A-Birding on a Bronco

by Florence Merriam Bailey

Though this little hummer that I was watching let me come within a few feet of her, when a lizard ran under her bush she craned her neck and looked over her shoulder at him with surprising interest. She doubtless recognized him as one of her egg-eating enemies, on whose account she put her nest at the tip of a twig too slender to serve as a ladder.

Another hummingbird who built across the way was still more trustful—with people. I used to sit leaning against the trunk of her oak and watch the nest, which was near the tip of one of the long swinging branches that drooped over the trail. When the tiny worker was at home, a yard-stick would almost measure the distance between us. As she sat on the nest she sometimes turned her head to look down at the dog lying beside me, and often hovered over us on going away.

The nest was saddled on a twig and glued to a glossy dark green oak leaf. Like the other nest, it was made of a spongy yellow substance, probably down from the underside of sycamore leaves; and like it, also, the outside was coated with lichen and wound with cobweb. The bird was a rapid worker, buzzing in with her material and then buzzing off after more. Once I saw the cobweb hanging from her needle-like bill, and thought she probably had been tearing down the beautiful suspension bridges the spiders hang from tree to tree.

It was very interesting to see her work. She would light on the rim of the nest, or else drop directly into the bottom of the tiny cup, and place her material with the end of her long bill. It looked like trying to sew at arm's length. She had to draw back her head in order not to reach beyond the nest. How much more convenient it would have been if her bill had been jointed! It seemed better suited to probing flower tubes than making nests. But then, she made nests only in spring, while she fed from flowers all the year round, and so could afford to stretch her neck a trifle one month for the sake of having a good long fly spear during the other eleven. The peculiar feature of her work was her quivering motion in moulding. When her material was placed she moulded her nest like a potter, twirling around against the sides, sometimes pressing so hard she ruffled up the feathers of her breast. She shaped her cup as if it were a piece of clay. To round the outside, she would sit on the rim and lean over, smoothing the sides with her bill, often with the same peculiar tremulous motion. When working on the outside, at times she almost lost her balance, and fluttered to keep from falling. To turn around in the nest, she lifted herself by whirring her wings.

When she found a bit of her green lichen about to fall, she took the loose end in her bill and drew it over the edge of the nest, fastening it securely inside. She looked very wise and motherly as she sat there at work, preparing a home for her brood. After building rapidly she would take a short rest on a twig in the sun, while she plumed her feathers. She made nest-making seem very pleasant work.

One day, wanting to experiment, I put a handful of oak blossoms on the nest. They covered the cup and hung down over the sides. When the small builder came, she hovered over it a few seconds before making up her mind how it got there and what she had better do about it. Then she calmly lit on top of it! Part of it went off as she did so, but the rest she appropriated, fastening in the loose ends with the cobweb she had brought.

She often gave a little squeaky call when on the nest, as if talking to herself about her work. When going off for material she would dart away and then, as if it suddenly occurred to her that she did not know where she was going, would stop and stand perfectly still in the air, her vibrating wings sustaining her till she made up her mind, when she would shoot off at an angle. It seemed as if she would be worn out before night, but her eyes were bright and she looked vigorous enough to build half a dozen houses.

"There's odds in folks," our great-grandmothers used to say; and there certainly is in bird folks; even in the ways of the same one at different times. Now this hummingbird was content to build right in front of my eyes, and the hummer down at the little lover's tree, with her first nest, was so indifferent to Billy and me that I took no pains to keep at a distance or disguise the fact that I was watching her. But when her nest was destroyed she suddenly grew old in the ways of the world, and apparently repented having trusted us. In any case, I got a lesson on being too prying. The first nest had not been down long before I found that a second one was being built only a few feet away—by the same bird? I imagined so. The nest was only just begun, and being especially interested to see how such buildings were started, I rode close up to watch the work. A roll of yellow sycamore down was wound around a twig, and the bottom of the nest—the floor—attached to the underside of this beam; with such a solid foundation, the walls could easily be supported.

The small builder came when Billy and I were there. She did not welcome us as old friends, but sat down on her floor and looked at us—and I never saw her there again. Worse than that, she took away her nest, presumably to put it down where she thought inquisitive reporters would not intrude. I was disappointed and grieved, having already planned—-on the strength of the first experience—to have the mother hummer's picture taken when she was feeding her young on the nest.

At first I thought this suspicion reflected upon the good sense of hummingbirds, but after thinking it over concluded that it spoke better for hummingbirds than for Billy and me. If this were, as I supposed, the same bird who had to brood her young with Billy grazing at the end of her bill, and if she had been present at the unlucky moment when he got the oak branches tangled in the pommel of the saddle, although her branch was not among them, I can but admire her for moving when she found that the Philistines were again upon her, for her new house was hung at the tip of a branch that Billy might easily have swept in passing.