Home
There are hummingbirds in our garden. Well, like most opening statements, that requires some qualification. It is quite hard to know how many Ruby-throated Hummingbirds are in the garden. We are quite clear there is one male, often perched on one of the two Bradford (or Cleveland) Pear trees, or on a Crepe Myrtle, carefully keeping guard over the feeder when it’s on our porch. The feeder is filled with sugared water (following strict guidelines on concentration), and it is clear the male regards the feeder as his. No other male is allowed near, and any attempt to feed is met with an aggressive response, our male (as it were) buzzing any other male trying to get close, often with a clash of high-speed vibrating wings: the resulting sound is quite disconcerting. Females are another matter, and while they are often chased away, some (is it just one?) are allowed to feed, but not for too long.
I used to worry about the hummingbirds becoming reliant on our feeder until I discovered they eat insects, including mosquitoes, flies and gnats, as their main source of nutrition. In the early morning and evening I see them high up in the trees, hoovering up insects as fast as they can go. They do drink nectar, the sweet liquid inside certain flowers, as well as the water in our feeder, but this is for energy needs, the sugar rapidly used up when actually flying. However, another of my initial misunderstandings was about how much time they spend on the wing: it is, in fact, relatively little, and they spend as much as 80% of their time sitting around digesting!
Hummingbirds are interesting creatures. Most are non-migratory, although the only one found in North Carolina, the Ruby-throated Hummingbird, does migrate, flying 500 miles nonstop across the Gulf of Mexico during both its spring and autumn travels. They are tiny dynamos, the average bird to be seen in our garden weighing around 3 grams: in comparison, a US nickel weighs 4.5 grams and an Australian 5 cent coin weighs 5.65 grams: it would take more than 150 ruby-throated hummingbirds to weigh one pound. With all their high speed wing work, a hummingbird’s maximum forward flight speed is 30 miles per hour, but they can reach up to 60 miles per hour in a dive, their wings beating between 50 and 200 times per second, and their hearts racing along at 1,200 beats per minute.
The more I read, the more I find these tiny birds astonishing. Contrary to what I thought I saw, hummingbirds do not suck nectar through their long bills; they lick it with fringed, forked tongues. Capillary action along the fringe of their tongue helps draw nectar up into their throats so they can swallow. A hummingbird can lick 10 to15 times per second while feeding and they can digest natural sucrose—the sugar found in floral nectar—in 20 minutes with 97 percent efficiency for converting the sugar into energy. [i] So there!
Enough facts? Just one more: despite their small size, hummingbirds are one of the most aggressive bird species. They regularly attack jays, crows, and hawks that infringe on their territory, and nicer small birds like chickadees, sparrows and cardinals don’t have a chance.
All this is background to my question: where is home for the hummingbirds in our garden? Is home where they spend the summer, usually the five months from May to September? Or is it in South America, where they will stay for longer? To add to the confusion, hotter and longer summers are extending the time when North Carolina is attractive for our visitors. I am assuming home is where you spend most of the time, but that might be a mistaken view.
The time that birds are spending in our garden is certainly changing. I haven’t been making a systematic study, but some changes are obvious. Canada Geese would come to our pond years ago for a short period in the spring and in the autumn as they were heading north or south to avoid extreme temperatures. In the years I have been watching, some remain with us all year round. One or two have no choice, they are disabled, but others seem to like the environment, and put up with the heat of a North Carolina summer. Perhaps their physiology is changing: whatever is happening, the pond is the only home for a few of them.
Consider the Blue Jays. In the last couple of years, we have had a pair resident in our garden and the surrounding area. Coastal blue jays are correctly described as vivid blue in colour, and I will catch a flash of colour as one flies past. Like hummingbirds, they are aggressively territorial. They ignore the chickadees and sparrows in the garden, but appear to take offense at the larger birds, ensuring the Cardinals move on when they decide to land. I think they are good at sounding an alarm, too, and can often be heard making a rather guttural screeching sound if they see danger (our pair are very concerned about the red-shouldered hawk that lives nearby, frequently to be seen landing on a branch in our garden). I suspect it is not just other birds which are warned by the Jay’s call: squirrels are less likely to be seen running across the lawn. Do the jays regard our garden as home? I am not sure, as I think they go south when it gets really cold. I haven’t noticed them around in the middle of winter.
