Staying Out of the Way

or Resting Lightly

Sometimes you're just not the one who matters, and so you just don't move.  When untamed lives that are not rabbits come to a tiny, urban garden, you do your best to efface yourself, and let them experience the garden as if without you.  Photos?  Forget them.  They're not important.  The slightest gesture toward your camera, even the subtlest tilt of the lens, is enough to spook a shy being.  It's better not to move.

Hummingbirds aren't particularly "shy beings," but they have their limits, too, the moments when they forget the roar of gargantuan hunger and remember vulnerability.  The black-chinned hummingbirds have been gorging on the agastache in the big urns this summer—the ones arm's length away from the Adirondack chair, with flowers that overhang the footrest.  The hummingbirds are often so close that the cool breath of their wings blows over my feet.   I try not to move when they're that near, but my idea of stillness is not theirs.  Some change of expression, some tiny change, will make them look up in startlement and vanish.

Perhaps to such small birds the line that seems delicately drawn to me, the fine hair between blithe unconcern and precipitate flight, is wide and nuanced.  The light speed change between feeding and fleeing may be a measured, thoughtful process to them.  The lift of a finger, such a small motion, spans the full length of their bodies.

A hummingbird's-eye view of hummingbird mint (or licorice mint, or sunset hyssop, Agastache rupestris)

At a distance details blur together.  When hummingbirds feed at the gaura in the central bed, it's hard to tell the young of either gender from the adult females.  They look remarkably alike in any case.  From inches away, though, you begin to wonder.  You see peculiarities of behavior—experiments, moments of clumsiness—that tell their own tale.  A bird will aim at a flower in a light wind and miss, several times running; it will try buds that haven't opened, insistently, perplexedly.  It will poke at the gap between a flower and its corolla, and then back off, and look, and look, through first one eye, then the other.  It will poke at the gap again, before finally finding the opening it seeks.  Its round belly will drag on the flowers below it, like a keel scraping on the shoals.  It will rest in the desert olive for minutes at a stretch, and not fight the next hummingbird that comes along.  It will feed briefly, and then find its perch to rest again.  A bird that does all those things...is most likely a fledgling.

One was feeding at the agastache recently when my toes, a foot and a half away, twitched involuntarily.  The bird startled.  Hovering, it eyed my feet in a fascinated, speculative way.  Were they a danger?  Were they edible?  Its head tilted from one side to the other.  I don't know what conclusions it came to, except the one about inedibility; I don't believe it ever made a mental connection between my toes and the rest of me.  And how could it?  Five feet seven inches of human are a lot for a bird to grasp all at once, when it doesn't really need to.

Last week for the second time (that I know of) a flock of blue-gray gnatcatchers descended on my desert olives.  They're almost as tiny as hummingbirds, only round like a ball, with twitching tail feathers and a thin, sharp bill.  They speak to one another constantly, and they move constantly, like the gnats and small insects they eat, like fish darting in an aquarium.  Their colors are subtle variations on gray flannel, lighter on the belly, darker around the crown.

Flycatchers, too.  I've seen them a few times, half again the size of the gnatcatchers, with the same restlessness under less pressure.  Their tails twitch gently as they perch or flit from branch to branch, from tree to tree.

These new birds are all probably migrants, just passing through on their way south, but I'm (almost) as thrilled as if they were nesting here.  The garden is beginning to attract Birds-that-are-not-finches, truly wild birds, no matter how briefly.  The desert olives have grown taller, their crowns broader.  They offer more in the way of shelter and safety; they attract a better class of bug.  But I have no pictures to offer of these moments of presence.  I only have memories shaped vaguely into words of that instant when your breath catches and you freeze, while shining black eyes look brightly from every tree, less than your own body-length away.

Desert olives (or New Mexico privet, Forestiera neomexicana)

You are irrelevant to these small lives, and rightfully so.  You mean them no harm.  You aren't going to hunt them for food or throw stones at them for wickedness.  You wish them well, but any good you've done them is indirect.  You've planted and nurtured the trees; you've let the sand cherries grow like weeds; you've kept the bird bath filled and clean.  You've laid the groundwork—and then you've mostly gotten out of the way, and let life get on with it.  But birds don't know these things.  They don't have the luxury to weigh degrees of harm and good.  They can't risk trust, they can't take the long view.  You will never be able to tame them, or show them likelihood, or accustom them to human presence.  So you try not to be a noticeable presence at all.  You just don't move.


