I was minding my own business when several people tagged me at once on a post in a local portmanteau Facebook group, MOV What's Happening. It's kind of a like a NextDoor for Marietta, Ohio and Parkersburg, West Virginia, with everything from the latest convenience store robbery video to fires, car wrecks, lost pets, hair salon recommendations and pleas for help with a hummingbird in December. Does anyone around here rescue hummingbirds? Oh, yes, Julie Zickefoose does. Tag. Tag. Tag. Tag. Arrrgh.
What are the chances that this is actually a hummingbird? I thought. It was very late, around 11 pm. I was very tired. I didn't want to get sucked into the vortex. There was no photo with the post. Maybe it was a goldfinch. How could it be a hummingbird, in Parkersburg WV, in December?
When I woke up at 7 AM, there she was, in my Facebook inbox, asking for help with her hummingbird. I sighed and messaged back, asking for a photo. She obliged.
Well, dip me in chocolate and roll me in peanuts. Not only was it a hummingbird, it was a Selasphorus, either a rufous or an Allen's hummingbird, which, after all, is what you expect for hummingbirds in West Virginia in December, if you expect them at all. Which you don't.
For those who don't know, rufous hummingbirds, and sometimes Allen's hummingbirds, which are both of the genus Selasphorus, occasionally move east in winter, instead of south. They come from their breeding grounds in the Pacific Northwest and Canada up to Alaska, and for some strange reason they fly until they hit the East Coast, and then they try to survive New England winters. Some of them make it. Some of them even return to the East year after year instead of going to Baja and Mexico and Central America like they're supposed to. Nobody knows why they do it, but they're remarkably cold tolerant and can eke out a living, especially if provided with a warmed nectar feeder all winter.
Now take a look at the rufous hummingbird occurrences on an eBird map from Oct 2022-Feb 2023.
Sightings are in purple. Yeah, my jaw is hanging open, too. Citizen science at its best!
So this eastward push in fall and winter is something rufous hummingbirds do, whether it's good for them or not. Who knows. Maybe it's working for them. Maybe winter hummingbirds will be commonplace as the planet warms.
Rufous hummingbirds are the reason I take my feeders down in September and keep them down. Because if I ever got one at my feeder, I would give everything I had to keeping it alive. And I would be worried sick through every sleet, ice, and snow storm. Sick, I tell you. Worrying about rufous hummingbirds is why I did this painting. If I ever got one at my feeder in winter I'd be trying to make it wear a little hat. I'd be making it a heated house to live in. It would not be good for either of us. So I take the feeders down. I do not want a hummingbird here in winter. It would drive me mad.
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Christina explained that her dad found the hummingbird sitting all puffed up with its eyes closed atop a colorful windchime on their back porch.
Pause to think about that. It was hoping there was nectar in that windchime, hoping its bright colors meant it was a feeder. And when it wasn't, the hummingbird just gave up in the freezing temperatures and went into torpor.
My heart broke for the first time, thinking about that bird in the freezing cold, hoping, then closing his eyes.
She had it in a cardboard box, in the dark. It had been without food for many hours the day before, then overnight. My brain jumped into action. I told her to get a big plastic box, like a foot locker, that was clear, that had a lid. The bird had to be able to see to be able to feed. Bring it out into the light.
Then I asked if she possibly had a hummingbird feeder. She thought she might. Put that in the foot locker, put the hummingbird in with it, and see what happens, I told her. She sent me this video not long after, and my heart got squeezed, seeing this tiny creature responding so well to the help she was giving.
From that moment on, my day was given to the bird. He was out of immediate danger of starvation, feeding himself. He could stay right where he was; Christina was wonderfully competent. I spent the next six hours texting, calling, waiting for callbacks, reaching out in several different directions to try to find a place for this hummingbird to recover.
My first choice was a large rehabilitation center two hours away. I couldn't get through to a human by phone, so I sent a Facebook message. Luckily, it was answered by a volunteer, who said she would check to see if they would take the bird. I explained that I was a licensed wildlife rehabilitator looking for care for a rufous hummingbird that had been found in bad shape the night before. I sent the video above, and she relayed it to one of their animal care specialists.
Shortly afterward, the volunteer got back to me and read off a bunch of information to me about overwintering rufous hummingbirds. I listened in silence. Yes. I knew all those facts. They didn't need to tell me any of it. She explained that they wouldn't take the bird because it was neither sick nor injured. Wait. This bird is found in horrible shape sitting starved on a windchime in 28 degree snow cover, and I'm being told to turn it loose back out into the snow again? Well, yes. It's not injured or sick, so there's no reason to take it in.
