Hummingbird Humans - The Model for a New Century?

Hummingbirds enjoy a drink of sugar nectar at the Wal-Mart feeder before a coming rain.

Volume 11, Issue 27

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Hummingbirds are one of the most interesting of God’s creatures. In the forested regions of the American West, human residents provide feeders for hummingbirds stocked with sugar water nectar as a favorite pastime.

On my property I have two such devices both of which attract the little fellows, but they do it much differently. Both feeders have glass reservoirs to hold the juice, and both have red plastic bodies, and flowers with yellow accents. Both a the bottles hold a little less than a quart of nectar which is all made in large batches, so the juice is essentially identical in each jug. (See the website article for pictures of hummingbirds and the feeders.)

One feeder has six feeding stations and came from Wal-Mart. The other, a much more sophisticated and engineered design, with four stations, was purchased from a farm and ranch supply known as Big R.

For reasons known only to the hummingbirds, the feeder from Wal-Mart continually feeds many more birds than does the Big R station. At times there is well over a dozen birds humming around the Wal-Mart, zooming here and there, grabbing quickly their chance to snap up a taste of sweetness. “Zoom, zoom, drink, and flit! Flit, flit, gulp, and zoom!”

Mean while at the Big R, three or four birds are sitting on the little perches drinking nectar at their leisure and to their fill. “Ah, life of a little hummingbird sure has good times such as this!”


Hummingbirds stop for a big gulp at the Big R feeder.

Do the hummingbirds for some reason seem to think that the nectar is different at Wal-Mart than at Big R? Just as in the real world, the prices for similar items are pretty much the same at both Wal-Mart and Big R. And just as in the real world, where the prices at Big R are a little more, those increased prices are generally reflected in higher quality. There is no difference in the nectar at either feeder.

There must be something that attracts more hummingbirds to the Wal-Mart feeder than the Big R feeder. Which brings up two questions for this article. Are hummingbirds similar in their marketing taste to their human counter parts? Second and potentially of deeper meaning, are hummingbirds as smart as humans, or have humans in this new century digressed to the intelligence of hummingbirds?

Before we look at these questions, it must be said that both humans and hummingbirds are still known for their industry. For humans to go to either Wal-Mart or Big R they must journey to Colville. The closest other locations for Wal-Mart or Big R are on the northern fringes of Spokane about sixty miles distant.

How far hummingbirds journey to my feeders I do not know, but it must be a comparable distance, in hummingbird scale, because I doubt that there is some grand design for hummingbirds to build hummingbird suburbs around human habitations. It would not be evolutionary wise to build such a sugar water paradise and then have the humans not show up on schedule to feed the little critters during the summer, or leave just when they have become accustomed to the free meals.

This evolutionary concept would also have to assume, as do many humans, that hummingbirds evolve in their lifetimes, not over eons of time. I would assume that hummingbirds adapt to their environment of that particular year and food supply. If there is a predominance of hummingbird homes near human habitation it may have to do with direct associations relating to natural habitat nothing more. So it seems just has with humans, hummingbirds seem to be attracted to Wal-Mart because it is showier than Big R.

Now for something more germane to this time in history. Hummingbirds are cute little fellows – we could call them lightweights. Humans really are not light in weight in the physical sense. In fact they are becoming more obese all the time. Perhaps that is because we spend too much time drinking sugar water, and not enough eating healthy food. Hummingbirds were designed to live on nectar from plants, and they seem to be able to handle our feeding sugar syrups with ease.

In the broader spectrum however, humans are becoming intellectual lightweights, not just in their shopping habits. Conservative commentators are becoming more frequent in their critique of President Obama’s decisions being lightweight and naïve. If you give these critics at least some merit in their observations, you must still admit that the President’s intellectual prowess is still at the top of Hells Canyon, while his fellow Democrat leaders are down near the Snake River, over a mile below.

When it comes to Republicans, it looks like Sarah Palin, by far the most popular political leader, decided to reassess her life and resign as Governor of Alaska. This was preceded by the sexual affair of Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina pretty much ending his political future. Here we have another extreme in physical distance, but at the same time there seems no substance of any Republican leadership in the intermediate distances either.

To put it bluntly in the summer of 2009, other than President Obama, who in either party is a serious political force in the United States as we hopefully move forward out of this economic situation?