A hummingbird had come to the agastache fresh from another part of the garden.  A white petal of gaura had fallen on her head and rested there as she hovered and fed.  She flew from one flower to another and another, wings moving faster than vision, that wrinkled white petal perched on her head like a lace cap.  The sight could have been comical, but it wasn't.  The petal sat too lightly on the feather-light bird as she fenced just as lightly with gravity.  She was graceful and deft; the long tubes of hummingbird mint barely moved as she tapped them for nectar.  An adult, not a fledgling.  She had mastered the art of lightness.

Appleblossom grass (Gaura lindheimeri 'Whirling Butterflies')

A lot of gardening is about heavy lifting—the bags of mulch and potting soil, the shovels full of dirt and sand and amendments.  A lot of it is about labor.  No more than to maintain a mown lawn, but still, labor:  weeding and dividing, pruning and transplanting.  Paradoxically, the goal of all the hard work is to rest lightly on whatever earth we have.  To make a big impact, perhaps; to concentrate nature with an intensity even she might not manage on her own, and create safe conditions for wild things that compensate for losses elsewhere.  But then to step out of the way whenever possible, and let life get on with it.  We work for the sake of those moments of held breath and awed stillness, when we try to be patio furniture while a new bird perches inquisitively in a young tree.  We want to enjoy the nectar while not disturbing the flower.  We want to master the art of lightness, to our own scale.

The lightness of a fallen petal on the head of a hummingbird.

A Change of Clothing

or Autumn Slips Away

I wonder sometimes whether hummingbirds recognize people.  My guess is that they don't—I'm not sure whether they even recognize people as people, let alone have the ability to recognize individuals.  If I wear pink or orange out in the garden, the hummingbirds are much differently aware of me than if I'm in green or blue.  Pink and orange qualify me as Potential Dinner.  Yellow might let me be Worth a Shot.  But blue and green?  They just make me blue Not-a-Dinner or green Not-a-Dinner, equally uninteresting in either case.  A change of clothes is worth a whole new role in the ecosystem.  It's practically an existential makeover, in hummingbird terms.

__________________________________

The 'Wild Thing' autumn sage looks thoroughly chastened.  Winter stalked through the garden this week in a grumpy-neighbor "Some of us have to work tomorrow" sort of way and shut down the party, slam!  Now the riotous blooming by the patio is at an end, and the loud outbursts of color have gone quiet.  Let's hope 'Wild Thing' doesn't look in the mirror until it's gotten some rest.

'Wild Thing' autumn sage (Salvia greggii) when it's at home

Winter really did let us have it, at least in the Albuquerque scale of things.  On Monday the temperatures reached record lows for that date, dropping to the single digits F; some parts of town (though not mine) had several inches of snow.  The unusual cold pushed the garden forward into winter by about three weeks, if not into a whole different growing zone altogether.  The Jupiter's beard and 'Goldflame' honeysuckle, usually green through December, are blackened mush.  The ipheion, which comes up in fall and was beginning to make a bright, grassy (if somewhat threadbare) carpet under the sand cherries, is limp and flattened.  Even the more or less evergreen 'Lady Banks' rose has lost most of its leaves.

The changes are a little disappointing this early in the season—I was hoping for more life in the garden this winter and am sorry to lose it before winter even starts.  The changes are also a signal, though, that it's time to reframe my idea of beauty, to reset it to winter's standards and let autumn's slip away.

Crocus speciosus, on a bed of cotula and cat hair

The days of leaves and seed pods are yielding to the days of stems and trunks, stalks and buds, to the play of light and shadow, to grass seeds backlit against a low, white sun.  A new wardrobe, a new role in the ecosystem, an existential makeover.  The new clothes may well turn out to be striking, shapely, and chic.

But they won't be party clothes any more.

