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Human Nature: Expanding Her Range
“I am trying to unlock some of the mysteries of the natural world.”
By Doreen Cubie
Ahummingbird lies quietly in my hand, her feathers emerald and ivory, splashes of copper and chestnut on her sides.
I caught her at a friend’s house by hanging a sugar-water feeder inside a wire cage. Then I knelt on the frosty lawn and waited. When the hummer flew in, I dropped the line holding the door open, took the bird out, and put a numbered band on her leg, giving her an identity and a history.
Clearly, she already has an interesting story because she is a rufous hummingbird, a Western-nesting species. Yet here she is on an icy December morning not far from the banks of the Savannah River.
As a licensed hummingbird bander and researcher, I am trying to unlock some of the mysteries of the natural world by studying individual birds that winter in South Carolina.
I often band ruby-throated hummingbirds along the coast, but we don’t know if the birds are here year-round or if they come from somewhere else in the United States or Canada.
This rufous I hold in my hand has surely forsaken the highlands of Mexico to winter in the southeastern United States. I suspect these birds are pioneers expanding the nonbreeding range of their species. But I can’t prove it. These are all things that I and other banders are trying to figure out.
I measure and weigh her, take photographs, and check her overall condition. As I release her, I wonder if she will stay for an entire season, until the brown thrashers start to sing and cardinals begin gathering twigs for their nests.
She does. And then one March morning she launches herself into the air, flying west and north for 2,000 miles or more to her own breeding grounds somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, perhaps as far away as Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula.
Not long after she leaves, I, too, head west — to learn even more about banding. I’m setting out for Idaho’s high desert and mountains at the very edge of the hummer’s summer range. On her trip, she has to beat her wings about 50 times a second. I, on the other hand, drive.
Even so, after eight days on the road, including an unexpected stay at a North Dakota hospital, I arrive exhausted and spent in Boise. I think about the rufous, thumb-sized and weighing less than a nickel, and try to imagine her journey. What did she face? A hailstorm in Texas? A sudden snow squall crossing the Rockies? Did she escape from the talons of a sharp-shinned hawk or elude a cat? And will she make the trip to South Carolina next winter?
Back home again, I wait for autumn. In October, my friend calls when she hears the staccato notes of a rufous high in a hickory. I set my trap. A hummer drops out of the tree and buzzes me, warning me away from “her” feeder. I step back, and she flies into the cage. I look at the bird. My brain tells me it couldn’t be the same one. But my heart hopes.
I take the hummer, a female, out of the trap and gently pull out her right leg. There’s an aluminum band on it. Impossible. How could she have flown as far as I drove? And how could she have navigated back to this exact yard? I spin the band, carefully checking the laser-etched numbers. It can’t be her. But the band doesn’t lie.
I start taking measurements, struggling to remain detached and scientific and failing miserably. Finally, I give in and stop to take a good look at her. She studies me back, her coffee-colored eyes locked onto mine. Eventually, I let her go, raising my palm up toward the sky. She feels the lift and finds her wings, helicoptering straight up out of my hand.
As I watch her disappear in the distance, I wonder if I’ll ever see her again. And I think of the words of a fellow hummingbird bander: “There’s no heart in you if you don’t love these birds.”
Pictures (top to bottom): Illustration © Stan Fellows; Photo courtesy Doreen Cubie
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