Wednesday Wonder

One time I sat in front of a Hummingbird feeder for at least an hour and I started noticing things I had missed before. One was that happy birds seem to come to rest and stop flapping their tiny wings when they feed. The agitated and frightened ones keep buzzing away while they drink, ever vigilant. It seems a waste of energy to keep flapping while feeding, kind of like keeping your engine running while you fill up your gas tank.

While I was watching this little drama a caretaker noticed that the feeder was getting empty and took it down to fill it. In just a minute, the Hummingbirds made another pass, expecting to find the feeder where they last drank from it. Although it was no longer where it used to be, the hyper little birds treated the air space it once occupied as though the feeder was still there. They flew, hovered and waited. Then they went away, came back and tried again. The result was always the same; there was no feeder where there once was. But that didn’t stop them. They continued acting as though it would be there, waiting for them.

Hummingbirds are not the little pacifists you might think. To say that they are territorial is an understatement. One of the most preferred aggressive techniques is to grab the long bill of another bird that is already feeding. This is akin to biting someone’s straw as they sip a soda, except that the straw is actually attached to their face. Most of the time they buzz one another in great displays of birdly bravado. Like World War I flying aces they practice spins, loop-to-loops and dives, though no one ever gets shot down.

So here they are, four or five of them, gathered in the place where the bird feeder used to be, and they declare all out war on one another for the sake of something that no longer exists. They keep zipping up and around the empty space just like it used to be in the old days. Like the Hatfields and McCoys they feud over matters they can hardly remember. Urgency so rarely depends on anything that is actually happening in the present.

Churches are like that sometimes, as are nations and lovers. They fight over things that used to matter but have long since been taken down. All the while they keep expending their dangerously short supply of energy for the sake of something that is not.

(Tim Carson, July 1, 2010)