Alaskan Range: Hummingbirds And Tea
...We encountered natural wonders like the largest Western red cedar deep in the Washington rain forest, and had a special, close-up moment with a barred owl, snake, otter, and mama [duck] towing her babies on her back. But the Rufous hummingbirds surmounted them all in marvelousness....
Greg Hill returns from a vacation visit to the Washington rain forest.
It seemed appropriate to read a review of a travel book while vacationing myself, especially when it’s written by Samuel Johnson one of my most esteemed literary men. Not only did Johnson almost single-handedly create the first great English-language dictionary, he was also “a hardened and shameless tea-drinker.”
In 1756 a certain Mr. Hanway penned a work titled “A Journal of Eight Days’ Journey … with Miscellaneous Thoughts, Moral and Religious.” Hanway spent most of his time going from Portsmouth to Southampton in lambasting in War on Drugs terms the dire effects of drinking tea. Tea-drinking causes women “to injure their health, and, what is more dear, their beauty,” hot water damages teeth, tea has corrosive properties, and its trade was wrecking the British economy, and so on.
Being something of a tea fetishist myself, I enjoy reading Johnson’s Herculean defense of “this watery luxury” as he countered Hanway at every turn.
Vacationing allowed time to enjoy such decompressing intellectual side-roads, and it also fostered many more, all interesting, and some downright delighted my soul. “Vacation” sounds new-fangled to me, but we got the term around 1400 CE from the French word “vacation,” which they converted from the Latin “vacationem,” whose root is the perfect “vacare: be empty, free, or at leisure.”
This left time for encountering notable trees, like the monkey-puzzle tree. It got that moniker in England a century after 1850 Hanway’s unfortunate book, when it was first transplanted there from its native Chile. It grows up to 120 feet, with a plethora of small branches sticking out just below the sparse, woody foliage on top. According to Wikipedia, one of its early English observers said “It would puzzle a monkey to climb that,” and the name stuck. Moreover, “a monkey trying to climb one would not be so much puzzled as injured by the spiky leaf points.” It’s known in France as “desespoir des singes,” or “Monkey’s despair,” but never fear, “monkeys are not found in the species native range.”
We encountered natural wonders like the largest Western red cedar deep in the Washington rain forest, and had a special, close-up moment with a barred owl, snake, otter, and mama [duck] towing her babies on her back. But the Rufous hummingbirds surmounted them all in marvelousness. It not only migrates over 5,000 miles from central Mexico to Alaska entirely alone, flying upright instead of horizontally, using only its equivalent of hands to cruise at 27 miles per hour, crossing the Gulf of Mexico flying 18 hours non-stop, while normally feeding every 15-20 minutes.
Hummingbirds eat half their body weight every day, while consuming 8 times their weight in water to breathe 250 times a minute filling their 9 internal air sacs their help cool their high-powered metabolism.
Hummingbirds’ eyes outweigh their brains, which are relatively the largest of all birds have more feathers per square inch than any other bird, and their throat feathers, or gorgets, usually appear black or dark grey, but when light strikes right. Paul Johnsgard’s “Hummingbirds of North America” tells us the hummer’s gorget feathers are composed of sub-feathers called “barbs.” Barbs are composed of “tiny, tightly packed layers of platlets” that are made of melanin filled with air bubbles. The bubbles refract light differently than the melanin, and that causes the creature’s beautiful iridescence when the light hits it right.
Even the glory of the iridescent Rufous paled beside the main point of this vacation: witnessing the graduation of Mimi, my darling youngest child. Her migration from glimmer in my eye has sped on to infancy, girlhood, sweet sixteen, and young womanhood with excessive rapidity, but seeing how she shares the well-read, well-rounded intelligence, intrepid vivaciousness, and a ready and raucous wit with all the other Hill women in my life.
Sure, I adore a good cup of Nilgiri tea, and find it amazing that hummingbirds use their feet only to perch and scratch, flying small distances rather than hopping, and can open their long bills only a tiny fraction, yet are fierce predators, hovering behind and below their air-borne prey before darting in and gobbling. But nothing can top how fast the last of my beautiful babies grew up.
