Along with coral reefs and their fish, tropical butterflies and birds of paradise, hummingbirds must be among the most beautiful organisms on Earth. Yet for anyone who has never seen one in the flesh, it is difficult to convey the psychological effects of a first encounter.
For beauty is only half the hummingbird story. Their impact is doubled somehow by the minuscule size of the creatures. How could anything so small, you wonder, embody so much life force? Even in ordinary flight the wings beat at 80 times a second, and in certain display modes this can rise to 200. The old name — ‘humbird’ — better expresses the electric fizz which those limbs create.
However this lifestyle comes at a cost. A typical species weighing five grams must drain the nectar contents of 1,000-2,000 flowers daily. The birds are famously aggressive and fight among themselves for food resources, which is a reflection of a life passed permanently on the edge of starvation.
A good place to begin to understand the birds’ dramatic pleasures is with this entertaining book. One of Jon Dunn’s real achievements is his ability to conjure the plastic form and astonishing chromatic architecture of many hummingbird species. Here is his account of perhaps the most splendid of all, appropriately named the marvelous spatuletail:
A searing bolt of turquoise, the colour of Caribbean water over white coral sand, shone from its throat, above a tiny white body bisected by an inky black stripe. Beneath him hung two midnight-purple discs, seemingly unattached from the bird itself, so thin were the filaments of feather spine that supported them. He sat, his crown radiating shafts of violet as the light caught the feathers at just the right angle.
Dunn is in a long line of historical admirers who have singled out this family for special attention.
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