For the last month or so the Monardas, or bee balms, have been blooming at our urban homestead. We have five different cultivars sprinkled throughout our food forest, pollinator and herb gardens ranging in color from lilac through magenta to cherry red and in height from about 12 inches to 24. The leaves and flowers themselves have a strong oregano/bergamot scent to them that is pleasing to have on one’s hands and face. I hear they make essential oils from them, but I am too lazy, being contented to rub the leaves between my fingers. The flower stalks spread outward from the central roots over time, creating little pockets of the showy, assertive blooms. We mostly planted these because they are drought tolerant, native, and attract pollinators and because Handsome Gentleman finds them to be “jaunty” [and he digs the holes]. But, despite the fact that they are called “bee” balm I rarely see bees on them like I might on borage or umbelliferous flowers like yarrow or carrots. Most of what these plants attract, however, is hummingbirds.
Now what hummingbirds most desire in plants are long, thin flowers that contain a lot of nectar that they can snuggle their little proboscises into and suck out all the sugar. Monardas, and a few other plants on the homestead like penstemon and honeysuckle, happen to not only accommodate this desire, but they have a whole crown of inflorescences to tempt the “hummers” [as we call them around here]. Spotting the improbable hummingbird in the yard is always delightful, not just because they are a bit unbelievable, but also because they are so fast one rarely has time to alert anyone else or take a picture. Hummer sightings tend only to be for one person, tiny moments that lack any concrete documentation, magical interludes that can never be substantiated. As if what you really saw was perhaps a fairy or other mythical beast. Because I am not a wildlife documentarian, you will get no photos of hummers in action in this post. I am not quick enough on the draw.
For the last week or so our new-typical, oppressively hot late July days have been filled with afternoon rain showers and electrical storms. In this climate an electrical storm fills me with a certain dread because they spark wildfires [which have certainly happened in the past week] but the delight of unexpected precipitation or “free water” is always cause for sitting on the porch swing and feeling the cold front sweep through. Most of the country has been plagued by heat domes this summer, which was also true of the UK where we went on summer holiday, but here in Montana we have been momentarily spared the new normal. In an area of the country where we tend to get only 11 inches of annual precipitation [most of which falls as snow in February and March] this year’s rains of June and July have been an actual divine blessing [says a farmer who doesn’t believe in that sort of thing]. The cosmic dice have granted us a temporary stay of execution.
So it was, yesterday evening around 5pm that I opened the front door to let that cool petrichor into the house through the screen, that I spotted the hummer on our Monarda “Gardenview Scarlet.” As it flew across the sidewalk to the Monarda “Bee-Happy” I observed a second hummer hot on its tail-feathers. Both hummers were a drab green, marking them as females of the species. Most likely black chinned hummingbirds but possibly broad-tailed, calliope, or rufous hummingbirds. It is hard to say because they are all basically the same color, the ground speed is substantial, my vision is not quite what it used to be, and none of the copious bird books I have go into much detail about the “boring” bird sex and how to distinguish. As with many things, the important reading on any topic concerns dudes.
The rain intensified and one of the hummers broke eastward, to rest on the hoop of our squash and bean trellis, the other flying southwest to perch in the branches of our neighbors’ unkempt ash tree that is always threatening to crush our house. The eastern bird chose poorly. She was exposed to the rain and I watched her for several minutes from a distance of about 30 feet, pitifully puffing up her feathers and trying to shake off the rain. At her size, about three inches long, I imagine that it is quite disruptive to be continually pelted by raindrops especially when your shockingly fast metabolism requires that you eat almost constantly. It then occurred to me that hummingbirds must live in a state of perpetual hunger, which for me would be uniquely terrible, because as an individual afflicted with fast metabolism myself being even slightly hungry makes me inhumanely irritable and quickly leads to dizziness or fainting. For this reason I have to eat with a certain consistency that has caused me to compare myself to a hummingbird. When I am scripting some excuse for myself about why I need to stop everything and eat, I have been known to say, “well, I don’t think you really want me to fall out of the sky.” This is how I imagine the inner life of a hummingbird, brain flitting to all the known plants in its mental map of its territory, running the numbers about relative levels of nectar since last visiting, calculating the costs and benefits of firing up those wings to fly for more food against the need to conserve calories and rest on its perch. It sounds to me like a rather poor quality of life for such a beautiful and magical little bird. I hope I am wrong about it.
The other things about hummingbirds, and I have observed this myself, is that they are very territorial. We do not keep a sugar feeder [because we grow sugar feeders on purpose] but hummers – especially the males – have been observed aggressively fighting one another for access to feeders. This is a well known issue for backyard birders and I have been known to go deep into the comments for suggestions about how to prevent the birds from fighting. It seems like the best thing to do is to provide many feeding locations so that birds can all maintain their own within their territory. The sort of bird feeder arms race that to me seems excessive. Like, there is plenty of liquid complex carbohydrate to go around, why can’t these birds learn to get along?
