Eric Schwennesen - Hummers

One of the improbable facts of life of the American Southwest, are birds so close to insignificance that it's almost comical. Animal-wise they're barely visible; we have bigger grasshoppers. For colors and attitude, they must spend a lot of their time in party climes practicing dance moves to Merengue bands. This time of year, put out a feeder at your own risk: squadrons of them will swoop upon you and tank up like Miami drivers at a gas station, and you find yourself wondering what's their hurry?

Everything we are supposed to know about biology and physics seems incorrect about hummingbirds. Everybody knows flesh and blood can't flap wings that fast; physicists have shown that levitation on that scale can't be done (at least until they recalled the Reynolds number: relative air density to size of airborne body). The amount of oxygen they burn for their metabolism supposedly should literally suck the air away from the rest of us. Plus, they don't carry drop tanks; logic would suggest a hummingbird should run out of internal fuel in a couple of hundred feet, and we would be seeing their exhausted bodies falling out of the sky like autumn leaves. 

Instead, they hover; sometimes dozens at a time around the feeders: half-ounces of belligerent tiny fighter pilots pulling Gs in instant acceleration and deceleration, continuously, without even bothering to land.

Try stomping on the gas pedal of your nephew's Mustang Mach 5, to get the feel for what a hummingbird would consider a slow and dignified start to somewhere. And now it appears that that somewhere, might well be a continent away, like pedaling a child's trike from Bozeman to Ushuaia by way of the Atacama Desert, with only the beer in your stomach to make the trip.

...and yet these critters have travelled that far every season, for as long as anybody knows. And somehow, from five thousand miles away, they can zero in on a bird feeder three inches in diameter, in the middle of a near-desert, and seem to like it.

This time of year they empty the feeders twice a day; guess it's only fair to refill them.

Eric Schwennesen is a commercial beef rancher in the Mogollon Rim country. He grew up in Belgium, cowboyed in Nevada, and helped Navajos and many African peoples with rangeland conflicts for over 35 years. He recently published "The Field Journals: Adventures in Pastoralism" about his experiences.