Back in Connecticut Jim was a member of the Men’s Garden Club of Wethersfield. One of its now deceased members – a white-maned Italian gentleman – was fond of saying that a tree should always be pruned so that “the wind and the birds can pass through it.” Jim was never quite sure whether what he called “Philip’s Law” was an actual arboreal advice or an aspirational aphorism. Either way it seemed like good guidance.
Then the other morning a fast moving green-gray-and-white hummingbird, flying like it was on a mission from God, slalomed its way through our desert willow tree en-route to the adjacent orange-colored Agastache plant. It then flitted from flower to flower sipping rapidly at each one before quickly darting on to the next. The stems of the Agastache swayed gently, put in motion either by an invisible zephyr-like breeze or the turbulence of the tiny turbo-bird. It was hard to tell which.
Out here it seems everybody loves hummingbirds. Which if you know Santa Fe may be a little bit surprising. If there are only two possible sides to an issue Santa Feans will somehow come up with five or six. And argue them into the ground on the editorial page of the local paper. Then refuse to compromise unless everyone gets 100% of what they want.
But we digress. So we repeat...
Out here it seems everybody loves hummingbirds. And why not. They are cute, fun to watch and demand nothing other than a constant supply of nectar plus a protein punch of small insects. This has been a good summer for both them and their viewing public. At our house Marsha provides the little guys with three red plastic feeding stations filled with the sweetest human-made nectar this side of the Mississippi. Each easily accessible in the flowering crab tree on the placita (patio) of our house. All replenished several times a week to keep them at their energy-providing peak. We also have four agastache – three potted and one a volunteer offshoot in the ground next to its progenitor. All seven of these al fresco dining stations draw equal attention from our near constant dawn-to-dusk inflow of hovering hummers.
Back in Connecticut hummingbirds were only a hope for us. We tried red plastic feeders and several variations of a “pollinator garden” – butterfly bushes, bee balm, coneflowers, etc. Butterflies came. Bees came. Cones came. (Just seeing if you were paying attention.) Perhaps one hummingbird came. Although it just might have been a hummingbird-hawk moth. Either way that encounter lasted all of two seconds.
First time in New Mexico – totally different story. We spent several days in Taos at El Pueblo Lodge, a hotel with an outdoor pool surrounded by yellow-leafed cottonwood trees and a comfortably large seating area with lounges and Adirondack chairs. Plus several hummingbird feeders atop poles all in a row several feet apart. While we sat, relaxed and read we watched hummingbirds by the dozen aerially queue up in orderly lines for a quick sip at the red containers. Pretty darn cool!
After each diner had its fill it dutifully returned to the back of the line and slowly edged forward as the feeding operation continued, probably using up most of the energy it had acquired when it led the procession. Our own community of hummers is considerably smaller in number – two or three at a time – and nowhere near as organized. But over breakfast coffee or lunch on our placita, equally entertaining.
The hotel is about one mile south of Taos Pueblo – one of the oldest continuously inhabited communities in the United States and the only living Native American community designated both a World Heritage Site and a National Historic Landmark. The hummingbird occupies an important place in the culture and religion of Taos and other New Mexico Pueblos who. e.g., perform hummingbird dances and use hummingbird feathers in rituals to bring rain. Native legend says the bright colors on a hummingbird's throat came after he fled through the rainbow in search of rain clouds to save the earth from a fire caused by an angry demon.
Taos is also home to a persistent and invasive low-frequency humming, rumbling, or droning noise audible to many but not all people – the “Taos Hum.” According to livescience.com “a variety of theories have been offered as an explanation, ranging from the mundane to the fantastic, the psychological to the paranormal. Stoned hippies, secret government mind control experiments, underground UFO bases and everything in between have been blamed.”
Not mentioned for some strange reason is the lingering effects of the presence of the Family Trochilidae at the El Pueblo Lodge and Taos Pueblo. Just sayin!
Hummingbirds are also a big deal in La Cienega, NM in Santa Fe County at El Rancho de las Golondrinas. Not for their physical presence – but instead, like college athletes, for their NIL – name, image and likeness.
