When the growing season arrives, it’s my mission in life to grow as many flowers as possible for hummingbirds. I don’t what it is about them, but those brilliant little balls of colorful fluff always make me smile. They’re like my own little garden-based familiars.
Hummingbirds also have it rough. They have high metabolisms, and thus need a lot of calories to survive. In the summertime, I grow Morning Glories, Purple Salvia, Mexican Cigar Plant, and various petunias. I do not, however, use a hummingbird feeder. It’s too easy for those to spread disease, especially if they’re not cleaned regularly.
Late fall and winter can pose a real survival challenge for these beautiful birds, and that brings me to the subject of today’s post. For today, to my horror, a motionless hummingbird appeared in our foyer. A little subsequent detective work figured out the series of events leading to this shocking discovery.
Augie had gone out earlier to get coffee and some fresh air. When he came home, he somehow caught a falling hummingbird in his hoodie. He came inside, the bird fell to the floor, and he proceeded to his room. Moments later, he returned to find what he thought was a leaf in the foyer. When he touched the “twig” on the leaf, he immediately released it and pulled away — because it was a tiny bird’s leg.
He called to me, and when I saw the sight in front of me, I had a little panic attack. One of my garden familiars was in an unfamiliar place. They looked dead. Very dead. Augie started to discuss respectful ways to remove the fallen bird, but I was still in shock and choking up.
That’s when the little Dungeons and Dragons dice started rolling in my head. It was time to make a check against my “Nature” skill, or possibly “Animal Handling.” Either way, I rolled a natural twenty.
The hummingbird, you see, wasn’t dead. “It’s not dead!” I said urgently. “It’s in torpor!” Augie put his ear to the tile and listened carefully. Quiet thump… quiet thump… quiet thump. It had a heartbeat, albeit an extremely slow one.
Torpor is a process by which hummingbirds slow their metabolism dramatically to conserve energy. Their heart rate decreases by something like ninety-five percent. They also clench onto a branch with one foot and hang upside-down. Then, when things get warmer, they need to wake and gorge on sugary stuff.
My best guess is that a male Anna’s Hummingbird went into torpor on a twig close to Augie’s car, and when he got out, he either brushed against it or jostled it loose with stray movement vibrations. Hummingbirds are tiny and weigh next to nothing, so he wouldn’t have felt anything when it landed in his hoodie. He then came indoors, and it fell to the floor.
It takes approximately twenty minutes to an hour for a bird to awaken from torpor, so his rediscovering it before it woke up was probably lucky. Nobody stepped on the poor thing. Umbra didn’t find the bird and kill him. And it didn’t wake up confused and fly around the house.
There is a chance the poor bird was too far gone before it even reached the house (it’s been extremely cold during the last day or so), or that it sustained an injury when it fell from Augie’s hoodie. But the bird looks intact, and it has a heartbeat, so it might be just fine.
Currently, the bird is on our balcony table in an open plastic container, which we’ve lined with a stack of napkins. There’s a shallow container with sugar water right beside them. And we’ve moved a chair in front of the container to shelter it from the wind and from view.
The rest is up to them. I passed my “Nature” check. I hope they pass their “Constitution” check.
UPDATE: It’s supposed to hit 25F by dawn, so the bird is inside a shoe box on our guest room’s desk. He’s resting on a bed of napkins near some sugar water in a shallow container. I left a desk lamp on above the box so that a little light can shine through the air holes. And I put on some calming sleep sounds of birds in a forest. I’ll know by dawn if my patient recovers.
UPDATE 2: He never woke up. I’m going to gently place him under some leaves in the garden of flowers I grow for hummingbirds. I’m sorry I couldn’t do more and better for him.