Fastest Things on Wings: Rescuing Hummingbirds in Hollywood by Terry Masear

Author:Terry Masear
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780544416031
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2015-06-16T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 16

And the Healing Has Begun

IN THE FOUR WEEKS between Gabriel’s and Pepper’s dangerous encounters with the opposite sex, twenty young hummingbirds have come into rescue. By the time Pepper appears, in early May, I have taken in sixty birds; eight have been released, forty are still moving through the rehab pipeline, and twelve, despite my best efforts, could not be saved. The twenty that have come in since Gabriel’s soggy arrival include a fledgling whose tail feathers were accidentally pulled out when he attempted to escape the grasp of a young jogger who picked him up in a park, a juvenile who’d been trapped and flying laps inside a Studio City apartment hallway, a nestling heard peeping under a car’s windshield wiper when the finder got home from work, two nests of twins cut by gardeners preparing for house painting, a nest of wind-chime hatchlings abandoned by their mother during a powerful Santa Ana windstorm, and two unscathed nestlings brought home by cats, one by an Abyssinian whose owner was quite proud of his pet’s gentle handling, and the other by an aged and toothless cat who, according to his doting guardian, had rescued grounded chicks in the past. The remainder of intakes consists of young birds discovered on canyon trails, city sidewalks, high-rise stairwells, and the classic Southern California scenario: floating in swimming pools.

When it comes to their approach toward hummingbirds, cats fall solidly into two camps. The first and most typical are the natural-born killers: cats that catch, maim, and dismember birds with savage abandon. The second, not as common but surprisingly frequent, are the search-and-rescue cats that locate young birds grounded by inclement weather and then gently transport them back to their owners. About half of the cat-caught hummingbirds that make it to rescue die overnight because the bacteria in a cat’s saliva infects a bird’s bloodstream like poison. If a cat-caught hummingbird’s skin has not been punctured and he makes it through the first night of rehab, he’s on the road to recovery. Interestingly, most dog-“found” birds (“found” because only an exceptional dog can catch a healthy hummingbird) that come into rescue survive and are successfully rehabbed because humans have, over tens of thousands of years, bred and trained our canine companions to retrieve with a soft mouth.

The morning after Hayley drops off Pepper, I set the tragic beauty outside in the sun for light and encouragement. Sitting quietly on her low perch, Pepper has a slender, delicate profile, with the Anna’s characteristic shimmering green back, smooth silver chest feathers, and exotic black eyeliner like ancient Egyptian royalty. When I kneel in front of her cage to examine her in the sunlight, the source of her disability reveals itself. Across the right side of her breast is a thin, one-inch gash where the feathers have been sheared off as if with a razor. This cut is where Pepper came into contact with the metal edge of the chafing dish.

Hummingbirds have large pectoral muscles that power their wing strokes.

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