Giving wing to small pleasures
I’VE been obsessed with the hummingbirds in our yard. Mornings and evenings since late February, I’ve tiptoed to the palm hanging over the barbecue to see if the mother was still sitting on the 2-inch nest she built on a swaying frond.
In the first weeks, she sat nearly motionless, her beak tilted upward, stoic even through the rainstorms and the windy nights that followed. When she was not in there, I worried that she’d given up on the whole family thing. Or maybe she’d met an untimely end.
Then we glimpsed her chick, its tiny beak poking out from the nest, wide open and waiting, as my children once waited for dinner to be put before them in bite-sized pieces.
Mom would invariably be nearby, flitting between the orange blossoms and the neon-yellow plastic flowers on a feeder I bought.
In recent weeks I’ve shooed away errant cats and swooping crows. The hordes of squirrels seemed too busy gorging on oranges to find the little family.
Through it all I’ve wondered what my preoccupation with this bird and her gray chick really means. Am I still mourning the death of our beloved family dog last year? Am I missing the kids, who’ve mostly flown our stucco nest?
My neighbor Hartmut Walter thinks the mother is an Allen’s hummingbird, noting her green back and the flash of copper on her throat. A UCLA geography professor who studies birds, Walter says the species migrated to the Los Angeles area from the Channel Islands in the 1960s, drawn by proliferating nectar plants as bean and corn fields gave way to yards like mine.
In my Mar Vista garden, the winter rains have seeded a bumper crop of dandelions. Here and there are the shriveled remains of plants that didn’t take; my sweet pea vines molded before they bloomed this year. Yet my 50-by-30-foot plot has been a refuge for this tiny family. And, really, isn’t a refuge what gardeners want?
Never mind the 12-story office building towering over my backyard. Or the droning traffic on the 405, four blocks away. Happiness, I read, is the ability to tune out the noise and find joy in life’s small pleasures and daily miracles.
Sure, instinct, not the pursuit of happiness, drew the hummingbird to our yard. There she found tiny stems, wood chips and bits of fluff she fused with saliva and spider silk. She felt safe enough to lay two little white eggs and, like the patient elephant Horton, wait for them to hatch.
Perhaps during her first long nights she was overcome, like me, by the perfume of our yellow trumpet blooms. Maybe she took pleasure in the riotous orange of the clivia plants, or the first pink rose of the season. Simple moments of awe in the garden. And sadness. Two eggs, as I mentioned, but only one chick.
That survivor stood high in the nest late last month, nearly as big as its mother, watchful and ready to fly.
The nest is empty now. Perhaps the fledgling is among the hummers still darting through my garden. Maybe we’ll even find another nest in our trees this year.
The economy stumbles and fighting in Iraq grinds on. But it’s easy to escape to our gardens, spring pulling us out the back door each morning.
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