Bird-brain

October 7, 2020

During rainy season, and often on other days, I leave my living room door open. It leads to a  patio, and the dogs can either cross the patio and go into the corral at the side of the house, or come indoors if it rains.

Often, butterflies and other insects fly in. Sometimes, I’ll catch them and release larger ones, although I only spend limited time trying. There’s also a window that I can open on the side of the living room opposite the door, so I can expel them that way.

More rarely, a bird will fly inside. Why? I have no idea. The living room is necessarily darker than the outside, and there are no flowering plants to create a smell that might attract them. Plus, since the door remains open, I can never understand why they don’t exit the way they came in.

If a dog is around at the time, he or she will go crazy barking at the bird as it tries to fly through the glass of the windows that I can’t open, or circles just under the ceiling. I therefore have a frantic bird in my house, and an equally agitated dog. Or maybe two dogs. That’s when the circus starts.

Yesterday, when I came back from a late morning walk, I heard a buzzing sound in the living room, and though a bee had come in. We get some large bees here, and they make a racket.

But I soon found it wasn’t an insect, but a ruby-throated hummingbird – Archilochus colubris, for the taxonomists among my readership. It was flying circles, a couple of inches below the ceiling. 

You can see the top of the door at the bottom of the photo. The hummingbird didn’t fancy it.

I kept hoping it would drop down a couple of feet and rediscover the door it had come in by. But no. Hummingbirds are tiny, and their brains are even tinier than other small birds. Ruby-throated hummingbirds weigh, on average, just over three grams: deductive intelligence is not their forte.

I’ve tried in the past to catch birds using a towel or maybe a discarded shirt from the laundry. They have frail bones, and I’m wary of injuring them using other methods, even if I’m not good with my preferred technique. Sometimes, birds have stunned themselves after hitting the window glass, and I can gently enclose them with my hands and take them outside. But what has proven most reliable has been my straw sombrero, which is not too rigid, and can encase most smaller birds without injury.

But three grams of birdlet, I figured, was a different proposition. Its bones had to be lighter than undersized matchsticks. The hat seemed dangerous.

Now first, I decided to see if it would drop down and either discover the window I opened, or go out the way it had come in. It was clearly tiring, taking frequent breaks to perch on a lampshade or the curtain rail, but it stubbornly refused to reduce its altitude by 20 inches, and make a graceful exit. I decided, against past experience, to get Monday’s discarded shirt, and try to use it as a net.

Thus began a drawn-out pursuit. The bird repeatedly traced the same course round the room, and every couple of minutes it came near to the door, where I was standing on a chair. I’d try tossing the shirt like a Mediterranean fisherman I’d once watched. But that was a man with years of experience, which I lack. And the bird moved fast when it wanted to. 

By now, two of the dogs had realised there was fun happening, and had come in to bark their support. So there was me on a chair with a shirt I couldn’t toss sufficiently far above the hummingbird, egged on by two mutts that hadn’t had any major distractions in the hours since two cows had passed by outside. I began to make progressively louder noises myself, each time I failed to net the bird, or deflect it down and out through the door.

After 10 minutes, I decided my method wasn’t working. I stepped down off the chair, took the photo I’ve used here, then waited to see if the bird might alter its flight-plan. Soon, I saw it was trying the glass window pane, and I briefly hoped it would have the sense to go to the right and out through the open window. But as noted above, sense was not part of its modus operandi.

And soon, it resumed its laps of the room three inches below the ceiling, egged on by the dogs’ yelping.

“I want to go make lunch,” I said to it plaintively. Well, maybe it wanted lunch too, but it wasn’t going to find any indoors. So we were locked in a duel of witlessness, both unable to eat, frantic prey and reluctant hunter. Only the dogs seemed to be having any fun.

Next, I tried again on the chair, this time with the hat. I figured if I could catch it in the crown, I might be able to sweep it down to the level of the top of the doorway, whence it could escape. No dice. Twice, it latched onto the brim of the hat, and I almost got it down to the opening before it made a tiny cheep, let go and headed off round the room again. Maybe I could have made the trick work if I’d been more ruthless, but I didn’t want to harm it, so I kept restraining my own motions.

Then, after almost half an hour of the fruitless chase it tried the glass again, and seemed to get stuck or confused behind a net curtain. I crept up to the window, and tried with the hat again. I caught the bird under the brim, and it stopped moving.

“Great, I’ve killed it,” I announced to Rem, my more enthusiastic canine accomplice, who’d come to check how I was doing. He looked disappointed, probably because he wanted the privilege of executing the coup de grace himself.

Holding my hand over the bird so it didn’t fall to his jaws (partly for fear it carried parasites or disease), I went out to toss it into the wilderness than we call a garden.

And once I took my hand off, it came back into action and was gone into the trees. Not dead, just bluffing, I thought. Which of us was Dumb, I wondered, and which Dumber?

The species isn’t threatened, and is actually increasing in numbers. I could have spared myself a frustrating half hour, instead of wondering just how stupid I’d looked waving a shirt or a hat at a tiny bird, without endangering the population of Archilochus colubris. I should probably buy a proper net on a stick, I figured, this being far from the first time I’d had birds in here. It will happen again, no doubt. 

The one real compensation of such misadventures is that there’s a feeling of coming into unusually close contact with the natural world. I see hummingbirds here all the time, and wouldn’t think to interfere with them as they go flower to flower. But feeling compelled to catch one, then having an unusually close encounter with a wild creature feels, despite the absurdity of my flailing hunt this time, like a privileged moment. 

I’m just glad no-one saw how absurd I must have looked flailing at a bird with a stale shirt or a straw hat, and nearly falling off my chair in the process. For sure, the dogs did, but I bribed them with extra dogfood not to tell.