But look at it! Yes, it can fly, but it's not strong, it's not OK by any stretch of the imagination. I'm not putting it back out into the freezing cold. And there's no way to explain that to the animal care specialist, because I'm not talking to them, and they're not talking to me. I thanked the volunteer who had relayed all the helpful information and hung up. I understood their position, and it might have worked with a robust hummingbird with a steady nectar source, but not with this bird. And I don't think they were seeing what I was in that video clip. A hummingbird that flies all puffed up is in trouble.
OK. Two hours away was my closest option, and that's a no-go.
All the while, I'm thinking about whether I could care for the bird. Yes, I've got this great big heated greenhouse full of flowering plants. Yes, I'd love to try. But... the greenhouse is made of glass. And as soon as that bird got to feeling better, he'd buzz his wings, pick up speed, and fly straight up, smack into the glass ceiling. And that would be that. I'd have killed him with kindness and optimism.
So I made another call, and sent another Facebook message to another rehabilitation center, and those went unanswered for several hours. Time was a-wasting. Finally my friend Ryan called a mutual friend who knew someone at the clinic I was trying to reach, and I sent Shane the video, and Shane sent it to Amanda, and I got a four-word answer back. "They'll take the bird."
By now it was mid-afternoon, and I'd been trying to get an answer since 7 AM. The bird was 45 minutes away. I set out driving. It was after dark when I got there. I kind of knew which house it would be as I drove through the pitch-dark neighborhood.
It was a house of kindness and light, the only one lit up on that whole street. I was warmly greeted and shown to the kitchen, where the tiny hummingbird, surrounded by hungry teens, bustling dinner prep, and several very interested cats, was calmly feeding from an old hummingbird feeder inside a plastic footlocker. Incredible.
Christina knew about hummingbirds because she had lived in Arizona and fed them there. Lucky for this one it picked her parents' house. She had even gone to a pet store and bought wingless fruit flies to offer him. I wanted to transfer him to my nylon hamper, so we took the footlocker and hamper into the bathroom just in case the bird got out. Christina said he'd gotten out while she was tending to him and flown all around the house, with cats in hot pursuit, but she managed to catch him again and get him back in the footlocker. Yipes. I don't know how many lives hummingbirds have, but this little guy had used several.
I caught him without incident, put him in my hamper, and headed back home. I hung a little feeder from the ceiling of the hamper and left him alone. He was clinging to the side of the hamper, stressed and unhappy, and he spent the night that way.
In the morning he was buzzing around the hamper. I didn't see him use the feeder, which worried me. Sure enough, he ran out of gas and wound up on the floor of the hamper. Oh, no. I took him in hand and after about ten minutes I got him to take some nectar from an eyedropper. It wasn't easy.
After he ate, he seemed better, and I switched out the hanging feeder for one more like the one Christina had offered him. To my vast relief, he drank from it on his own. I knew I needed to get a little video that wasn't compromised by the mesh hamper. I'm so glad I did. His beauty took my breath away. I'd never seen a rufous hummingbird so close, or so incredibly red. So beautiful. So dear.
We had to hit the road. I was headed to the Ohio Bird Sanctuary in Mansfield, and it was a solid three hours away. I still didn't love the way the bird was acting, and my little voice said, "Might want to give it a day, see if he improves before you make a drive like that."
But that wise little voice was drowned out by a muffled howl from my soul, telling me I wasn't up to the job. He was going to leave me if I didn't get him help. I tried one more time to feed him, without success; he just wouldn't swallow. I loaded everything in the car, packed a few snacks and some tea, and took off. Before we left the driveway, the feeder had tipped over, dumping nectar all over the hamper floor. I had to turn around, clean out the hamper, and find another feeder he might use that wouldn't tip over. It was 10:15 AM, and we were off to a very poor start.
I stopped at 11 and tried to feed him. I couldn't wake him up, no matter what I did. This was not good. But I had the bit in my teeth now. I gave up, pressed the accelerator and prayed, eating away at the miles, glancing worriedly again and again at the little bird who hadn't moved.
It was only 24 degrees up here, but at least there was blue sky. I hadn't seen blue sky in way too long.
