blog @ xanatos.ca

Hummingbird

While walking to the movie theatre yesterday, Erin and I came across a very tiny little bird that was was sitting motionless, right in the middle of the busy sidewalk. We looked a little closer, and realized that it was a hummingbird!

He barely reacted at all when I touched him, so obviously something was wrong.

Erin ran off to get the bird some sugar water from a nearby coffee shop, and I picked him up and carried him over to secluded tree on the other end of the parking lot. The middle of the sidewalk is really no place for a tiny, semi-conscious hummingbird.

Unfortunately, he wasn't interested in any of Erin's sugar water, and he didn't really like where I put him in the tree, either. He jumped up, wobbled in the air for a second or two, and then landed on Erin's shoulder.

But that was as far as he went, which still seemed awfully sluggish for a hummingbird. Maybe the wind had knocked him into something and now he was just kinda stunned?

There wasn't much else to do, so we just found him a tree that he liked better and left him there with the rest of the sugar water, hoping that a little rest would help him recover.

A few hours later we decided to check up on the little guy. (We were walking back home from the movie theatre anyway.) Unfortunately, there had been a thunderstorm while we were gone. We found the bird exactly where we'd left him, only now he was completely soaked! It was a sad sight. With his feathers all wet, he looked even smaller than before, and he was actually shivering.

Of course, we couldn't just leave him there (I think Erin would have left ME there first), so I picked the bird up and carried him home. The heat from my hand seemed to warm him up a bit, so at least he stopped shivering. Actually, I think he fell asleep--or at any rate, he certainly didn't seem to mind being carried around.

When we arrived at my place, Erin built the bird a little house out of a shoebox, complete with a twig for him to roost on, a side entrance for him to leave if he wanted to, and a dish full of sugar water in case he got hungry. (I checked online--apparently hummingbirds have a very fast metabolism, which means that they need a constant diet of sugar or else they starve to death.)

Once he was securely on his twig, we put the shoebox out onto a nice spot on my balcony where it wouldn't get rained on or blown away. And we decided to name him "Jet", since he looked like he'd be pretty fast if he were awake and healthy.

At that point Jet was willing to eat some sugar water, so Erin spent about an hour feeding him with a straw. Then we went to bed. There really wasn't much else we could do, although I admit I checked on him once or twice during the night.

Anyhow, this rather long story has a happy ending.

The next morning, we tried to wake Jet up. At first, he was groggy and unwilling to move around much, but then after a few minutes he was able to fly away on his own. I like to imagine that he stopped for a quick drink at the sugar-water bowl before he left, but unfortunately he slipped away when Erin and I weren't looking, so there's no way to know for sure.

I doubt we'll see Jet again, but we did manage to snap a couple of quick photos on the night we found him. If you're interested, you can see them here.