Late Arrivals

or The Last Hurrah

When the hummingbirds leave around the first of October, the party goes kind of flat.  Your favorite guests have gone—not that you don't care for the others, too, of course.  But the goldfinches, housefinches, sparrows, and mourning doves are the mixed nuts of the party, while the hummingbirds are the champagne.  You can count on them to add zest and a touch of magic to anything they do.  And with their explosive tempers, you never know when sparks will fly, or when a high-speed chase will ensue.  You wouldn't enjoy the party nearly as much without the other birds, but when the hummingbirds leave, they take a lot of the fizz with them.

When the sandhill cranes return near the end of the month, then, they are doubly welcome.  You hear their creaky purr sounding long before you see them, and when you first catch sight of them gliding down the Rio Grande valley,  the sun glinting off their silvery, upturned wings against an azure sky... Oh, they do know how to make an entrance.  Late arrivals though they are, they breathe new, dramatic life back into the party.  They bring a new character to it, too, a touch of elegance and dignity.

The cranes arrive about when the first of the fall-blooming crocuses opens.  In the garden, 'Wild Thing' autumn sage (Salvia greggii) may still be partying hard—if anything, blooming even more raucously than usual—but everything else is getting sleepy and quiet.  The agastache is winding down, the gaura looking tired, the West Texas grass sage ready to call it a day.  When the crocuses suddenly appear from nowhere, you welcome them with delight.  They bring a bright presence with them as they sound the last hurrah of the growing season.

Over by the patio, 'Wild Thing' is getting to the "wearing a lampshade and dancing on the table" stage—although really, it arrived in that condition and has kept up the rumpus ever since.  When the crocuses call you away from the action, inviting you over to their corner for some intense conversation, you're happy to go.  You appreciate 'Wild Thing,' you really do.  Its high-spirited loudness gives it a special place in your heart.  It's been blooming enthusiastically since April and is just as ready to spread a good time around now.  It will even still be cheerful tomorrow morning, with no (apparent) regrets. 

The crocuses, though—they'll be gone before you know it.  (Actually, last year one crocus or another bloomed through to December.  But each particular crocus is only around for a short while.)  For all their glowing color, they are fragile, ephemeral.  They remind you to make the most of every shining moment, and to enjoy their company while you can.

But don't get despondent about the passing of autumn or the fleeting nature of time or anything.


'Wild Thing' will still be partying hard tomorrow.

Turn and Turn Again

or Remembrance of Things Past

A whiff of licorice.  As I brushed past the hummingbird mint, its fragrance filled the air, and I had a sudden  flash of memory from childhood.

We were on a drive through the Colorado Rockies, possibly to enjoy a "three-picnic day," and had stopped at a mom-and-pop gas station on the edge of a tumble-down town.  It was made of logs, and the inside was cool and dark and musty.  Dirty windows glowed golden with sunlight but didn't let much of it through; tiny cobwebs shone in their corners.  At the counter a mountain man with a bush of a beard presided over the cash register.  Lined up in front of him was a row of open glass canisters, filled with long, unwrapped sticks of hard candy in costume-jewelry colors.

Mom gave an exclamation of delight—"Penny candy!"  It actually cost more than that, maybe 5¢, and we children were allowed to choose two sticks each.  They had wonderful, old-fashioned names:  sarsaparilla, horehound.  I chose horehound and licorice, but when we got back to the old Plymouth and tasted our treats, they were disappointing—flavorless, a little dusty.  At the ripe old age of six or so, I felt a pang of nostalgia for the olden days, when penny candy was still good enough to exclaim over in delight.

The odd bite of homesickness for something I had never known made that experience lodge in memory.  Nostalgia for the past got mixed up with that present moment to make a new story, to become a small part of the lore of my life.  Some day I shall inflict it on my niece and nephews, and maybe they'll become nostalgic for family picnics and log-built, mom-and-pop gas stations, for the days when penny candy only cost a nickel.

