writer and all-around awesome spirit. She and her husband Ross are why I was there. They founded The Hummingbird Society, a conservation organization directed at hummingbirds alone, and the festival followed. 

Years ago, when the kids were little, Beth and Ross came to visit. We were going around my then very modest gardens, and we watched a ruby-throated hummingbird apparently feeding at my Peace rose, slipping its bill between each of the huge tea rose's petals.

Well, we knew it couldn't be getting nectar that way. Or anywhere on a tea rose. When the hummingbird left, we parted the petals and found a beautiful pool of rainwater cradled inside each petal. The bird had been drinking.

How does a hummingbird know it can drink water that way? 

A hummingbird knows flowers.

This is Deandra. She and I were friends from Hello. I had the honor of sitting with her at dinner and the conversation never flagged. She is simply fascinating, one of those people you wish you could propagate, take a cutting, make more. 

I went through my images and found some that capture just a touch of what hummingbirds are all about. 

Black-chin in corkscrew willow

Black-chins in trumpetvine...

Flying sideways, of course, why not if you can?

Eyeing a honeybee...

and diving for sweet nectar

the bee in hot pursuit.

Hummingbirds, briefly contained...what a concept, corralling a hummingbird...

The large but incredibly deft and gentle hands of Lanny Chambers, a furious tiny throbbing life in his fingers.

Processed and ready to go, they lie unbelieving for a few moments...

and eager fingers get the chance to touch lightning, something they will likely never have a chance to do again

and then it's time to let him fly.

But sometimes they lie, shellshocked, and don't believe they're free. This Anna's lay still on an eager palm.

They've had quite enough of the touch of strange fingers and hands, so Lanny rouses them back to the real world by blowing gently on them. Wind! Hummingbirds know wind.

Liftoff!

I'm charmed by the experience, this big gentle man with a way with tiny birds, and the people who've come to see them. 

Banding Hummingbirds

I got distracted by my gardens, and when I get distracted, you do, too. As if you have any choice as to what goes up here.

When we left Zick, she had successfully disappeared into a backyard outside Sedona, Arizona, and spent a delightful couple of hours photographing hummingbirds. The garden was the site of a hummingbird banding demonstration for the Sedona Hummingbird Festival, led by master hummingbird banders Steve and Debbie Bouricius and hummingbird researcher Lanny Chambers of hummingbirds.net. That's the awesome website that has a wealth of information about watching and feeding hummingbirds, and even posts a map of rubythroat sightings as they make their way north on migration each spring. I was very excited to meet these amazing people. 

Lanny was excited to meet me, too, which was nice. Also he was holding an Anna's hummingbird, which adds spice to any meeting.

The banders were working under a tent, quickly processing hummingbirds that Steve Bouricius was bringing them from the wire cage traps in the garden. 

They set traps around the feeders, allow the hummingbirds to enter and exit the traps for a day or so, then hand-trip the traps when there's a hummingbird inside. 

The birds are quickly caught by hand as they rise to the top of the trap, put in soft mesh bags, and brought to the banding table. 

 In a yard this full of flowers and feeders, you can catch a lot of hummingbirds!

I watched with fascination as Lanny processed each bird. His hands moved so deftly, so gently.

Full tail-spread.

When it was time to weigh the bird on a gram scale, he gently wrapped it in breathable nylon so it would lie still. A little hummito.

The bird gets measured, wing, bill, and tail; it's aged and sexed; it gets its fat checked and its nasal grooves looked at; its gorget color assessed...the columns on this chart are astounding. I wish I'd had time to ask the million questions swirling in my head, looking at this data collection effort. 

Lanny selects a band of the right size for the species he's working with from the incredibly tiny rings in his neat little case.

He teases the hummingbird's minuscule leg out from the nylon wrapper

and gently applies the band with a tiny pliers. He's got some massive cheaters he uses for magnification.

Afterward, Lanny offered the bird to me to release it, a very special honor. I'd have been thrilled to do it, but I have had the chance to touch many hummingbirds in my life, so I gave the honor to someone I sensed hadn't.

She was into it.

And after lying perfectly still for a few moments, the little Anna's got gone, banded now and with all his vital stats now points of light in a galaxy of data.