Hummingbird Times

This past week we’ve been enjoying dinners on our back patio, in the cool shade of the setting sun. After a couple of evenings, we realized were also being treated to a nightly show. The raucous, lively, and sometimes comical show of male hummingbirds staking claim to certain backyard flowers and then fiercely defending it.

The hummingbirds always come around in droves this time of year. Their high-pitched chirps and squeaks are ever present, even if you can’t spot them. I especially love sitting on my front porch in the early morning and watching the daredevil moves they make in flight, flying straight up and then diving straight down 30 feet before turning around and doing it again. I think of hummingbirds as the dolphins of the sky. They, more than any other bird, seem to never take for granted they are a creature blessed with the ability to fly. However, when they are not playing around or courting, they are intensely territorial, which is the display we get to witness every night as we are finishing up dinner. We don’t have any hummingbird feeders so the defensive moves are all to protect the remaining red rockets we have blooming and other stray flowers. Their aggressive chirps and displays as they fan out their feathers provide endless entertainment. One night we saw a particularly ornery male do an interesting move where he was swaying back and forth almost like he was the end of a pendulum with his feathers fanned out. Another one likes to perch high on a lilac branch that overlooks a flower bed, dive bombing unsuspecting passersby.

In Amy Tan’s book, Backyard Bird Chronicles, she has a few entries she entitled, Windowsill Wars and writes them like a wartime correspondent. That’s an apt description of our backyard during hummingbird season. Maybe next week I’ll have a new report to document, for all is not quite on the home-front.