NONFICTION
Ruby-Throat Fusion
by Gary Presley
It is late evening, and I have taken a book outside. I sit near a bird bath, one we've placed near the south wall of the house, where it rests surrounded with magnificent red salvia. It is August in a wet, warm summer, and the plants have flourished. There are hundreds of stalks, thousands of trumpet-shaped blossoms. And every one red, a glorious, powerful red, the red of a rooster's comb or a tomato ready to spill juice down your chin. Salvia is a favorite of hummingbirds, and one has come calling.
He is heard before he is seen. A hum. Low, powerful, but not loud. Unmistakable. A resonant throbbing, a beat so rapid it is driven into a blur of noise, first distant, and then close enough to feel as well as hear.
He is a ruby-throat, red on neck and chest, that red matching the salvia flowers, but most of his body is a mottled green, set off by iridescent patches. He is as long as my index finger, and perhaps twice as wide.
I am reading in the mellow light of evening sun, silent, motionless, book on lap, chin on hand. I breathe, I blink, but those movements must be nearly imperceptible to a hungry bird that consumes half its body weight in food each day in order to survive.
I hear the hum, hear it grow louder, and soon I see the bird begin to circle the perimeter of the patch of flowers. He pauses. His head swivels. He moves closer. His head swivels again, and he drops into the forest of red blossoms. I move only my eyes to follow his progress, and soon he is so near I feel the miniature windstorm raging off his wings.
I am in the presence of perfection.
His wings are a blur, of course, as I follow his movement. I know they beat at nearly one hundred times each second. They beat so quickly they seem to be a device upon which the little beast rides. He is not a bird. He is a pilot. It is an illusion, I know, but the wings blur into a solid line, and the bird's lower body flexes, moves, twists below it.
He is a surfer riding upside down on a whirlwind.
And, as he storms through the air, his head, with its needle-like beak, dips daintily into each salvia's trumpet blossom to pray for nourishment.
I marvel. I have seen hummingbirds at a distance. I have seen them through a window as they eat at a feeder. But I have never been within inches of one of the tiny wild creatures.
I am near pure sound and motion, compressed into a fusion of a few grams of living flesh.
I listen closely. Does the tone of the hum change as the little bird moves from blossom to blossom, stalk to stalk? I think it does. I know it is nothing more than the way his wings arch and flex as they push through the molecules of air, but I close my eyes and listen. Yes, it is there, the shift in tone and volume, but, when I open my eyes, what I see does not match what I hear, for the bird's working rhythm is steady and the sound changes constantly.
He moves, quickly, darting from blossom to blossom. He does not glide, or sail, instead he launches himself from flower to flower as if there is not time to eat enough. The body flexes and the head dips, and the pace never slackens.
Thirty seconds pass. More, perhaps. I breathe, I shift my eyes, but nothing more. And then it is over. He pops up, three feet above the flowers, spins on his axis, and jets off in an easterly direction, sound fading, bird reduced to a pinpoint, and then gone.
I look downward. The pages of the open book flutter in the evening breeze.
Gary Presley lives and writes at the edge of the Ozark Mountains. He's published in venues as diverse as Salon.com and The Ozark Mountaineer. See more of his work at www.garypresley.net.