Watching keeps provoking questions. Is home for a bird where it nests? As I watched a pair of Canada Geese taking their goslings down to the pond in the spring, I decided, for that pair at least, this was home. The place where you raise a family must be one indicator of ‘home’: it might be the same for the squirrels, although they appear to stay here all year, even if they hibernate, briefly nowadays, during the coldest part of the winter.
For humans, we say “home is where the heart is”. That is a statement about emotional attachment, not about breeding territory (!!) or duration of residence, although children and longevity are often indicators of being home. However, for those of us who are migrants, the issue of home can be a perplexing one. Many people in Australia talk about ‘going home’ when they travel to see their parents. ‘My home’ is often a reference to a birthplace, or even the original family location generations back. It can refer to the location of family members, a building, a village, or even a county or a state. Does the sense of a place as home lose salience when parents have moved or died? If we create a new ‘home’ after living in a new area, even a new country for many years, does that displace previous homes?
No, there aren’t rules about this; it is a matter of how you feel. I found an interesting insight into this when travelling back to the UK a few years ago. I was brought up in London, and my family had roots in East Anglia and Sheffield. Going back to look at places where I had lived in as a child made me feel rather like a tourist in my own town. Yes, there was the house I had lived in until my early teens: smaller than I remembered (all childhood homes seem smaller to adults, I suspect). It was familiar, but the emotional link was gone. My first impression was shaped by visual clues – the people living there hadn’t looked after the front garden! I went up to the church at the top of the hill, close my old house, and it too was comfortably familiar. But this wasn’t home. It was a place I knew, but any emotional sense of belonging had disappeared. I think I would feel the same way about the village where I lived in Scotland for nearly five years, or the part of Adelaide I lived in for the first five years of my time in Australia. Familiar, yet also separated now, like the images of childhood seen in an old home movie. Was that really what I was like? Was that my home once?
I think about my sense of home today as I live a life in two places, North Carolina and Melbourne. In many ways I feel ‘at home’ in both places, surrounded by people I know, familiar places, shops and libraries, all the little things that make a place comfortable. Yet in another sense, neither feels like home: I feel as though I am in transit, waiting to settle down once again, and really be ‘at home’.
Of course, all this has a lot to do with me. I am a wanderer in many ways. I have found it hard to stay doing the same thing for a long time. This has been evident in my working life. I have hopped from one area of work to another: academic, government employee, working in the private sector, working for myself. Not just the nature of my employment, but what I do. I have been a teacher, a researcher, a policy analyst, a writer, a consultant, a trainer, a facilitator, a mentor. It might be relevant to add I have spent a large amount of my time reading, novels, mysteries, fiction, non-fiction, and even children’s books.
Let me try again make sense of where my home is. As I think about it, I am most at home when I am working, writing, or reading. Working first: I really enjoy working with others where my role is assisting their learning, growth, and insights. I read John Heider’s book ‘The Tao of Leadership’ years ago, and I am still influenced by one of the commentaries: “The wise leader does not intervene unnecessarily. The leader’s presence is felt, but often the group runs itself … Imagine you are a midwife; you are assisting at someone else’s birth. Do good without show or fuss. Facilitate what is happening rather than what you think ought to be happening. If you must take the lead, lead so that the mother is helped, yet free and in charge. When the baby is born, the mother will rightly say: “We did it ourselves”.” [ii] I don’t want to claim I do this as well as I should, but it is an image of facilitating to which I aspire. I enjoy working with groups and individuals, not as an instructor, but by supporting and enabling learning. Yes, I feel at home when I am facilitating an individual’s growth, a group’s learning or a team’s planning.
Writing is a second important part of my life, mainly because I am all too well aware of my limitations. I rush my writing, and don’t give myself the time to reflect on what I am trying to achieve. As a result, all my attempts at fiction have been half-baked, slight and second rate. I try for a while, and then I give up again. However, the decision to write a weekly blog has been an important source of learning, and has given me some real pleasure. I work to a few rules. Each blog is to be finished by Friday (North Carolina time!). It can be no longer than four pages, and no less than that. The third rule is the one where I am less successful: it has to say something. I have been doing this for two years now. Yes, in this style of writing, I do feel a little more at home. Novels and non-fiction reports are far less satisfying, and whatever I produce is far less well written.
