Hummingbird Banding: All You Need to Know

I witnessed an hour's worth of hummingbird bandings, when hummingbirds fly into a cage they can't figure their way out of, then are grasped and put in a net bag, then measured, placed in a tiny fabric bag, weighed, and are gently given leg bands the width of a pinhead, stamped with a four-digit numeral -- if they haven't one already, because since the 1990s volunteer and federally certified bander Lanny Chambers of Missouri by his own count has banded 6,000 hummingbirds -- and 30 more today.

Lanny and wife Linda travel to state parks in the summer and invite the public to watch and learn. After banding and measuring each bird, giving the figures to Linda who wrote them down, he stepped out into the open and let a spectator hold the hummingbird, urging us to feel its astonishing heartbeat (20 beats per second), until the bird up and flew, btw always leaving a pool of pee in the spectator's hand.

Chambers and his wife answered every question I had, and after 18 summers with Divine Cabin hummingbirds I had plenty.

Q: Why are you banding them?
A: For a federal science database with bird migration information.
Q: What information are you taking?
A: Their gender, age, length and weight, and the number on the band they are assigned. If they have a band already, we take a note of that and add it to the bird's history. Banding is the only way we can learn more about them.
Q: Why do you look at the beak with a magnifier?
A:  To tell their age. Juveniles will have little marks along the beak, sort of like growth rings or stretch marks. Adults don't have those.
Q: What's your background? How did you learn to do this? Is this your life work?
A: I majored in anthropology. I had only one job in that field for one summer. Now that I'm retired, this is my science hobby. It's my way of contributing to science. And some kid might see what I'm doing and get interested in biology. So many kids these days don't know nature.
Q: How were you trained for this?
A: I took an expensive course and then was certified.
Q: Are you paid to do this, or are you a volunteer?
A: I'm not paid for this.
Q: What interests you specifically in hummingbirds?
A: It's not at all because they're little and cute. I'm joking.
Q: What's the best hummingbird feeder formula?
A: Four parts water to one part cane sugar. They'll take beet sugar but prefer cane.
Q: Why are hummingbirds attracted to the color red?
A: They're attracted to any bright color, because those are the colors of flowers, and flowers are food.
Q: Why are hummingbirds so combative with each other?
A: They're defending their food supply.
Q: It's the same birds every year at my feeder?
A: They always come back to where they were born. They remember every single feeder in their territory and on their migration paths, just as you remember the whereabouts of every grocery store around you.
Q: Where do they winter?
A: In Central America.
Q: What do they do there all winter?
A: Exactly what they do here.
Q: Do they fly or travel in packs or families?
A: No, they're loners. They fly across the Gulf of Mexico alone. They can fly for up to 25 hours straight.
Q: How old is the oldest hummingbird in your banding program?
A: It survived for 10 years. Three or four years is the average lifespan.
Q: Do hummingbirds sleep?
A: Yes. They perch on a branch and sleep. They can't do anything in the dark.
Q: I heard that the female hummingbirds do all the parenting.
A: All hummingbird mothers are single mothers. Juveniles of both genders look like females. The female builds the nest with spider webbing and other expandable materials so the nest will expand as the babies grow. Hummingbirds will pick and eat from a spider web all the insects caught in the web, then eat the spider too, then take the webbing for nest building.
Q: What does the mother feed the babies before they can fly?
A: She regurgitates a slurry of insects and nectar. She feeds them insects for protein.
Q: Why is the male's throat red?
A: The feathers there are black except for a micro-coating that makes them look red or orange from certain angles. The male flashes his red when he wants to look threatening.
Q: What is a hummingbird doing when it points its beak straight up in the air and holds it there?
A: It's napping. Some nap that way and some don't. Every bird is different.
Q: Why do they pee so much? They peed on the hand of everybody who held one.
A: Because they ingest so much nectar. Their body burns the calories and they eject the excess water before they take flight. Just getting rid of water weight. Here's some hand sanitizer.

Do you want to experience a hummingbird banding? Here is a link. Lanny and Linda have been doing this work for years at various state parks. I had fun, and yes, I got to hold a hummingbird in my palm, throbbing like a little engine, for a few seconds before it up and flew.

Everybody Knows This, Except You

In life I've met with many things everyone else knew but me: how to pronounce "derriere" and "decollete"; that people are born naked (the shock!); that bottled mayonnaise and salad dressing differ while looking the same; how to light matches; that not all plants are perennial; that screws tighten when turned rightward; that salaries are negotiable and the first offer is a lowball; that canned tuna must be drained (we never ate canned tuna; the kids I babysat showed me how); how to tie shoelaces without making two loops and crossing them. From age 6 to 55 I walked around with shoelaces tied "backwards" and ignorance was bliss.

That applies to my first telescope lesson. The eyepieces ordered, of good quality and standard size, were a bit too big to fit in the tube you put your eye to. I tried everything. I even unscrewed one lens from its base and dropped it into the barrel, and oops, down the tube it went, requiring me to strong-arm the 22-pound telescope upside down to get it out.