Agastache rupestris—licorice mint or hummingbird mint—is good at inspiring nostalgia.  The soft, sage-green of its foliage and the salmon-colored flowers have something pleasantly faded about them, like a favorite shirt that has been worn and laundered to softness, or a Polaroid photograph of a long-ago family outing.  The fragrance, too, like licorice (some say root beer) with a hint of rain, is an evocative one; it's overpowering when you're cutting back a whole plant in late winter, but refreshing in small doses.  It always reminds me of the early days in the garden, when I had several agastache growing:  the cool spring day when I planted them and ran my hand through their leaves in greeting; Luther T. Dog coming in from his evening rounds, wearing the scent of licorice on his coat; crisp winter mornings when I crumbled the equally crisp dried leaves to release the fragrance of summer.

In the relatively kind conditions of morning sun and dappled shade, however, the agastache grew twice as tall and wide as they should have—taller than the sand cherries, almost as tall as me.  It became impossible to maneuver around without breaking their stems.  Luther would go outside, look at the impassable jungle, and just give up, and despair is not something I like to see in a dog.  (Or, indeed, anyone.)  The agastache had become a problem, but the decision to dig them out was still a hard one.

I've missed them.  It's probably a bit too soon to call the feeling fully-fledged nostalgia, but not having them around has made the garden feel incomplete.  This summer I'm trying agastache again in containers:  urns this time, to suit their long tap roots.   They generally mark the entrance to the garden proper, but lately I've moved them back closer to the Adirondack chair where they can get more direct sunlight.

The hummingbirds love them.  They have come to tolerate the autumn sage, and they'll toy with the gaura and sample everything else, but the agastache is always their first, most enthusiastic choice.  As they feed, they are so close to me in the chair that I could reach out—not even stretching—and touch them.  Those moments have been some of the most magical of the whole summer.

Nostalgia is such a funny thing.  It's backward-looking yet also somehow creative.  Just as you can never really go home again, you can't really re-create something you've lost; you can never recapture it exactly.  But you can incorporate something of the old into present circumstances and create something new from the mix—something that starts off a fresh round of stories, that creates its own set of memories.

They will become their own source of nostalgia in turn.

Mistaken Identities

or Comedy Tonight

For low-brow humor, it's hard to beat well-placed weeds.  Not that weeds are usually knee-slappingly funny all by themselves, but it turns out that they're mighty fine prompts for funny behavior in others—as good as a ladder and a bucket of whitewash to a clown.  When I wrote last month about wanting to see what would happen if I let an unexpected evening primrose (Oenothera biennis) go to seed in the middle of the desert olive tree where it's been growing, my expectations were really pretty feeble.  I mean, I thought that perhaps new seedlings would come up in other unlikely places.  Is that lame or what?  What's actually happened is that the primrose has turned my little garden into a nonstop Vaudeville act that has had me laughing for weeks.

The primrose itself is about six feet tall, growing up through the ten foot desert olive.  Its stems stick out through the tree branches at unlikely angles; on random days they bloom at the tips.  (I've been taking some plants out, so the ground in the photo is embarrassingly bare.)  The upper stems blend into the tree—even those of us who know what we're looking for don't find it easy to tell where one ends and the other begins.  For those like, say, the two families of fledgling lesser goldfinches who hang out in the trees and who haven't yet learned that things are not always as they seem, it's flat-out complicated.

The thing about a tree branch is, it's sturdy.  When you're not entirely sure of your wings to begin with, sturdy is good.  But when you land on what you expect to be a sturdy tree branch and get a flexible primrose stem instead, things can get a little slapstick.  Down bob the stems—whoops!  Frantic flapping.  Up bounce the stems—surprise!  More frantic flapping.  Squawk!  Squawk some more!  Bob, bounce.  Equilibrium returns at last, and then along comes one of your siblings, to land on that nice, sturdy "tree branch" with you.  Bob, bounce, flap, squawk. 

Over the last few days, the goldfinches' balance has improved.  They've learned that the primrose stems have tasty seed pods, and all is well again.  Perhaps half a dozen of them, juveniles and adults, are seated on the stems or in the tree at a time, yellow feathers radiant, looking like fluttery primroses themselves.

Make that scruffy primroses.

