Watch your feed
I needed something different to sustain me, something not found on a phone.
Note: Previously published in Oregon Humanities magazine. Reposted here with permission.
Hummingbirds appear dainty — little bitty feet perched on a feeder, sipping sugar water through needle-like beaks.
But these aerial jewels, they fool us. They are neither sweet nor delicate. They are loud for their size and defensive. They claim territory and fight off other hummingbirds who try to encroach. They will dive-bomb a human who gets in the way of their goal, which is always the same: to eat.
Hummingbirds are hungry.
When you are the weight of a nickel and move constantly, you are always hungry. Your heart beats 1,200 times a minute as you zip and zoom. Your wings beat seventy times a second. These madly beating wings are why you sound like a mini-helicopter. They are what propel you near to starving almost every hour of the day.
The hummingbirds in my yard are Anna’s Hummingbirds, the only kind common to Oregon who do not fly south for the winter. It is November, and the others have left for warmer climes. The flowers that feed hummingbirds with their nectar have closed up for the season. The hummingbirds are as hungry as ever.
Surveys show that humans check our phones once every ten minutes. That is roughly how often hummingbirds eat. Some mornings, I try to replace my phone checking with hummingbird watching — to replace my news feed with their actual feed. In one ninety-minute span, I counted fourteen hummingbird visits to the feeder that hangs from an eave outside my office window. The males sport a showy deep-pink hood and collar that sparkle in sunlight. The females are grayish-green.
I am alerted to their arrival not by an iPhone chime but by the wild vibration of beating wings. Both feeds, the phone kind and the hummingbird kind, are buzzy and addictive. But with the bird kind, the news is always the same: time to eat.
Watching hummingbirds makes me feel old. Isn’t this what old people do? Stare out windows at birds? Or maybe getting old is less about the years stacking up behind us and more about surrender — to doomscrolling and distraction, to the constant checking for the latest outrage. That, to me, seems closer to death.
A female hummingbird veers in to sip from my feeder. She dips her beak into a feeding port, sucking in sugar that will power her whirring wings and sustain her tiny, thrashing heart. Like any good feed should.
