Kissing hummingbirds in Arizona

By Mark Carwardine, Mail on Sunday

Last updated at 11:15 20 August 2002

There's a rather embarrassing tradition in wildlife circles in certain parts of Arizona. Visiting naturalists are encouraged to try to 'kiss' a wild hummingbird.

This is more of a challenge for men than it is for women - mainly because it involves wearing lots of red lipstick. A dress and high heels are optional, but the redder and thicker the lipstick the better.

Hummingbirds drink nectar from flowers that are often bright red and have learned to associate this particular colour with food. The theory is they mistake your mouth for one of their favourite plants.

Which is how I found myself high in the mountains of South-East Arizona, looking like Tony Curtis or Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot, with puckered lips pointing skyward and a crowd of bemused onlookers egging me on.

My home for a couple of days was Beatty's Guest Ranch in the Huachuca Mountains near the Mexico border.

Run by Tom and Edith Beatty, the ranch is nearly 6,000ft above sea level, nestling between two enormous peaks, with spectacular views down the valley to the desert below.

According to the South-Eastern Arizona Bird Observatory, it is the hottest hummingbird-watching spot in the state.

Thousands of 'hummers' arrive in April and May and stay until early October. No fewer than 15 different species are found here on a regular basis.

Dozens of special hummingbird feeders, looking like upside-down jam jars, are dotted around the ranch. Hanging from trees, bushes, fences and buildings they are full of a simple magic potion (four parts water, one part white sugar) similar to the nectar of hummingbird flowers.

Tom and Edith keep the feeders topped up, getting through a mind-boggling 550 2lbbags of sugar in a typical year.

There were two feeders outside my bedroom window in the turn-ofthe-century self-catering cabin on the forest edge (not a good place to stay if you've seen Friday The 13th or The Blair Witch Project, but idyllic in every other sense).

I will never forget pulling back the curtains on the first morning. There were hummingbirds everywhere, whizzing backwards and forwards past the window like bees on speed.

Sometimes they paused in front of the sugar-water to feed, either perching or hovering with the immaculate precision of experienced helicopter pilots.

Apparently, it's possible to see as many as ten species at the ranch in just half an hour. But even when they stayed still for more than a few moments I had no idea which was which.

As they moved around, their colours changed in relation to the angle of the sun. Bird identification is hard enough at the best of times, but this was ridiculous. Their iridescent feathers seemed to wink on and off.

Take a male rufous hummingbird, for example. When you look at it face-to-face its throat is a fiery scarlet red. But as it turns away the colour shifts - first to orange, then yellow, then blackish-brown and then green.

Try identifying that in a hurry, before it turns into a blur and helicopters away.

I think there were Anna's hummingbirds, black-chinned, broadbilled, blue-throated, magnificent, rufous and violet-crowned that morning, but I'm not entirely sure.

Later, I asked other bird-watchers about similar-looking hummers around 'their' feeding station, but they weren't sure either.

I left them bickering over the difference between the sapphire blue throat of a broad-bill and the cobalt blue throat of a blue-throat.

The biological advantage of changing colour is that the birds can control the way they look. If a male wants to impress a female he shows his best side, but if he wants to hide from a predator he merely turns away and almost disappears among the foliage.

According to Sheri Williamson, hummingbird expert and cofounder of the South-Eastern Arizona Bird Observatory, you can tell them apart by the sound of their wings.

Broad-tailed hummingbirds, for example, have a metallic trill to their wingbeats, while male black-chinned hummingbirds make a dull, flat whine.

Sheri took me to see a hummingbird in the hand. There's a ringing station, or banding station as they call it in the States, at nearby Sierra Vista. It's open to the public and every weekend the observatory staff rig up a mist-net trap with a tasty-looking sugar-water feeder in the middle.

Whenever a hummingbird dares an investigatory hover, a burly member of the observatory team rushes forward, waving his arms around, and ushers the unfortunate bird inside.

We caught lots of hummingbirds that day. One was a female black-chinned that squealed when she was caught.

It was hard to tell whether this was out of fear or anger ('How could I, so fleet of wing, be caught by this enormous lummox?'). We found her abdomen distended with an enormous egg, which Sheri guessed would be laid before nightfall.

For a brief moment, I actually held the delicate bundle of feathers in my hand, and was so nervous about squeezing too hard that she escaped. After hovering above us for a moment, she made a beeline for the bushes.

Hovering hummingbirds draw crowds of naturalists from all over the world to South-East Arizona, but hovering does have one major drawback.

Pound for pound, beating your wings 70 times per second uses more energy than any other activity in the animal kingdom. Living life in the fast lane means hummingbirds need a continuous supply of fuel.

A typical hummingbird eats around half its own weight in energy-rich nectar every day. To do that it has to keep others away from its favourite foodplants.

I spent many hours watching these Samurai warriors in iridescent suits battle it out at feeding stations. Far from being all sweetness and light, they are little fighter pilots.

As Sheri commented, if they were the size of ravens it wouldn't be safe to walk in the woods.

Before I left, there was one thing I had to do. Dutifully, I put on bright red lipstick, took a mouthful of sugarwater, sat back, puckered my lips... and waited.

Within 30 seconds two hummingbirds came to investigate. Others soon followed.

I sat there for an eternity not daring to move. No hummingbird actually drank sugar-water from my mouth (who can blame them?), but several did hover so close I could feel their wingbeats against my cheeks.

Strangely, the encounter was every bit as impressive as rubbing shoulders with mountain gorillas in the wilds of Africa or performing slow-motion underwater ballets with dolphins in the Bahamas.

Even better, my biggest worry came to nothing - the red lipstick wiped off.

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