But as entertaining as the finches are, they are just the warmup act.  Our star comedian is this young fellow, a black-chinned hummingbird:

Doesn't he look gullible sweet?  He's spent quite a lot of time exploring the garden the last couple of weeks.  After making the rounds, he comes to rest on the lowest branch of the olive by the patio, maybe five feet from where I sit.  He makes himself comfortable:

Lately he's been trying—successfully, so far as I can tell—to impress this little charmer:

A hummingbird needs some serious feeding to support all that activity.  Fortunately our hero is an enthusiastic, undiscriminating eater.  He has been taste-testing every blossom in sight—the 'Wild Thing' autumn sage (at last!), agastache, gaura, dwarf plumbago, 'Blue Twister' allium, arugula, basil, the primroses...  The primroses.  To the hummingbird, the primroses grow on what is apparently a primrose tree.  And there are two other trees just like it in the garden.  He checks them over regularly for flowers.  He doesn't find any.

What he does find is a lot of goldfinches.  Primrose-colored goldfinches.  In the "primrose" trees.  If they are primrose-colored in the primrose trees, they must be primroses, right?  You can practically see the "Q.E.D." flashing through his mind.  He dives in enthusiastically for his dinner.

And lo and behold, his dinner objects.  When I wrote last year about a hummingbird trying to feed off a goldfinch, I thought that was a fluke.  Apparently if you're a goldfinch it's just an occupational hazard.  As the hummingbird—not a quick learner—tries to sip at every single finch, each one swats him away with the kind of bored irritation you or I might use on a housefly.  But some of them are still sitting on those flexible primrose stems, which the swatting sets in motion.  Bob, bounce, flap, squawk.

They've been performing this routine at least once a day.  Sometimes the squawk comes before the flap; otherwise they don't really vary the schtick.  Is it wit?  Is it irony?  Is it subtlety?  Well, no.

But when you want a good laugh, sometimes you just can't beat a pratfall.

Fool's Gold

or When Instinct Goes Awry

My friends, we are gathered here today to laugh at the foibles of youth.   I don't know about you, but when I was young, I felt endlessly like the protagonist in a Victorian era British novel—the kind where the main characters spend most of the (very long) book doing embarrassing things while an all-knowing narrator tsks pityingly at them.   (And somehow, I was certain, everyone else in real life was the all-knowing narrator.)   Well, now it is our turn.   We are the all-knowing ones, laughing (gently?) at the well-intentioned errors of the young in this "Tale of Two Fledglings."

A family of Lesser Goldfinches has recently found my thistle feeders (which deserves its own "Hooray!").   Even a couple of weeks ago, the fledglings would feed as a mutually supportive group, but as they've grown older they've become squabbly and aggressive.   The least aggressive one in this family usually waits until all the others, which have been fighting for the best perches Keystone Kops-fashion, have been spooked by some spurious danger (usually me) and flown off, and then enjoys having the feeder all to herself.   (Query:   Who's actually the sensible one here?)   This quiet, unassuming, well-fed finch is one of our protagonists.

The other is a newly-fledged black-chinned hummingbird.   For the record, let it be stated that for most hummingbirds, the following equation is always in effect:   "Bright = flower? = edible!"   Hummingbirds love the warm colored flowers, especially red ones, but also pink, orange, and yellow.   The emphasis seems to be on color; the hummingbird definition of "flower" is a little more nebulous.   If you live anywhere in hummingbird territory and have ever worn a hot pink top outside on a summer day, you have probably had the experience of having a tiny bird hover in front of you wondering whether it has just struck the mother lode.   (And nothing makes your own big, overwhelming project suddenly seem do-able like having a 2-inch hummingbird speculatively eying all 5'7" of you and planning its dinner menu.)

The other day, our little goldfinch was sitting at the feeder, having patiently outwaited all her siblings.   Being a cautious sort, she wasn't actually facing the feeder but rather the wide, scary world, and her sunny golden chest was facing into the morning light, gleaming brightly and cheerfully.   The young hummingbird flew by and, seeing this vivid yellow object, put The Hummingbird Equation into action.   Much to the finch's consternation, the hummingbird hovered in front of her and tried to feed, poking her delicately with its long bill and "sipping."

