It all starts so innocently, as most obsessions do. One day, you’re taking out the trash when you hear a high-pitched whistle and notice a tiny bird hovering over a beautiful columbine. The next, you’re browsing the hardware store when you come upon a Perky Pet hummingbird feeder complete with lobster-red “nectar” powder. You purchase the feeder, fill it, and hang it on your balcony. It takes a while for the local birds to find it, but when they do, you enjoy listening to their whistles and chirps. Watching them hover over the feeder is soothing. You delight as they swoop and dive in aerial acrobatics fit for a $100 million fighter jet. You lecture them for bickering with each other. You laugh at the little butterballs who might be hitting the nectar too hard. You look for the rare calliope. During their sunset feeding frenzy, you carefully move your hand toward the base of the feeder, giggling as a rufous rests its tiny toes on your finger.
Before you know it, you’re purchasing multiple feeders — four, and then eight — and hanging them up around every corner of your tiny balcony. You learn the perfect recipe for “nectar” with one part granulated sugar, three parts purified water, mixed thoroughly, and left to sit until it reaches an optimal room temperature. You swap out fresh nectar every other day whether the feeder is empty or not. Then there are so many hummingbirds that you need to refill the feeders every day. And then more than once a day. Before you know it, you’re burning through several pounds of sugar per week. You buy it in bulk. It’s never enough.
A few years ago, Beat started working on a machine that could automatically deliver sugar water to the hummingbirds while we were away. For “Hummer Heaven,” he designed and built several prototypes that nearly achieved everything he wanted the machine to do — automatically schedule the refills, pipe the water, mix the sugar, pump the mixture into a long tube with feeder holes, and repeat. But he could never quite figure out what to do about the problem of mold, so Hummer Heaven was ultimately scrapped. Instead, Beat just fills every feeder he owns and then frets when we go on vacation. What about the cold nights? Will they have enough energy for migration?
Then I joke that one of these days, we’re going to return home from vacation to find tens of thousands of hummingbirds clinging to every perch near our house — Alfred Hitchcock style — after which they will collectively swoop down and rip us apart with their tiny claws. The authorities will never be able to determine our cause of death.
“It looks like they were shredded with thousands of acupuncture needles, detective.”
“What?!” Beat yelled as he swung open the balcony door after returning from his afternoon run today. “What the #$!@?! I just filled these up this morning and now they are all empty. I’ll probably have to fill them again tonight. I’m creating a monster hive of sugar suckers.”
As the world’s smallest bird, hummingbirds had to trim a lot of mass to develop their enviable flying abilities and endurance. The various species that pass through Colorado typically weigh between 3 and 8 grams … 5 grams is about the weight of a nickel. They require a lot of fuel to keep up their activity level and compensate for their insulation, taking in between 3 and 7 calories a day. If they were human-sized, that would translate to about 155,000 calories a day — so we’re lucky they’re small.
Recently, Beat has been burning through about 2 pounds — 900 grams — of sugar per day to feed them. That much sugar has 3,550 calories — enough to feed more than 700 hummingbirds every day. And that’s assuming they only consume sugar water. Hummingbirds also lap up flowers and catch bugs, so the number is likely double that. Every day. Can you see why I’m beginning to feel a little frightened of our hummingbird overlords?
Tuesday was already a jam-packed day. Every Tuesday, I have ongoing deadlines from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. I always try to finish up some of the work Monday night so I have time during the day for a run or a medical appointment. On this day, I aimed to squeeze in a two-hour run, which was going to put me in a bit of a tight spot with work. It also forced some awkward timing as I tried to beat the daily lightning-and-hail deluge that makes summer such a terrifying time to live in Colorado.
Anyway, I returned home, drenched in sweat, and immediately returned to my laptop. Thunder rumbled as I tapped away. The booms were accompanied by an increasingly loud chorus of whistling and chirping. I looked outside to see at least two dozen hummingbirds hovering around a single feeder that was nearly dry. The other feeders were all completely empty. I did not have time for this. But guilt gnawed at my stomach. A storm was coming, poor birds. They needed calories to shelter in their trees and wait it out. So I rushed outside to grab two feeders and ran to the kitchen to brew their favorite concoction.
Beat uses 2,000 ml glass beakers to make nectar. This allows for easier measuring and pouring. One of the beakers recently developed a crack, but Beat reasoned that it was still in one piece and thus still useful. I absent-mindedly grabbed the cracked beaker out of the dishwasher, poured 600 ml of sugar, filled it to the brim by waiting for water to dribble from our slow purifier, and plunged an electric mixer into the liquid.
Seconds later, the cracked triangle of glass burst away from the beaker, showering me, the kitchen floors, the cabinets, the walls, everything within a 10-foot radius in two liters of clumpy sugar syrup.
I froze for a few more seconds, drenched and dumbfounded, still holding the whirring mixer in my hand. Then I turned off the mixer and looked down. My pants and sweatshirt were coated in wet clumps of sugar. Liquid covered a wide swath of the floor. Knowing I’d need to act fast, I stripped to my underwear and pulled a pile of dish towels out of the drawer. Everything I couldn’t mop up in the next 20 seconds was set to turn into a candy coating of sticky mess all over the kitchen.
It was in this compromised state — half-naked, skin still glistening with sweat and crystal clumps of sugar, and wringing out dish towels in the sink — that a single broad-tailed hummingbird found me. He flew toward the kitchen window, his neck feathers an unnerving shade of crimson that lit up with the flashes of lightning tearing through the sky. He hovered there at eye level, just watching me as if to say: “You are supposed to be making nectar. This does not look like making nectar.”
And knowing all this — already behind at work, desperately in need of a shower, knowing that if I didn’t mop up the entire kitchen and start a load of laundry immediately, I was going to have a sticky nightmare on my hands — I could only submit to the broad-tail. I found the good beaker and went about making two feeders’ worth of nectar. Dozens of birds descended on them while the liquid was still a cloudy white and the thunderstorm raged overhead.
After a few immediate work tasks that I had to complete standing half-naked with the laptop balanced on a couch to avoid touching anything with my sticky skin, I was able to squeeze in a shower. Mopping the kitchen took place in intervals over the next few hours, scrubbing so hard that my bad hand began to ache as though I had smashed it all over again. Twenty-four hours after the mishap, I am still finding sticky streaks in the darndest places.
Beat returned home a few hours later to find a frazzled mess who was quietly mumbling, “Those rotten birds.” (And then even quieter, in case they could hear me, “I’m never going to feed those birds again. There are so many flowers here. They can fend for themselves.”
On Wednesday, Beat returned to his main role as the provider of nectar. In the evening, I walked out onto the balcony to make peace with the hummingbirds. As sunset approached, they flitted around the house as thick as mosquitoes, their tail feathers whistling in an eerie cacophony. A few far-away flashes of lightning lit up the horizon, and then a rainbow appeared over Eldorado Mountain.
“Ah, peace,” I thought. Just then, a hummingbird buzzed centimeters from my face and startled me so much that I jumped back, slamming my aching hand against the wall.
Humbled, penitent, I tiptoed backward through the balcony door, retreating to the house.
I love this! Made me laugh out loud!
Tell me who can make a story about the adventures of humming birds so interesting. Thou art a great writer my friend.