“By western Indians living sunbeams named.”
You can remember it by that line, which is from a poem by Mrs. Hemans, a clever lady whom your mother will tell you about. For the Indians, you know, live in America, that great country—so large that we call it “the new world”—which Columbus discovered. They do not live in India, as you might think. At least, when we talk of the Indians, it is the ones that live in America and not India that we mean. The ones that live in India we call Hindoos. It seems funny, but the reason of it is that when Columbus discovered America, he thought it was India; for it was India he had been trying to find, and he thought he had found it. But it was America, not India, and it is only in America that the beautiful Humming-birds live—birds that are so beautiful as they are want a world to themselves to live in.
Now the birds that we have been talking about—the Birds of Paradise—are not such very small birds. The largest of them is nearly as large as a crow, and even the very smallest is not so much smaller than a thrush or a starling. But the largest Humming-bird is not so large as a sparrow or chaffinch, and the smaller ones are the very smallest birds in the whole world, some of them being not so very much larger than a large humble-bee, which is quite wonderful to think of. Then they are wonderful fliers. The Birds of Paradise fly very well—quite well enough—but still there is nothing extraordinary in the way they fly. But the little Humming-birds dart about quite like lightning, and move their wings so fast that, when you look at them, they do not seem to be wings at all, but only two little hazy patches in the air, with a bright jewel between them, which is the gleaming breast of the Humming-bird. All the time their wings are moving so quickly, they make a humming sound, just as a top does when it is spinning very fast, which is why we call them Humming-birds, just as we call tops that hum very much, humming-tops.
We have named the Humming-birds from the sound they make when they fly, and the Indians from their bright radiance and the speed at which they dart about. It is from flower to flower that they dart, and whilst you are looking at one sunbeam that is dancing about one flower, all at once there is a ray of light through the air, and another sunbeam is dancing about another flower. That is what it looks like, only, really, it is the same sunbeam that has flown from one flower to another.
Sometimes when you are walking in the garden in England and looking at the geraniums in your flowerbeds, you will see a little brown moth hovering over one of them, and putting a long, slender thread-like thing that we call a proboscis (though we call an elephant's trunk a proboscis too) right down into the centre of the flower. His wings move so fast that you can hardly see them, and in a second or two he will dart away too, so quickly that you only know he is gone, and then, all of a sudden, you will see him again, hovering over another geranium and probing it with his wonderful, long, thin proboscis. It is a tube, that proboscis, and through it, the moth is sucking up the nectar of the flower, which is what it lives on. That moth is the humming-bird hawk-moth, and, if you have seen it, you have seen what looks more like a Humming-bird than anything else in England. It hovers over or under or in front of a flower, as the Humming-birds do, it keeps moving its wings in the same rapid way as they move theirs, and making the same humming noise with them, and it puts a long, slender, little brown thing, that looks something like the beak of a Humming-bird, right down into the flower, and sucks up the nectar that is in it, which is just what a Humming-bird does. So if the humming-bird moth were bright and gleaming, as Humming-birds—sunbeams—are, it would seem to be a Humming-bird and not a moth at all. But you must not think that it really would be one. Oh no, it never could be, because it is an insect, and an insect is a very different thing to a bird.
The humming-bird moth and the Humming-bird look like each other because they live in the same way and do the same things. They both fly, so they both have wings; and they both sip nectar, so they both have a long thing to stick into the flowers and suck it up with: so they look like each other, but they are not a bit the same. A petticoat, you know, looks a little like an upper skirt, for they both have to be worn round the waist, which makes them the same kind of shape, and when the skirt is part of a white dress then they are of the same colour. But think how different they really are! Why, one is a petticoat and the other is an upper skirt. So you must always remember that, though two animals look the same, they may really be very different.
Now although the Humming-birds, or living sunbeams, are all of them small birds, yet they are not all of the same size, and some are quite big compared to others, just as a peacock butterfly is quite big, compared to a tiny blue one, whilst even the tiny little blue one may be big compared to some very small moths. Then, again, their beaks are of all kinds of different shapes and lengths. Some are quite straight, whilst others are bent like a sabre or even a sickle, and one Humming-bird has his so very much bent indeed, that it looks like half of a black ring or bracelet or something else that is quite round. As for length, some are shorter than a quite short pin, whilst others are longer than a very long darning-needle.
RACQUET-TAILED HUMMING-BIRD