What astonished me most was the odd level of understanding on the finch's part.   She obviously wasn't frightened as she would have been by a predator; while she was clearly uncomfortable with being someone else's feeding station, she wasn't about to give up her own.   Instead she shifted her feet unhappily on the perch and made odd little distress calls ("I'm fauna!   I'm fauna!   I'm fauna!").

The hummingbird drew back a bit and tilted its head in a "Well, that's unexpected" kind of way.   But when you're young, you're used to things being unexpected and are more likely to chalk confusion up to inexperience than, say, to faulty judgment.   Shaking off doubt (what would the finch know about it, after all?), the hummingbird approached to feed again, at which point the goldfinch just kind of lost it and started flapping its wings and darting its beak emphatically in the universal language of "Oy!"   The hummingbird finally caught on, did a clear double-take, and high-tailed it away.   (The goldfinch settled its feathers and returned to the thistle feeder.)

I've seen what I'm sure is this particular hummingbird again, always when the family of finches is feeding.   It flies straight up to them and then suddenly looks like a cat caught in some foolishness:   Who, me?   I was just going to check out this... yeah, this bit of... Well, I'll just be going, then.

It makes human youth look so easy—at least when we were teens (unless our childhoods were unusual indeed) we never had to prove whether we were animal, mineral, or vegetable.

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa

Agastache rupestris

or Okay, okay, mea maxissima culpa!

The guilt-inducing power of many of the world's religions is impressive, indeed; almost as impressive as the power of certain mothers I have known (though fortunately not mine).   But if you want to experience real sackcloth-and-ashes, chest-pounding, gnashing-and-wailing self-recrimination, try pulling up a gardenful of Agastache rupestris, otherwise known as licorice mint.

Also known as hummingbird mint.

Hummingbirds love it.   A lot.   It turns out that in addition to being beautiful, feisty, and territorial, black-chinned hummingbirds are astonishingly good at making a grown woman feel very, very small.

Agastache rupestris

In my defense, let me say that I, too, love licorice mint.   A sturdy, drought-tolerant native of the American Southwest, it has airy, sage-green leaves, salmon-colored bloom spikes that last from mid-June to November, and a clean, anise-y scent.   It is one of my favorite plants of all time.   At one point, I had seven of them in my little garden, and if they had stayed the 24-30 inches tall and 18 inches wide that my garden books and catalogs promised me, I would have kept them all.   Instead, they grew to be five feet tall and 3 feet wide.   The hummingbirds were thrilled, but I could not find the garden beds, the paths, or Luther T. Dog.   And these were just immature plantings.   So this year, out they came, to be replaced by mild-mannered and above all short plants.   I still have two of them, which are suffering in containers but may survive the summer; the rest I gave to a friend.

For the record, I did not neglect the hummingbirds.   Theoretically, they are supposed to adore the blooms of autumn sage (Salvia greggii) and pineleaf penstemon (Penstemon pinifolius).   They do adore them—I have observed them in the very act of adoring them in other people's gardens—and so I planted a number of both.

"Wild Thing" Autumn Sage

Which the hummingbirds ignore magnificently.   (And ignoring "Wild Thing" autumn sage isn't easy.)   Instead of sampling the new plantings, the hummingbirds go to every place where an agastache used to be.   They hover.   They waste calories you know they can't afford.   (Don't you realize that they will have to migrate hundreds of miles south in just a few short months?   And in the meantime, they have mouths to feed—young, helpless nestlings to strengthen for the long flight!)   They find you in your comfy patio chair and hover in front of you, just to be sure they have your attention, and then return to the former homes of the agastache.  Each plant.   In turn.  (They remind you of Lassie trying to catch the attention of the obtuse parent while little Timmy is in danger.   Only Lassie is starving, and it is you who have stolen her favorite food dish.   Because you didn't like it.) 

