Hummingbirds – flying jewels
The imagination of nature has no limits, it is oceanic, of an incandescent brilliance, a treasure chest of tried and tested diamond-hard ideas, in time, an imagination run riot,no crevice, cranny in mountain, sky or sea is not filled by something, somewhere.
Like a master jeweller, nature, forever rewiring strands of DNA, reconfiguring genetic permutations, like a true artist, its hidden hand, always invisible.
Birds are nature's crowning achievement, and hummingbirds are a jewel in that crown. Hummingbirds, among the smallest birds in the world, are the only bird that can fly backwards, sideways, even upward like a helicopter, all while facing forward. Their unsurpassed virtuosity, even allows them to fly upside down!
Most birds simply have an upstroke and a downstroke, but hovering, somersaulting, ultra-manoeuvrable hummingbirds, seen from side view, have a figure of eight configuration, their insectlike, blurred, zipping, whirring wings sending vortices of air in a perfect circle.
Interestingly, certain hummers live at an altitude where the air is so thin as to make hovering impossible, and so perch while feeding (less oxygen to power muscles and/or create lift). Others are so small, many of them bathe in dew-drenched leaves.
Living almost exclusively on nectar, the high-octane fuel food, which, in order to stay alive through the long night, he must eat his own weight in food every day.
Hummingbirds, although widespread in the Americas, are only a recent bird family to have evolved, being nectar feeders, they couldn't have started to evolve until flowering plants came on the scene, which themselves are comparatively recent, in evolutionary terms.
Skywalker
The Cuban bee hummingbird (it eats five times its weight each day) is the tiniest warm-blooded creature on Earth, including tail and bill, it measures two inches, and weighs 0.07 ounces (the weight of 20 postage stamps).
The strain on a bird to fly all day, to eat and drink while flying, to go into a state of semi-hibernation at night, would make them the most evolved bird of all.
Their heart rate is 20 times a second, and in flying, they use ten times the energy a person would use running a marathon.
Revered for their jewellike colours, they rightly deserve names like turquoise sabrewings, amethyst woodstar (this one beats its wings a mind-boggling 80 times a second) ruby-throat and violet crowned hummingbird (380 species exist in all).
Light entertainment
The metallic, gleaming, emerald, gemlike, golden, burnished colours of hummers isn't real colour, its iridescent, that is, varied densities, depths and troughs of plate-like feathers mirror the solar light, sunshine hits the plumage at varied frequencies, breaking up its light like a rainbow.
We don't have hummers here in The Old World, but we do have sunbirds, their bills are curved, whereas American hummers have a sword/ needle like bill. Lucky householders in America have nectar feeders in their gardens for these birds, like we have peanut feeders, well it is God's country!
Finally, who could have imagined looking at the ancient, sulphureous, bubbling, primordial slime in Year Zero, at the dawn of time, that from slimy, slithering slugs could such life evolve as these birds.
Hummingbirds, a showcase of beauty, the embodiment of energy, spirit, bravery (hummers migrate from North to South America) innovation, gyroscopic airborne mastery, a dazzling energy and fragility, it would have been beyond our imagination, but given plenty of time, apparently, not beyond nature's!
Contact Martin Egan at Megan9@eircom.net.
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Monday 21 May 2012
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