Whenever I think about competition among members of the same species [and therefore also humans since we’re a species] I think about the fictional land of Westeros [from Game of Thrones] where all the many families lie and murder and manipulate one another in order to have power over their kingdom only to have a much larger [and more terrifying] adversary to the north that doesn’t see the differences between any of these scheming families and seeks only to annihilate them all with endless winter. Like, duh, Westerosi are sooo stupid: they need to stop fighting amongst themselves and unify against a common enemy or there won’t be any kingdom at all for anyone to rule because they’ll all be slaves of the Night King. It’s the same thing for dumb humans fighting over stupid countries and resources so they can win at capitalism [climate change gets you anyway, idiots] as it is for these hummingbirds: evolutionary pressures made them prone to competition for scarce resources and they turned that up to 11 even when resources were not scarce [like in my pollinator garden] and now they have no easy equipment to turn down those competitive urges to the point that they’ve manufactured their own scarcity and invest even greater resources in sustaining the competition than they might have spent on just surviving in relative safety and abundance.
Sometimes even I am not sure where my metaphors become over-extended.
Evolution is an awesome force of precise solutions to hyper-local and specific pressures over expansive time. When it finds a solution that best solves the problem, it really invests in that solution as if the environment that selected for it was never going to change, but of course that environment is always going to change, and so evolution’s work is never going to be done. And sometimes it really paints the species that it has been selecting traits from into a logistical corner. Hummingbirds are very small, they have highly adapted metabolisms and kidney functions that allow them to speed up and slow down how their bodies regulate their temperatures and macronutrient absorption. Apparently, the average hummingbird eats the human equivalent of 150,000 calories a day just so that it can spend 20% of its time foraging, the most calorically intensive activity that it ever does. Hummingbirds wouldn’t need to eat so much nectar if they didn’t fly in the manner that they do to forage for nectar. Their entire lives are running [flying] to stand still. Evolution would not have done this to them unless it had exhausted the other options available to it in the genetic archives of the hummingbird ancestors [which are birds that were apparently a lot like swifts]. Other descendants of the common ancestors of hummingbirds and swifts made other choices and are therefore different birds right now at this snapshot in time. What hummingbirds might end up becoming because of continual changes to their environment remains to be seen.
We have to remember that time continues to unfold after the time that we generally experience as “now” and that in that unfolding selective pressures change and so do the constitutions and traits of the animals being selected. It’s a real moving target. It is “easier” to model individual species that have essential traits that don’t change, but all models are wrong even if some models are useful. The birds that became hummingbirds had other options and they still contain other potentialities for whatever hummingbirds will become going forward. So too with humans [with all species].
Sometimes, like when I am contemplating the first person perspective of a wet hummingbird and its place in the great arc of evolutionary history, I remember that there are no essential traits of humans either because what humans are is always becoming something else that our environment is selecting for from the traits that we currently have. Just as with the hummingbirds in the relative abundance of Monardas at my urban homestead, I wonder how long would it take for humans existing in relative abundance to stop thinking that we need to fight over territory and resources when we really don’t [it seems like many thousands of years]. And sometimes I also wonder if some of the corners that evolution has painted us into prevent us from easily seeing that we exist in a time of relative abundance. If we treat everything like it’s scarcity [until our resource consumption creates more scarcity] because we can’t even see abundance at all.
Human beings are not hummingbirds. We have a certain self-awareness, I hear, that evolution selected for us because, I guess, it helped us be successful at some point. At certain times, like now in this moment of history, I feel like our reasoning brains are less a feature though and more a bug. Mostly because we don’t seem to use our reasoning brains to make actually good choices based on the available information that we have, but instead to shore up the things that we think are already true to justify the semi-deterministic paths constructed for us by history, custom and habit. We think we are free, rational animals but we believe a story about how there is not enough to go around and that we need to fight over resources because we are the sort of animals that fight over resources [and some mythology about “the market”]. Like the hummingbird using all its energy to power it’s energy intensive body so it can get more calories to power it’s energy intensive body, we have gotten ourselves on a sort of treadmill that seems to really decrease our quality of life. But unlike the hummingbird, we have the apparatus to recognize the trap we’re in and get out of it.
And yet we don’t.
It is this sort of thinking that gets me trapped sometimes, staring out the screen door on the inside of my mind at the wider world and wondering how I will ever fold these revelations back up into the small boxes that they need to be locked in so that I can get back on the treadmill and run to stand still. I can’t quite tell if I am the same as the hungry hummingbird in the rain or if I am something different. Or if I am/we are different enough to make a difference.
Oftentimes I view our own time as a vast speciation event [all time is like this, but I have only lived in this one]. There is a lot of selective pressure out there on the human race [and the rest of the biosphere]. When people say that climate change threatens our way of life as we know it, the part they are failing to say out loud is that they are existentially terrified of finding a way of life that we don’t yet know how to live. I do not find myself excited about having to adapt to change but it is the main thing all life is designed to do. I also do not particularly enjoy the prospect of being ground up by the process of natural selection, it is red in tooth and claw. I would prefer a more humane set of selective pressures than the ones we are choosing to operate under. Nature is miraculous and improbable, but it isn’t gentle. One of my favorite things about being a human is our capacity for gentleness. Having leaned in hard to our capacity for violence and seeing where it has gotten us, I think it might be time to try another evolutionary strategy.
Related: fucking free Palestine. If one single head of state on this god forsaken planet has a single bird feeder among them, they clearly understand why you don’t let innocent children starve in their mother’s arms.
The Oracle of Z 