Book Review: The Glitter in the Green
In Search of Hunningbirds - by Jon Dunn
This book follows Route One to grab attention. Three hundred pages spread over ten chapters take you from ‘Migration’ to ‘The End of the World.’ The subtitle – In Search of Hummingbirds – is the author’s compass but his map is explained in the introduction. I was certainly green when I read the plan. He was setting out to see as many hummingbirds as possible across the family’s global range – all the way from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. However, this is no ‘Challenge Anneka’ race to the finish. En route, expeditions were needed to reach remote areas where unique species occur. Many are increasingly isolated due to human activities but others were crafted by evolution to live perpetually in the rarefied air of a few Andean valleys. I pulled on the seat belt, gulped down the introduction and hit the road. First stop Alaska.
I need to lay my cards on the table. I have only seen three species of hummingbirds. Having written that sentence I should perhaps check the latest world checklist of birds in case they have been split and I could be close to a ton. Not surprisingly, the current splitting mania was a bit of a headache for John Dunn too. My minimal exposure to the 350-strong family is tempered by the fact that everyone’s first hummingbird is an experience like no other. In a nutshell, it is hard to believe that the sheen and hum of a minute UFO is really coming from a bird and not an XXL insect. Just days after watching my first – a male Ruby-throated Hummingbird along the Massachusetts coast – I was at sea on a pelagic trip. Great Shearwaters and whales were the order of the day. Because it was the fall, the boat was frequently shrouded in mist. Blue skies hung overhead but nothing was visible at eye level. Then, in a Samuel Taylor Coleridge moment, a blip appeared and buzzed around the wheelhouse. It made a handful of circuits and departed, shifting like an arrow into the fog. We were thirty miles out in the North Atlantic and I’d just seen a migrating hummingbird. Although filled with admiration, I had a more pressing question for the skipper: what direction did it go and which way is Ireland? It went southwest, probably heading for Florida.
Migratory feats are de rigueur for hummingbirds living in Alaska. I did not know that. Sparks of information are imparted at relevant parts of the narrative. I preferred this to having all the nuts and bolts presented in a stand-alone ‘the life of a hummer’ section. Hence we discover that Jon Dunn’s first stop is to look for Rufous Hummingbirds, one of which flew 3,500 miles from Florida to Alaska in 2010. Imagine the size of its ring – although ringing a bird that small seems, somehow, immoral. I preferred another statistic. Apparently a hummingbird heart beats at 1,200 times a minute. I know that a healthy human heart beats around 80 times a minute. The rate didn’t intrigue me. Knowing how my pulse feels – roughly a beat per second – I did the maths. A hummingbird heart beats twenty times per second. Before I even got to the ‘action scenes’ I was enthralled.
I was expecting a dam-burst of unrecognisable names, places as well as hummingbirds. I was just about holding on to a smattering of familiarity with species that occur in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert and Chiracahua Mountains. But visions of John Wayne movies and sunlit canyons made verdant by cool waters disappeared in the rear-view mirror when, at a little over sixty pages, the narrative crossed the Mexican border. Chapter three – La Chuparosa: Mexico City and Jalisco – reeked of the unknown, an ornithological El Dorado. Because there are no photographs or illustrations (my copy was a proof, so even the cover was plain. The final version will include two sections of colour plates) I planned to use Google in order to get an idea of what the subjects looked like. Then a strange thing happened. I started to fall in love with the names that were so descriptive and evocative – Glittering-throated Emerald, Gould’s Jewelfront, Sparkling Violetear, White-chinned Sapphire, Harlequin Hummingbird. I did not want to see the true likeness; I preferred to imagine the magnificence. Jon Dunn did a great job in providing the words to light up my mind: ‘she [a Juan Fernandez Firecrown] was utterly beguiling, her plumage more sophisticated than that of the male. Her forehead, a shimmering blaze of heliotrope, merged into aquamarine on her crown, with spangled ultramarine jewels cascading from her throat down her white breast and flanks.’
The author also proved to be well-informed on many topics connected to hummingbirds. His chapter, ‘Fakes, Freaks and Phantoms’ was as engrossing as any historical novel. Then there was the dreaded topic of habitat loss. I winced when I read the quote from the twisted mouth of Brazil’s Bolsonaro: ‘I used to be called Captain Chainsaw, now I am Nero, setting the Amazon aflame.’ Fortunately not all the news was bad. In a delicious irony, set against the racist slurs directed by Trump at Mexicans, the best tidings came from there. Fears that Mexican cloud and tropical forest would disappear proved overly pessimistic: ‘that magical road is still there, wonderful hummingbirds still live there, and a new generation of active Mexican birders keep tabs on the place … the tiny Emerald-chins still flit and hover in the shadows, the big Garnet-throats still zoom through the fog of the cloud forest, and for the moment at least, all is right with their world.’
Much as I enjoyed the enlightenment, I came to regard time away from the field as ad breaks. This is not a criticism, more an indication of wanting to pick up the trail and fill my head with yet more close encounters of the hummingbird kind – the heavier the going, the better. As the scene shifted to increasingly ‘dodgy’ countries I was not disappointed. Here Jon needed help to reach the unreachable or, in Bolivia, save him from an unknown fate: ‘I began filming our rapid progress down the road on my phone, bursting through the debris of first one unmanned roadblock and then another. Before I knew it, we were braking hard and, in my phone’s screen, I could see a boy at the line of tyres looking at us, his face freezing … we were in trouble.’ An Ultra Pampers moment if ever there was one.
At times, just reading the book was an adrenaline burner. Epic quest followed epic quest. I was swept along, wide-eyed at the places, the friendly people and the nail-biting conclusion of wondering if, after all the effort, the hummingbird in question would materialise. Hold it right there. I need to qualify ‘friendly people’. Local people, particularly guides, were heroes in certain episodes. One Peruvian farmer, charmingly named Santos Montenegro, met some visiting western birders in 2000 and, realising that his farm held the species they sought – Marvellous Spatuletail, one of the rarest and most enigmatic hummingbirds – brought first them and, subsequently, a David Attenborough film crew, to his patch of forest. I found the scale of the tip he received – around £40 – mean. That was nothing compared to the selfishness of two Belgian bird photographers that removed feeders at an Ecuadorian lodge in order to deprive the many and concentrate a few hummingbirds at one feeder surrounded by flashguns. More proof that bird photographers are the new egg collectors.
Occasionally Jon Dunn expresses exasperation at situations he encounters, such as the plight of the breathtaking Juan Fernandez Firecrown, an endemic hummingbird restricted to the island where Alexander Selkirk (fictionalised as Robinson Crusoe) survived for four years as a castaway. Jon Dunn manages to save one by throwing a water bottle at a stalking cat. As well as cats, alien brambles are invading the hummingbird’s home and driving them towards extinction. A handful of dedicated locals are trying their best to save them – ‘they are the most beautiful and endangered birds in the world’. Addressing the birds’ peril, Jon Dunn calls a spade a spade – ‘nobody has yet dared to publicly suggest that domestic cats are a carbon-emitting luxury we should consider giving up for the sake of the environment.’
The mark of a great book is that you never want it to end. I was sad when I reached ‘game over’. But, just like the author, I hope the book will instil added interest in this galaxy of winged jewels and win more hearts and minds to protect them and the priceless habitats they call home.
Anthony Mcgeehan
15 Jun 2021
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- The Glitter in the Green In Search of Hummingbirds
- ISBN: 9781526613073
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