I got to the Ohio Bird Sanctuary around 1:15 pm and took the hummer to the triage room. Amanda, the director, met me there. I told her he'd been without food since 10, and that I was afraid I was losing him. I asked her to hold him for me so I could photograph his spread tail, something I hadn't been able to do one-handed. I had been corresponding with Allen Chartier, a bander who could help determine if he was rufous or Allen's.
This pose, with his wings wide out...a hard thing to look at.
It's all in the tail feathers, the second rectrix to be exact, and as anxious and upset as I was I just could not get his tail spread wide enough to get a good photo of it. It kept folding up as I tried. It was notched (rufous), but it didn't appear lanceolate (Allen's) to me. I suspect this is a pure rufous hummingbird.
Amanda couldn't have been nicer. She took him and put him in an incubator, and that was that.
By now I was in tears, and I had to leave for home or drive much of the way in the dark. I don't like the short days of December, and I don't like driving in the dark any more.
But I couldn't leave without visiting the birds. The cheerful visitor's center receptionist gave me a tiny cup of dried mealworms and sent me out to the aviary. Two blue jays and two cedar waxwings descended on me. Which only made me cry more. How I miss communion with animals and birds, the touch of another living creature! To someone who has spent so many hours with a budgie or a macaw muttering away on her shoulder, so many summers raising wonderful baby birds, so many years with a good dog by her side, living alone without animals is not good. And now I was leaving a precious jewel here, because there was nothing I could do for him any more. The touch of waxwing feet and feathers was like food to a starving person.
I didn't even notice this hermit thrush had only one eye (the one he keeps on me) until I watched him for awhile.
The birds who live at the Ohio Bird Sanctuary are unreleasable. I am so very grateful that this place exists, to give a home to birds who can't fly well enough to migrate or live wild, but who still have so much joy to give to the people who are lucky enough to come visit them. The Sanctuary is not just for longterm clients. They heal and release lots of birds, but they're unique in keeping unreleasable raptors and songbirds around for the public to enjoy and interact with. It's a beautiful combination. I got to meet the gentleman who helped start it in 1988. You can read about its history here
The thrush at the end of this clip is not a hermit, as I guessed. When I saw the video, I recognized it as a veery! Who gets to stare at a veery??
There was a father with his adorable young sons there. They are members, and they come regularly to commune with the birds. The boys had asked to come visit the birds today. They were so quiet and respectful and gentle.
Look at this little guy with his waxwing pal.
I felt SO much better after lingering awhile in the aviary, communing with the kids and the birds. I stopped to visit with a great horned owl, who was hooting the last time I visited several years ago when I was dropping off an injured blue jay. I suspect has been hooting ever since.
This is the outdoor classroom at OBS, which you reach along an
elevated boardwalk. I'd love to be there in summer, too.
A very cool timelapse of its building in 2022 here:
I think I see Amish craftsmanship here!
Shadows were getting long when I left. I thought I might find a nice Amish meal on the way, but it didn't happen. I grabbed a horrible sloppy Joe, threw it away after one bite, found a quick burger at another diner and kept rolling.
And the moon rose over an open field
The moon never looks as huge in photos as it does in person. It was like a great big old beach ball.
I had about 20 minutes to race through the garden shop at Sheiyah Market in Berlin before it closed at 6 pm. It's one of my favorite places. I bought a teeny tiny poinsettia that makes me smile.
I could tell it was just a rooted tip cutting of a regular poinsettia, but I love it just the same, and I don't have room for a great big floppy one. Tiny cur for scale. Me being me, I'll transplant it into a bigger pot and let it be what it is destined to be.
I stopped to watch the moon rise over the marketplace, vying with the streetlights for size and brilliance, and it made me feel better. Christmas is coming, and I'll see my beloveds soon.
When I got home, there was an email waiting from my new friend Allen Chartier, who had heard through the grapevine that the little cinnamon-brown hummingbird had died before I even got home. Nine hours in the car, 420 miles total over two days I'd driven, and I knew even as I was leaving that morning that he wasn't going to make it. He was so special, so lovely, so sweet. I had to try, for him, and for the sweet family who took him in off their wind chime.
I've been sitting on this story for a couple of days, grieving for a tiny soul I only just met, and I finally realized that the only way to process it and to feel better about it is to tell it to you. As my friend Ryan, who ought to know, said to me, "Big hearts break hard."
If you would like to contribute to the good work of the Ohio Bird Sanctuary, I'm sure they would appreciate the help. Tell them it's for little Rufous.
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