Legions of beautifully colored spiders silently spin their geometric webs. Insects all dipped in silver, with waving antennae laid back along their heads, red beetles with golden heads and wings of chintz, buzz to and fro. Moss-grown leaf-insects—ossified, living scarabs—walk about on tree-trunks. Stinging bees and wasps fill chinks of jungle trees with wild honey. Myriads of ants swarm: driver ants; parasol ants carrying a bit of leaf about over their heads; fever-bearing ants, and ants that live in the hollow, white stems of the cecropia tree and furnish the sloth’s food. Centipedes hurry by, legs moving with “invisible rapidity like a vibration,” and numerous flies, ticks, mosquitoes, cicadas, dragon-flies. Some of these strange beings need two or three years of larval life to prepare for a flight of a single hour, possibly after sunset. What a limited idea of the world must they have who never see the light of day!
We are assured that the unseen world is a very substantial place; so is the microscopic. And an ear-trumpet reveals a new universe of sound. What a region of ultra-violet murmurings must lie beyond that we never catch at all! If only an elemental apperception can grasp the vastness of the jungle, what can be said of the delicacy of its silver-point drawing? For here is greatness on the invisible scale, “a creation at the same time immense and imperceptible.”
Side by side with sloths, ant-eaters, and armadillos, dwarf descendants of mastodon days, still lumbering about undeveloped in spite of their ancient lineage, humming-birds have flashed through the ages. They have profited by cycles of centuries to elaborate their little bodies beyond imagination with pendent beards, crests, waving ear-tufts, and ornaments colored in fantastic manner. Their tails, fashioned in queer shapes, always consist of ten feathers. Even the tiny, sharp feet, minute as they are, differ greatly in form and are sometimes covered with a delicate, white down. There are feathers on a humming-bird’s eyelids. The little saw-edged tongues for extracting insects from flower-honey all differ. Their bills are as long as their bodies, and their tails are twice as long.
What can be said of their color, brighter than any other in nature? The hue of every precious stone, the luster of every metal sparkles from some part of the diminutive body. Often only a twinkling of emerald-gold-green or ruby-colored light reveals their passing—
“A route of evanescence with a revolving wheel!”
Sometimes the flash comes from throat or back or brow of iridescence, sometimes from a body sheathed in little gold scales; sometimes from the very tips of long white feathers frilling the neck about. The colors come and go, shift and change with every motion, “embers flung about by in visible hands.” The wing feathers are gray. No eye could discern anything but a dusky film, so a bright display would be lost!
And all this is within a thimble’s compass, for the smallest of all humming-birds grows in Peru. It is hardly larger than a bumblebee, and the giant of the race measures less than a swallow. Doctor Brehm says the Dwarf Humming-bird is the only one that has a song.
There is as much diversity in the names of the humming-bird as in everything else pertaining to it: Tresses-of-the-day-star, Rays-of-the-sun, Sun-gems, Sun-stars, Flame-bearers, Frou-frou, Pecker-of-flowers, Flower-sipper, Honey-sucker, Sipper-of-roses, Fly-bird, and the sweet Colibri. It has, besides, many local names, as Tominejo, tomin being the smallest weight.
Birds migrate south from the tropics as well as north. The humming-bird whirls through the jungle and luxuriant valleys of the Andes, out to islands in the Pacific, and follows the fuchsia down to the very boundaries of barrenness in the tail of South America. A mere dab of brain can engineer this infinitesimal motor from Patagonia to Canada. One minute Flame-bearer lives only inside the crater of an extinct volcano in Veragua, marked with red like the fire-stealer wren of Brittany, and many battle with storms of the high Andes and can be seen mingling their vivid flashes with snow. They who live by means of flowers! One called Sappho, a blend of red and green, lives upon the bleak heights of Bolivia, frequenting the haunts of the condor.
It has been thought that the humming-bird has no wish-bone, its frame being more compact than such construction would allow, in order to withstand the immense strain of its wings—immense, yes, measured by millimeters. At any rate the largest organ is the breast muscle, and the heart is three times as large as the stomach. Its senses are alert, and a well developed skull could prove the excellence of the brain beneath did not its habits do so.