Maybe the problem with America and the world for that matter really is not the problem with leadership per se, the problem is with humans that just want to congregate around the human hummingbird feeders, either Wal-Mart or Big R, rather than venture out into the big cruel world and find our own substance. America has no leadership, because as long as the human hummingbird feeders exist there is no real need for leadership.

President Obama so far has squandered an excellent opportunity to promote his vision of “Change we can believe in,” into actually “Change we can believe in.” Instead it has become a prescription for change that special interests and especially megalithic global financial institutions and corporations can “continue” to believe in. In that respect it is not really change at all, but a continuation of an unsustainable compassionate liberal rather than the quickly scuttled compassionate conservative of George Bush.

Both Bush and Obama seem to think that keeping the human hummingbird feeders full should be the prime focus of their presidencies. The problem is that the sugar water has turned to just plain water, and even that liquidity is in short supply when it comes to the excess of consumer goods the feeders were created to dispense.

It looks like the economic stimulus package that was “designed” to have unemployment peak at eight percent and by now return to a realistic seven percent, either was not all that well designed or the design criteria had no semblance to the real world. The unemployment rate of nine and a half percent just before the Independence Day holiday seemed to be in some other utopian hopeful world rather than real reality on planet earth.

All this means in simple terms, that even hummingbirds can understand, in an empirical sense man cannot and does not control the economic climate any more than he can control the physical climate.

With the passage of the recent “climate change” bill by the House of Representatives, the President used California as a leader in the way the rest of the country should manage its energy. However starting things off with an example of leadership, in which the example state is bankrupt and issuing IOUs for their debt generally is not a good place to begin a discussion.

California uses less energy than the rest of the nation because it has the most temperate climate in the country, hence it doesn’t need as much air conditioning in summer and heating in winter. Added to that, Californians have to import twenty percent of the energy they do use, because of environmental restrictions on new power plants, they can’t feed their own humming energy needs. I would suppose it is sort of a lightweight illustration to use for a good example: A dry hummingbird feeder. In more pithy terms to emulate a state that is financially and energetically bankrupt is not a good way to influence a skeptical audience to accept a seriously flawed bill and program.

Furthermore does this imply that bankrupting the country is acceptable so that we can attempt to save the earth for the pantheistic religion of global warming? At least Nancy Pelosi stated that the bill would create jobs, jobs, jobs, and more jobs. This is another figment of political fantasy, but at least that concept has the spin that might focus on the real need over the long run.

So for the present, since we really can’t tell one hummingbird from another, we must assume that hummingbirds are better off without real leaders or at least leaders we can tell as such. For once your feeder runs out of nectar hummingbirds adjust almost instantly. Once the feeder is refilled it only takes a short period of time and the whole group has returned.

As for we humans there are real doubts that our sugar water is ever coming back. In fact we have lost fortunes and significant retirement sugar stocks, by believing the prophets of continual sweet times. Furthermore the prophets seem to have a lightweight hummingbird view of good times are just another stimulus away, the last was too lightweight for the required sweet stimuli. It again is time for another big dose of debt stimulus sweetening.

Perhaps it is time for us to go out and prospect for our own plants that offer sweet nectar and not believe that humans are capable of providing a filled hummingbird feeder for more than a brief summer season.

Early in September, the hummingbirds no longer come to the full hummingbird feeders. It seems that they have answered a deeper call beyond an easy meal. That call was understood and required migration to warmer climates so that they could return to the northern forests and Wal-Mart and Big R feeders next spring. Sure enough those feeders are up and make the forest summer a pure delight, but if hummingbirds had decided to cancel the migration, those feeders would no longer be a gift for either the birds or the humans.

Will humans look at the world that has significantly changed seasons and say to themselves personally and collectively?

“What we need to do now that the sweet nectar of the feeders is gone, is to look to ourselves and to God’s order to find a better and more self sufficient way to feed ourselves and also the world. From now on we will take a pass on our perception of hummingbird logic. For it is written that humans were created in the image of God. Therefore we are to be stewards of God’s creation, not worshipers or gods of creation. We are smarter than God’s beautiful and industrious hummingbirds, therefore we probably should act that way.”

Therein lies the logic of America’s founders of 233 years ago. In some semblance of human intellect we must return to those roots and cast off the lightweight fantasies of our current sugar water diet.

Tags: hummingbirds, Wal-Mart, Big R, humans, leadership, Barack Obama, climate change, economic stimulus