April 8, 2004 - Located on the outskirts of Oroville off Cherokee Road at the base of Table Mountain is the 1849 Thompson Flat Cemetery. It is a peaceful place of old tombstones and blue oak trees residing unscathed near the Diversion Dam and railroad, surviving earth-altering operations from the time of the miners to the construction of Oroville Dam. The site has descended from a time when ambitious gold hunters thrived at the settlement of Thompson Flat where even future California governor George Perkins tended a store.

In talking to my neighbor, Tod Fryer, he told me about a hummingbird nest he had discovered in the cemetery, "in a cedar down low where you could get a good photo." Knowing the elusiveness of tracking down things like bird nests and agate beds, I picked Tod up and took him to show me. There it was–plastered among cedar cones on a low limb perfectly camouflaged among the boughs–the nest of an Anna’s hummingbird! Short of an accidental observation, I would never have found the golf-ball sized nest made of lichens and mosses and smoothed to resemble the gray cones.

The nest owner arrived and followed us around the cemetery as if inquiring about our intrusion, perching on limbs like some diminutive space creature from another dimension. You could barely see the silent ghost, yet, those gleaming eyes of life were upon us among the dead stones and buried bodies of the graveyard. A colossal amount of work had gone into that nest construction and there would be protest if we interfered.

During the following days, I found myself returning to the graveyard to check on the hummingbird. On the first visit, the lady was on the nest, hunched down on the seemingly insufficient creation like a napkin stuffed into a play-house teacup, and she held her position, dark eyes gleaming like the living jewels they were, even as I set up a step ladder and a long telephoto lens. A nice pose but she was off like a flash, not intending to endanger her life no matter how devoted she was to her project, and I had to be contented with a photo of the nest. You can do only so much to ward off monsters when you’re three inches and three grams. Discretion is perhaps the better part of valor, especially if you’re dwarf size, although I have seen hummingbirds attack hawks that get too close to their territory.

At other times, I would find the nest empty-looking from my ground angle, and I would sit down on the nearby bench to think like a hummingbird. After laying two pearl-white eggs the size of a pea, the female attends the nest while her husband sucks flowers and sits on branches to flash feathers indicating an occupied territory. In fact, the Audubon Book of Birds tells me that only the female sits on the nest about 16 days to incubate the eggs, maintaining a constant temperature when it is ordinarily common for hummers to become torpid on cool nights to conserve energy. Since hummingbirds start nesting early when cold temperatures may linger, or mountain species contend with high altitude coldness, juggling the need for nectar and the need to keep the eggs a constant 93 degrees is a formidable task. Building thick insulated nests under tree boughs helps.

"How does she do it?" I would sit there and muse. She would have to have food during those 16 days of incubation, and a ready source might be a couple miles away in Oroville. She couldn’t be gone long or the eggs would chill. Evidently the male does none of the nest sitting, according to studies...but I wondered if he helped set when a cold spell struck. I wondered if she came to our back-porch sugar-water feeder in town. Hummers come and go from a number of feeders in the community, and very few of their nests are ever discovered. I spent some time there wondering in the deathly silence of the graveyard.

Perhaps I was underestimating a hummingbird’s strength and determination. It is known that some species fly long distances in migrating, including a 600-mile flight across the Gulf of Mexico non-stop. The mere fact that they can flutter those wings in blurring rapidity and hover in the air like a helicopter suggests a creature of unusual powers. And yet, the calliope hummingbird is 2 3/4 inches long and 2.5 grams–the smallest bird on the North American continent, and the male, which is smaller than the female, has been observed lifting his stunned mate by the bill three feet into the air, according to reports given to Audubon’s John K. Terres!!

I suspected that the buried emigrants must have also noticed hummingbirds, just as the Spanish had seen them in the 1700's and prehistoric Indians 12,000 years ago. How long has the Anna’s hummingbird species been in existence? Ten million years? Or even back to the days of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, or mastodons a million years ago? Maybe God loved hummingbirds since over 330 species exist–but only in the Western Hemisphere! However, 98 out of 100 species of animals on earth are invertebrates, including over 400,000 beetles!

Then one day I looked up at the nest, and two tiny beaks were protruding over the edge. At first I thought they were thorns, but finally one moved and actually stretched its partially feathered wing! The beaks were up and ready to be filled. Mom was evidently out there stuffing on salvia suds.

On a cold darkened April 17^th day threatened with storm, I found the nest empty. The odyssey was over. The cemetery was again deathly quiet without even the stir of a breeze. It was as if life had been taken away from the enclosure. I got the ladder and climbed up there and for the first time peeked into the nest. The interior was of the softest down, but bird growth had out-grown the cup, and maybe the youngsters were flying from flower to flower, maybe tutored by the progenitor, adding some more life to life.

The other side of the coin was the possibility that something had happened, like a scrub jay or crow taking the young, but from the sign of defecation on nearby cedar cones, it appeared that one had sat there a day or two, savoring the region outside the family circle nest, and hopefully, those tiny wings became stronger, and it had fluttered away outward bound into glorious space!

I had mentioned to Tod what a nice display the limb and nest would make in the Feather River Nature Center, but it was his call since he found the nest. However, after reading about the Anna’s, I find that they sometimes have two broods per year. Now why would she want to go through all that again? Also stated is the fact that they often use the same nest site again next season, so what was found natural will be left natural to evolve with the times. After all, it would be extremely interesting to check next year to see if the nest drama happens again.

If those cemetery human spirits are tethered to their tombs in some way, watching the world pass by, perhaps they feel deprived of the tiny feathered angels that graced the graveyard for awhile. "The shell must break before the bird can fly," said Tennyson. The shell broke.

Hummingbird

"Darting, hovering, helicopter

Fueling at a flower

Tell me how your engine heart

Generates such power."

–Joel Peters

From "Frustrated Engineer."