I would not give up on my free telescope with useless new $20 eyepieces; I just wouldn't! After a long search I learned a fact apparently everyone knows, so basic it's not even listed in specifications: older cheaper telescopes use eyepieces .965 [inches] across, and today's standard measures 1.25."

.965s are so obsolete that adapters are scarce, but I found and ordered one. From now on, though, I know what to tell anyone who fosters or adopts a homeless telescope.

You, Too, Can Zentangle

The public library offered a free class on "Zentangle" drawing, and because all education is good, I attended, having not the slightest idea of what it was, nor any drawing talent, nor much interest in Zen. But that evening I made a work of art and thought it was pretty cool.

The lively woman who taught our class is a public-school art teacher named Megan, who explained that "Zentangle" is "meditative drawing," or the creation of patterns and images in a relaxed fashion, with no pressure and with no such thing as errors. She taught us to create, step by step, the most common Zentangle patterns, plus flowers, and there are more patterns we didn't get to.

"Zentangle" is as fully established as adult coloring, except the Zentangler creates the image rather than filling in somebody else's pre-made image. There are "Zentangle" (registered trademark) starter kits. Megan got us started with Pigma 01 extremely fine-point ink pens, a fine-point Sharpie, and pencils. That and a drawing surface is all a Zentangler needs. We drew on 4 x 4-inch artist's tiles, thick paper rather like the coasters taverns put beneath your beers. Megan showed us a pair of white sneakers she'd decorated with fabric ink, and a photo of a backpack; she's also done a mural on the St. Louis public flood wall; and Pinterest is rife with Zentangler wallpaper, tee shirts, gift boxes, Zentangles in colored ink and watercolored.

Megan told us Zentangle began with a monk who tried to call to lunch an artist who was busy illuminating a sacred manuscript. He called and called and she didn't hear him. She explained, "Oh, I was so into what I was doing I didn't hear you," and I suppose it takes a monk to trademark and monetize that. It was fun and I'm glad I went to get some continuing education and learned something new that anyone can learn to do. I bought my own supplies and intend to Zentangle my way across the Atlantic toward my upcoming overseas adventure.

Wash Your Hair Once a Week

I keep this old home-economics book, from a box of  secondhand books somebody gave us when I was a kid, because it seriously changed my life, telling me for the first time how to sit, dress, look, choose and coordinate colors and clothing styles (what?) and amazingly, said (this was 1957): "The normal scalp may be shampooed every one or two weeks. A weekly shampoo is necessary if the air is heavy with smoke and dust, or if the hair is light in color."

Shampoo every two weeks? I once went four days and my hair smelled like the camel/rhino enclosure at the zoo. What kind of world was it that this book contained? A world of either/ors, I guess:

In the culture of 50 years later, now our hair is clean but typically our posture much more resembles the dreamer/beatnik/free spirit's on the right. In fact we like her better; the controlled one is a "brownie" or "teacher's pet" or "sucking up" and certainly the boys would say she's a "high-maintenance" chick. The girl on the right -- she might let the boys get to second base, or even third.

Maybe when I was 9 and first read through this book I knew the answer to the question just above, but as an adult I understand, completely, the girl on the right.

Yes, I Do Chicken Fat

The coveted Kennedy/LBJ-era fitness patch

Full-body exercise being what it is -- important -- I want to do it, but as briefly as possible, and therefore have returned, after 45 years, to exercising to the 6-minute 33-second sound recording called "Chicken Fat," written by the composer of "The Music Man," Meredith Willson, and performed by its star, Robert Preston, and released in 1961. It's on You Tube should you miss the Cold War era when Mrs. L put it on the turntable and forced your class to exercise to it. It gets the lead out on slow mornings. I do it daily and can now do those insufferable 10 pushups military style and have developed genuine see-able front delts.

Odd history, this song. Health people concerned that we kids were watching too much TV formed the President's Council on Physical Fitness, under President Kennedy. They commissioned the writing and recording of "Chicken Fat" and sent millions of copies of the 45 rpm disc to schools. Once past its corniness it isn't a bad little workout, but obviously the only model for physical fitness back then was military, so you get orders to march ("Left! Left! Left a good pound and a quarter; was it right? Right? Then it should be left!") interspersed with the jumping jacks, pushups, bicycle, deep breathing and arm circles. And when was the last time anybody told you to touch your toes ten times to get physically fit? Or to run in place, for heaven's sake (the culminating exercise)? It's a time capsule of WWII boot camp (Robert Preston was in the army for years; you can hear it in his voice).

Yes, it's dated, but it's simple and cheap. No equipment required and only a few square feet of space and costs nothing but willpower and discipline. There's been a call for the present government to commission and distribute a motivational exercise recording on the "Chicken Fat" model. Of course it could not be uncool, so it will never be made, because kids nowadays won't do anything uncool and that changes hourly, and no matter what, there'd be parents filing lawsuits about it. Back then we did what we were told or got sent to the principal who lectured us about the Soviet threat.