Flying to Rescue Birds

“The lack of manners today is something appalling!”

Eighty-one-year-old Lisa Salmon spoke with such quality, so imperious, so refined that she might have been a Jamaican Queen Victoria.

Round our heads the giant doctor bird flashed, green and black, a winged blur. With a magnificent lyre-like tail, Jamaica’s national bird is the largest hummingbird in the world. He was trilling impatiently.

“Now will you behave? I hear you!” For a nervous moment I cowered. Then I realized that she was addressing the streamertail that flirted about our ears.

Only after chastising her feathered subject did she turn to me. “You sit here,” she commanded, and I sat. Taking my wrist tenderly as if to check my pulse, she produced a small cordial bottle filled with sugar-laced water.

“Hold out your finger.” I made a pistol of my right hand, and no sooner had this perch appeared than the doctor bird alighted, its tiny feet delicately pinching my knuckle.

Tea With a Hummingbird

Thrilling, I watched his snakelike tongue flicker through a pinprick in the bottle cap, and my hostess bantered on, as if there was nothing strange about all the birds of the tropical jungle streaking in to join you for tea.

Of course, for Salmon there is not. For 30 years she has held court in the forested hills above Montego Bay, surrounded by dozens of species of birds that listen for her voice, come when they are summoned, feed from her hand and dance about her head like living halos of fire.

Disney imagined this fantasy for Snow White; Salmon lives it each day.

Rocklands Feeding Station at Anchovy is 2 1/4 acres of densely wooded hillside, at the center of which is Salmon’s home. A fading, handwritten sign hangs at the gate--the only assurance, after an adventurous drive up a steep gravel road, that you have arrived.

The house straddles a ridge with a sweeping view of the distant azure coast over treetops. You crunch across an open courtyard past blooming orchids, to a covered flagstone terrace where about 20 chairs are arranged. Behind a polished coffee table laden with grass seed, cheese bits and bottles of clear syrup, Salmon presides.

The Bird Lady cannot be interviewed in any conventional sense.

“I can’t see, you know! And I can’t hear anymore, either!”

Hears the Cooing

But while she can’t hear too many questions, she can catch the cooing of the streamertails, however gentle, and can tell in a split second what kind of person you are. Her family dates back to the first European settlers of the island; that’s about 400 years.

A mynah-like bird sprang out of the brush, frightening the yellow orioles who nibbled shyly at banana slices browning on a miniature swing. Glancing right and left with a mixture of astonished curiosity and hauteur, it bounded in our direction.

“Oh!” Salmon cried, delighted. “That’s the white-chin thrush. C’mon, Hoppity!”

And bobbing over the flagstones, Hoppity came right up to the coffee table and took a few bits of cheese thrown to him from a covered dish.

“That’s where all my money goes,” Salmon said. “If you want the birds to come, you’ve got to buy what they want. They don’t like cheap cheese, and neither do I. We both enjoy the cheese.”

Hoppity was soon replaced by a sunbeam of olive brown and iridescent purple. With a buzz, another hummingbird came to rest upon my finger. Salmon calmly held out the syrup bottle, which, like an infant, the little creature sucked gratefully.

“A female doctorbird?” I whispered.

“No. It’s a Jamaican mango hummingbird.”

All around us, finches peeped and whistled. Down below the terrace, in the back yard, was an arrangement of ceramic vessels where common ground doves watered. Their brooding sounds rose and faded in the shadows of the warm afternoon.

“How long has it taken you to train them all to come around?” I asked.

“Years,” Salmon confided. “There is the saffron finch which comes to haunt. If you look up there, you see the oriole and several others. If you see a blue one with a reddish throat, that’s the male orangequit.”

Whisking me to another seat, Salmon made me lay my wrists on my knees with palms up. She sifted grass seeds into my hands as a thrush whistled in the thicket.

Selected Fattest Seeds

After a few seconds, half a dozen little finches shot from the surrounding hedges and perched upon my palms. Slowly they began selecting the fattest seeds, popping them in their vise-like bills and letting the chaff trickle between my fingers.

If I so much as shifted a thumb, they did not fly off, but cocked their tiny heads and fixed me with an irascible stare.

“Black-faced grassquits,” Salmon said.

“They look like the house finches in California,” I said.

“Well, everybody says they look more like your juncos,” she corrected.

She interrupted herself to chat with a female streamertail that had just perched on the finger of my friend.

“I believe you have babies, you know, because you’ve been coming in quite often. Yes, there’s something definitely wrong with that left foot of yours.”

Salmon has entertained guests in her Eden-like surroundings ranging from the Queen of Denmark, on her honeymoon, and Princess Alice to Duke Ellington’s nephew.

She raised her eyes in wistful ecstasy.

“Be- you -ti-fully behaved children--a perfect gentleman,” Salmon said. “Normally I don’t bother with the guest book, but this time I looked at it. I saw Ellington, and I said, ‘Any relation to the Duke?’ And he just bowed to me and said, ‘Nephew.’ ”

She paused for us to contemplate these hallmarks of breeding, as comparison with our coarse manners subtly sank in.

Just then a couple arrived in a tourist van. Their faces broke into delighted surprise as they became aware of the dozens of birds sailing nonchalantly from shrub to terrace and all about our ears.

“Where are you from?” Salmon asked with a gentle smile.

“Canada,” said the husband.

“Ah, but you weren’t born in Canada,” she deduced.

Laughing, they admitted: “No, we’re Germans.”

Gaping in amazement at the doctor bird that had just buzzed her, said the wife: “In Montreal we have a hummingbird, green with a red neck. I don’t know what its. . . .”

“Ruby-throated,” Salmon interjected. “I lived in Montreal for five miserable years and I never saw a hummingbird!”

With time running short, we thanked the Empress of the Flocks and went our way. But instead of walking directly to our van I went around the lower wall of the terrace, beneath the hedges, to view the rolling green sweep down to the sea. I could still hear Salmon speaking to her guests.

“Those two were cartoonists,” she said. “All kinds of people get in here, if you see what I mean. The loveliest compliment I ever got was from a nun. She sat with me for the longest time. Before she left she said, ‘I should like to return to this place before I die.’ Such a lovely thing to say. Especially coming from a nun.”

But of course. The Lady of Rocklands’ influence over the wild things was as easygoing as that medieval bird man from Assisi. Hers is a window on Jamaica’s primal beauty. The sanctity of the site, the harmony of dazzling tropical creatures, the remarkable personality of Lisa Salmon--it was a face of Jamaica we were profoundly privileged to see.

To get to Rocklands Feeding Station, hire a tourist van or taxi or drive a rental car along the A-1 highway south to Reading. Then head up Long Hill via the B-8, which writhes like a bronco for 2.2 miles to the town of Anchovy.

Turn left, twist half a mile up a steep hill and grind to a halt in the gravel turnout. The station opens at 3:15 p.m. Admission is $20 Jamaican (about $3.75 U.S.) for adults and children. Children under 5 are not allowed, as they may disturb the birds.