They come back to hover in front of you a little more.   (Don't you know that hummingbirds have to consume more than their own weight in nectar every day??   Their 1,000 beats-per-minute heartrate doesn't just maintain itself, you know!)   They test the drumstick allium blossoms and turn away in disgust.   (They can literally starve overnight!   To death!   If they don't get enough nectar!)   Weary, they perch in a tree branch and look at where the agastache should be.   And then at you.   (So what if your neighbors—twenty feet away—have feeders that could keep every hummingbird in town fat and sassy all summer?   Sugar water is just Not the Same.)   They fly over to the finch feeder, a decorative jobby that happens to be their favorite shade of red.   (Ooh—sorrysorrysorry.)   They tap on it.   (And if the starving Lassie had risked her own life to rescue Timmy from the collapsed mine, you would have rewarded her with a rubber bone.)   They hover at you some more.  (Have you no shame?!)   Repeat daily.

Lately when they hover at me, I gesture at the autumn sage, which is blooming its little head off.   "Look here," I tell them,  "Just because you're used to eating prime rib, that doesn't make filet mignon a bad thing."   They feed at last.  One sip from one bloom on each plant.   One.  And then they return to where the agastache used to be and hover.   (Sigh.)

Guilty as charged, little ones.

We Have Nothing to Fear Except Well-Meaning Incompetence

or

I Came, I Saw, I Flapped About

They make hummingbirds feisty around in here in ways I don't remember Vermont's ruby-throated hummingbirds being. Our black-chinned hummers are highly territorial and will spend more energy driving competitors off from a food source than they could ever gain from eating it (or so it seems).

That's especially true at feeders. A feeder may have six--count 'em, six--perches, but only one hummingbird at a time ever gets to use them (with the possible exception of mates and just-fledged siblings). That's why I don't put out feeders. To have a bunch of angrily meeping birds zipping past at warp speed before I've had my coffee--no. Whether you find all that action entertaining or irritating, peaceful it isn't. That said, hummingbirds are generally better behaved where natural sources of nectar are concerned, and those I provide with pleasure.

Cut back to my first year in this house. I planted tithonia (Mexican sunflowers), an annual that I thought would nicely fill in one of my new perennial beds. Only one seedling survived, but that was plenty. It became a monster of a plant--eight feet high and at least five around. I had grown tithonia in Vermont, where it, too, had been better behaved (Query: Is there a pattern here?), but even though the New Mexican version rather took over the bed, that sunflower was glorious in bloom--157 cubic feet of greenery covered in two-inch, bright orange daisies.

Bumblebees and butterflies loved it; to my surprise, so did the hummingbirds, which would sip from the trumpets on the disc flowers. But they're territorial birds (have I mentioned that they're territorial birds?), and apparently, they're perfectly willing to turn that protectiveness against other species. One day a black swallowtail butterfly was calmly--quietly, peacefully-- feeding at one of the tithonia's several dozen flowers. (Just to be clear, on 157 cubic feet of plant. A large plant. With dozens of flowers. Room for all and sundry.) A hummingbird zoomed up and tried to chase it off, and an aerial battle ensued...

which the butterfly won.

The butterfly won! An insect that can't fly in a straight line to save its life and that has no offensive capabilities, vs. a 60-mile per hour bundle of irritation with a bill that could rip a butterfly's wings to shreds. Admittedly, the butterfly was bigger than the hummingbird and for all I know may well have weighed more. But still...

Cut back several years earlier, to a regular bird feeder I had in Vermont, a basic platform affair with an angled roof. The mourning doves had quite a time figuring out how to negotiate around the roof to get to the food, and I watched many of them fall off the feeder altogether (cheap entertainment at its best). Eventually they became more expert, but they never landed without a lot of fuss and bother. One day I was watching a blue jay at the feeder--blue jays being large, aggressive birds, right?--when along came a mourning dove, back-winging like mad in its effort to land. The blue jay jabbed at it a few times to no effect and ended up with a faceful of flapping feathers in return. It very quickly just gave up and left.

The moral of these stories: Never underestimate the power of a lot of uncertain flapping about. (Try saying that in your best James Earl Jones voice.)

The alternate but related moral: Incompetence wins over aggression every time. (It's the combination that you really have to watch out for.)

And do take your history books with a grain of salt. They're all about people being "competent."