One of the things we celebrate at the museum is the traditional New Mexican folk art of tinwork. Among the early Spanish colonists were craftsmen who planned on creating works of art from silver, which they expected to find in Spain’s northernmost colony just as they had around Mexico City. Not! But small amounts of tin were available, which they used instead to produce religious items for New Mexican churches.
Then in the 1820s people traveling west on the Santa Fe Trail brought with them large quantities of food and goods (lard, smoked oysters, lamp oil) packed into large tin containers. These discarded tins were a blessing to resource-starved New Mexicans who could now expand their product-line to include mirrors, candle holders, nichos and children’s toys as well as more elaborate ecclesiastical pieces. Some of which they shipped back on the Santa Fe Trail to new customers in the eastern United States. The craft continues today as one of New Mexico’s major folk arts.
Las Golondrinas has its own collection of early pieces – although we unfortunately do not have one like the religious-themed tinwork with the word “LARD” prominently displayed, which we have seen in the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art. Museum guests also have the opportunity to make their own tin medallions using four different templates we provide – a rose, a floral design, a swallow and a humming bird.
In Spanish a swallow is a golondrina – after which the El Rancho de las Golondrinas was named. A hummingbird is called a colibri. In classic, school-taught Spanish that is. The real world is a little more complicated.
Now neither of us speaks Spanish. Nor surprisingly do most of the volunteers. New Mexico is 50% Hispanic and Spanish the normal spoken language of one quarter of the state’s residents. However not knowing textbook Spanish may not be that much of a detriment
“Due to New Mexico's unique political history and over 400 years of relative geographic isolation, New Mexican Spanish is unique within Hispanic America … unlike any form of Spanish in the world.” (wikipedia) Among the distinctive features of New Mexican Spanish are the continued use of now-obsolete vocabulary from colonial-era Spanish; words from Puebloan languages such as cíbolo for buffalo (Zuni;) Aztec expressions used by colonists; independent inventions; and refashioned English terms, e.g. telefón. (This should not be confused with Spanglish, which mixes English with Spanish fluidly shifting from one language to the other sometimes within the same sentence. E.g. ¿Me enviaste el email? (Did you send me the email?) or ¿Quién me robó el mouse? (Who stole my mouse?))
One of our summer interns – a college Spanish major – tried to apply her learning to our guests with what she described as less than successful results.
So, frequently we volunteer-interpreters simply ask our Spanish guests how they would say a particular thing. At medallion-making asking “how do you say Hummingbird?” yielded a variety of responses – among them colibri, tucusitos, picaflores, chupamirtos, and chuparosas. The last two being the most frequent. (Chupa means “suck.” Mirtos means “myrtles,” as in the flowering shrub. Rosas are “roses.” Some of you may have heard of the legendary chupacabra – the vampire-like creature that kills animals such as goats (cabras) by sucking their blood.
West Texas, Arizona and New Mexico are at the focal point of the hummingbird’s seasonal resettlement in the southwest United Sates. In previous years however we felt as if we were barely on the outermost periphery of that hub. This summer we seem like an integral part of it. We also are being visited by multitudes of finches, sparrows and other such small birds, groups of which perch on the branches of the flowering crab pecking away at the tree’s purplish-red fruits, even while the chuparosas suck away at the bright red feeders.
Climate change? Santa Fe is definitely experiencing warmer weather. But seeing that slaloming hummingbird the other morning got us we are wondering if it also could be something that we ourselves have done.
We planted the flowering crab in 2022 and the Desert Willow last year – replacing a tree and a bush that were thick with branches and leaves. Mother Nature seems to have followed Philip’s design specs perfectly when constructing both the crab and the willow. And this summer’s hordes of hummers and other flocks of feathered foodies offer testimony to the efficacy of that “law.” To paraphrase the advice given to Kevin Costner in the movie “Field of Dreams” – “if you plant them, they will come.”
BTW The shrubbery that preceded the Desert Willow and flowering crab were not complete anathema to our avian visitors. The honeysuckle bush frequently provided a place of warmth and shelter for wintering birds who having been startled by the sudden appearance of one of us would startle us in turn. And the red maple that provided significant summer shade to our placita was the 2020 site of a well-hidden hummingbird nest, which we accidentally spotted while re-arranging the tiny hoverers’ feeding stations. Nestling into a thick coat of invisibility can sometimes be a good thing.
