Hank
By Sandra K. Barnidge
Hank is aggressive and loud and zooms back and forth from the crepe myrtle in the backyard to the feeder on my balcony. My brother’s wife named her Hank because she looks like a Hank, moves like a Hank, sounds like a Hank. And so, she is Hank.
I first noticed her last year, the big little hummer that sits on the tips of the thin myrtle branches and sways in the wind, vigilant for other birds or insects that come to close to the red glass feeder I’ve hung from the rusted hook jutting out from the peeling balcony door frame. She comes fast and furious up from the bush-tree to dive bomb the competition, and twice I’ve seen her pin other hummers by the throat on the balcony boards. She’s a bitch of a three inches, that Hank. She lets out war cries instead of chirps.
Hummers were what we called blow jobs in the middle school I attended 800 miles north of here. No one who talked about hummers was actually giving or receiving them, but we got comfortable buzzing the word out of our lips and practicing for the breeding seasons we would molt our way through in high school.
In September we had a swarm of hummers, three, four, then five of them. I lost track of Hank in the melee of fledgling birds that rested in the gutter and on the shingles of the roof in close range of the feeder. It was hard to tell her apart from the others, though I often had a feeling when it was her chasing after the meeker, younger others. They may have been her chicks, or maybe not. Female hummers will tolerate their own young and share food resources for a while after they leave the nest, but not for long.
In October I finally looked her up and pinned her down: she’s a mature female ruby-throat, the only species of hummer that hangs around the eastern United States for any length of time. She breeds here in the spring and raises up to three sets of twins each year, and fattens herself up through the fall. By late November she’s supposed to be gone, to Mexico or Guatemala. She’ll make the trip in one brutal long-haul flight, 18 to 22 hours nonstop over the gulf. She will fly alone.
The first boy I gave a hummer joined the army when I told him I wouldn’t mate with him for life. He called me for a while from bases, but never after he was deployed to the desert. We circled back around to the same bar years later, had a drink, and flew our separate ways.
When I was in elementary school, military Humvees hit the civilian market as Hummers. Each of those massive cars weighed 10,000 pounds and got an average of ten miles per gallon. No one I knew could afford to own one; we saw them in music videos and commercials featuring long, open roads.
Hummers were what my grandmother called the little crystal figurines my parents bought one year for her birthday when I was young. The two glass birds dangled from a hook over a pink glass flower. My grandmother set the trinket on the shelf amongst the fussy African violets that she fought valiantly to keep alive with syringes of sugar solutions and heat lamps.
My grandmother was a pocket-sized woman, short and stout and round. Her curly stayed black and never grayed. She wore her keys pinned to her chest every day with a bright orange tag, and she kept bowls of sugar on hand for visitors. When she died, the glass hummers and African violets migrated to my parents’ living room. My mother left the violets alone and they multiplied into a ring of clay pots with pink, purple, and hybrid blooms.
I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that Hank’s primary mate this year was Felipe, a motley little male that sits furrowed up on the top of the feeder like a grumpy old man whenever Hank will let him be there. Where Hank is long and lean and strong, with a speckled neck and elegant white belly, Felipe is ragged and round like an overripe lime, with a patch of fluffy red feathers under his thin black beak. Hank will chase him off whenever she’s in need of a drink or annoyed that he’s hung around too long. He disappeared a little early this year, in mid-September, just before the fledglings went south.
Now it’s just Hank at the feeder, and I’ve started to think she might take it easy and winter here this time. She’s got about five years of trans-gulf flights in her, and it’s hard to say how many she’s used up. Her wings beat an average of 52 times a second, and she can reach a top speed of 60 miles an hour when she’s on the attack. Her metabolism spikes as she eats, and her heart beats 1,200 times per minute as she sucks in Walmart nectar.
It’s a myth that hummingbirds don’t sleep. They do, deeply, in a hypothermic state biologists call torpor. Sometimes, hummingbirds in torpor will hang upside down in bushes and trees. As their bodies warm up in the sunlight, they wake.
When I was 28 weeks pregnant, I dreamed my daughter came out too early with a long, thin beak instead of a nose. We attempted to breastfeed, but my bird daughter’s beak was painful on my nipple and I had to push her away even as she kept pecking at me, hungry.
According to my mother, my grandmother died with her mouth open. I was in bed with a boy when I got the call that she was in the hospital. “I’ll come down,” I said, and my mother told me not to, that there was no reason for any of us to worry. “It’s just some testing,” she said, and so I didn’t go. My grandmother was on the table waiting for the doctors when she decided, instead, to die. A too-fast heartbeat set off a chain of events that caused the end. She wasn’t alone, but I wasn’t there.
My far-flung cousins flew back to Wisconsin and together we lowered the box of her ashes into the ground. We are not the kind of family that thought it was right to empty them into the wind.
Hank doesn’t like it when I sit with my daughter on the balcony under the shade umbrella, but she has learned to tolerate us, at least a little. When we are out there, she takes note of us but keeps on with her patrols and sips, myrtle to feeder, feeder to myrtle.
Hank has no such patience for my husband. Last week he sat on the balcony with our daughter, and Hank roared up chirping in the air above him, her eyes bearing down on him as her wings hummed hard.
Sandra K. Barnidge is a writer with a passion for small towns and the environment. Her fiction has appeared in Nimrod, The Fiddlehead, Reckon Review, Barren, Allegory Ridge, and elsewhere. She’s originally from Beloit, Wisconsin, and now lives in central Alabama.