The Hummingbird: She Builds Room To Grow (Bird)

I have often been awed by hummingbirds over the years — flashes of magnificent color at feeders and flowers, there and gone all too quickly. Once in a while, I've been quiet enough and lucky enough to deeply witness these remarkable creatures. While researching my upcoming June podcast episode devoted to these astonishing birds, I fell deep into the world of the hummingbird. And what I found there built another layer of how I think about love.

She cares for her brood entirely alone, unlike many in the avian world. Like other birds though, she is incredibly intentional, gathering the exact supplies she has been born to know. She will first gather plant fibers and soft thistle down for the inside, to ensure her eggs and babies are warm and shielded in softness. Then she will hunt for spider webs, using the silk to give it a unique flexible structure, bind everything together, and anchor it to a branch. She will camouflage the outside with lichen, moss, and bark so it looks like a natural knot on the branch. The finished nest is just the size of a walnut shell and truly miraculous.

Here is the part that awed me most: she uses spider silk because it stretches! She is not building a nest that fits her chicks today. She is building one that will expand around them as they grow. She engineers space for a future she can only imagine.

She does all of this on a body with the highest metabolic rate of any bird — a heart beating over a thousand times a minute, a body that must eat every ten to fifteen minutes just to stay alive. At night she enters a kind of suspended animation called torpor, her heart slowing and her temperature dropping, just to survive until morning. Then she wakes and starts again. She will hunt for small insects to meet their protein needs and regurgitate a slurry of nectar and bugs to feed her rapidly growing nestlings every 20 to 30 minutes. She will keep the nest immaculate in part by teaching the chicks to poop over the side! And she will fiercely defend the territory from intruders.