Finally, what about reading? I could spend much of my life reading. Perhaps it is in reading that I feel most at home, and that has to be a paradox: how can I be at home when I am living through the words of others? When I was in primary school in England, I read voraciously. Three books every Saturday, and three every Sunday, and then three books to last me through the rest of the week. Of course, parents would mess that up, with trips and visits. But I did read a lot. By the age of eight I had exhausted the children’s section of the little public library close to where I lived. I moved on to historical fiction and even contemporary fiction. By the age of ten I was reading Nevil Shute and W. Harrison Ainsworth, even Jane Austen. At that stage it was the stories that got me, and all the adult emotional business (and worse) slid past me. My father’s bookshelf of books on astronomy and physics was gobbled up, too.
I have never stopped. At various stages, it has been non-fiction that has dominated my time. Books on social anthropology while a student. Social psychology when first teaching. Then books on management and leadership, dozens of them (although very few have proved memorable). Books about business. Most sit on shelves, occasionally used for reference. One or two were truly great books, like Max Holland’s ‘When the Machine Stopped’, which has the illuminating subtitle “a cautionary tale from industrial America’. What a powerful, disheartening account of the decline of manufacturing. Now I am back to science, and a topic I missed out on when I was growing up – history. And novels. Novels for teenagers, science fiction novels, fantasy, detective stories, thrillers, action novels. Novels that are about puzzles and mysteries, and novels that are about relationships. Sadly, I have to admit, as I get older I also like novels where relationships work out (even if a few key players are killed or otherwise lost along the way): I’m not so keen on novels where everything is left in the air!
Are we at home when we feel comfortable? Are birds ‘comfortable’ in the garden? Many of the birds thriving in our cities and suburbs today, have a comfortable lifestyle, exploiting the food we drop or seeds in feeders. Pigeons, mallard ducks and sparrows are always on the lookout for a dropped crust of bread or a person eager to feed them. Our commitment to bird‑feeding helps replace the foods lost by introducing foreign plants into gardens and concreting over areas of the city. In Europe, North America and Australia, between one in three and one in five families feed birds. In the US, somewhere between 500,000 and 1.2 million tons of birdseed enters the food chain every year. The result is a growing tribe of domesticated nuthatches, chickadees, woodpeckers, juncos and sparrows. We even provide housing: nesting boxes for Bluebirds are popular in North Carolina, helping them survive.
Another evolutionary process, described by Charles Darwin as ‘sexual selection’, is also at work in redefining home. The dark-eyed junco is a small, ground-dwelling seed-eater, a bird common to many areas in North Carolina. Male juncos in the wild have two or three white outer tail feathers that contrast with the darker, charcoal grey inner ones. These white feathers have been identified as indicators of a male’s aggressiveness and ability in defending his territory from others. In battle, it appears those with the most white usually win. However, those same males are also less interested in looking after their chicks, something that appears to have been noticed by urban female juncos. In the city, where heat and food are readily available, the breeding season is long, and a female junco can produce many broods of nestlings, especially if her mate is faithful and cares for one brood while she hatches the next. The result has been a gradual muting of the male city junco’s tail, a sign these birds are less willing to fight, more skilled at tending the young, and more favoured by females. [iii]
Perhaps the changed behaviour of the dark-eyed junco is symbolic of how we relate to home today. It isn’t just a place where we enjoy life eating dropped crusts of bread or reading books. It is a place where we have changed, set aside our childish, selfish behaviour, stopped spending our time living for ourselves alone, no longer exclusively absorbed in that world of books. Instead it is a social place, a community where we settle down to living and working in harmony with partners and children and the other people around us, comfortable in a dense network of relationships. Or that’s the way it should be.
[i] https://www.thespruce.com/fun-facts-about-hummingbirds-387106
[ii] Heider, 1985, page 33
[iii] Much of these two paragraphs comes John Marzluff’s fascinating research, summarised in ‘Birdland’, Aeon, July 2019: https://aeon.co/essays/how-urbanisation-can-be-a-friend-to-the-biodiversity-of-birds
