In praise of the female Anna hummer
The last time I wrote about Anna’s hummingbirds, I wrote about their courtship displays. These birds are one of the earliest to begin nesting and males can now be seen performing their impossible acrobatics in which they climb a 100 feet in the air before hurling themselves at the Earth in a dive that accelerates faster than any other vertebrate on Earth. But those male displays are only half the story. I like the female half even better.
The biological significance of such extremely developed demonstrations is that hummingbird courtship is based overwhelmingly on visual display, indicating “good genes” rather than “strong parenting and provider habits.” Male hummingbirds don’t contribute to defense of a nesting territory or help with nest construction, incubation or care of the young. Their pair bond is more ephemeral than that of any songbird in your yard.
Those wonders of displaying males obey an evolutionary imperative: be visible. But the wonders of female hummingbirds follow an opposite command: conceal the nest.
A female finds a male to mate with, then goes off to lay her eggs in the nest she’s already built herself. The corollary to flamboyant but practically absent fathers is therefore triumphant motherhood.
It’s a congenial coincidence that this is one of the few birds with a specifically female name. Ornithologist René Lesson declared Anna’s hummingbird “one of the loveliest species of the family” and named it after Anna Masséna, whose husband owned the collection in which Lesson found the type specimen. It seems that he intended at least some flavor of gallantry to attach to the gesture, citing both the bird’s exceptional loveliness and his personal respect for its eponym, who he noted shared her husband’s interest in natural history. Audubon corroborates this in his journal,
where he describes her as beautiful, graceful and “very polite.”
Why is our hummingbird named Anna? My best guess is that the namer thought that Anna was a sweet and lovely person. There are far worse sentiments to commemorate.
But despite this name, hummingbirds continue to rarely be celebrated for the females, which is a backwards state of affairs. Lesson declared this bird a great beauty based on the males’ brilliant shining heads. The modern reports on Anna’s hummingbirds all seem to emphasize the males’ extravagant displays. But I love to call our hummers Anna because it is the females that I most admire.
There are those of blazing red that burn brightly and depart. But there is also one of gray and green that nurtures and sustains. She sits upon the most wonderfully tiny nest, a thing she built alone from down and spider’s silk, until her chicks have hatched. She gathers all their food herself, until her chicks have fledged. In 1915, American ornithologist Donald Dickey described the “grewsome-seeming spectacle of their feeding” in which “the mother’s needle bill is driven to its hilt down the hungry youngster’s throat. … Two days later, respectable pin feathers transformed them from loathsome black worms into tiny porcupines.” It’s the mother that does all the work, until the porcupines transform again into independently flying miracles.
Flight, song and color are all remarkable things. But equal to all those flamboyant wonders is a nest, the epitome of nonflamboyance. Hummingbird nests are warmth and comfort, safety and security stitched from the slightest things: tufts of willow catkins and fuzz of sycamore leaves, sticky silk of spiders and cocoons, tiny flakes of lichen and fragments of fallen leaves. Those wonders of displaying males obey an evolutionary imperative: be visible. But the wonders of female hummingbirds follow an opposite command: conceal the nest.
Are flashy colors more beautiful than a perfect camouflage? Are dives and chases more to be admired than the endless patience of sitting still? For myself, I find that I by temperament
invariably incline toward the quiet and persevering rather than the brilliant and the boastful. I do not find a labor more worthy for being widely seen.
She approaches with no announcement and no glitter. There are only a handful of stars upon her throat, and the male’s noise and fury are far off and forgotten. She bears another scrap of lichen to disguise the nest as just a part of the well-weathered branch on which it sits. And when I see that gray-green ghost perform that often unseen labor, I catch my breath at something precious in that silent, private moment.
Jack Gedney’s On the Wing runs every other Monday. He is a co-owner of Wild Birds Unlimited in Novato, leads walks and seminars on nature in Marin, and blogs at Nature In Novato. You can reach him at jack@ natureinnovato.com.