America’s Hummingbirds, the “Miracle of All Our Wing’d Animals”

In the precarious early days of the American colonies, European settlers mostly deemed birds worthy of attention to the degree that they could help them scratch out a subsistence. Yet even though it had no practical use, the miniscule hummingbird immediately captivated colonizers with its “variable glittering Colours”[1] and pugnacious behavior. In 1680 one educated Bostonian called them “the bird of the greatest rarity in this place, if not in the world,”[2] while in 1709 the English naturalist and explorer John Lawson called them “the Miracle of all our wing’d Animals.”[3] To William Wood, who wrote of his experiences living in Massachusetts colony in 1634, they were “one of the wonders of the country,” with colors “glorious as the Rainebow.”[4] Evidently he felt they were too wonderful for a land as savage and devoid of civilization as America, writing:

The Humbird for some Queens rich Cage more fit
Than in the vacant Wilderness to sit.

Some early settlers questioned whether hummingbirds were even birds at all. In 1653 the Dutch settler Adriaen van der Donck wrote that there was disagreement about whether hummingbirds were in fact birds, or rather “West India bees”, as they were also called in New Amsterdam (today’s New York). Their feathers, wings and beak indicated that they were birds, but the use of their beaks to “[suck their] nourishment from flowers”, and the humming noise they make when they fly, suggested that they might instead be insects. Van der Donck did not indicate which side he took on this debate.[5]

Hummingbirds in New England

There are over 350 species of hummingbirds, and all of them can only be found in the Americas. Most kinds of hummingbirds live in the tropics of Central and South America, where the flowers they depend on for nectar are available year-round. A dozen or so types of hummingbirds venture into the American West, but only the ruby-throated hummingbird – just one errant species from what is otherwise a vast family of tropical birds – makes its way up to New England. 

While the northeast is blessed with flowers every spring and summer, the blossoms fade away every fall, and so do the hummingbirds. In 1671, the English writer John Josselyn, after visiting Massachusetts, accounted for the annual disappearance of this “least of all birds” by reasoning that “they sleep all winter,” after which they emerge to lay eggs that are “no bigger than a white pease.”[6] The truth is more fantastical than what Josselyn imagined. These minute birds instead embark on a tremendous migration to winter in Mexico or Central America, repeating the same journey in reverse each spring. For many, this involves crossing the Gulf of Mexico in one single leap, a grueling 500 mile direct flight. To perform this feat, each bird must cover a distance 10 million times greater than its body length in just 18 to 24 hours. For a human, an equivalent journey would be like traveling halfway around the world on foot.

Procuring Humming-birds 

No other bird inspired such great fascination as the hummingbird, which inevitably led to attempts to catch, contain, and preserve them. One ingenious method of catching the birds, recalled by Penny Williams, who had been enslaved on a North Carolina plantation prior to the Civil War, was to soak flowers in whiskey, which a hummingbird would “suck till he gits drunk an’ can’t fly ‘way.”[7] John James Audubon, in catching the birds to study and paint in the 1830s, fired a shotgun loaded with sand to kill the birds. His preferred method for catching them alive was with an insect-net, and “were this machine used with dexterity, it would afford the best means of procuring Humming-birds.”[8]

Children too were enchanted by these fantastical creatures – in 1709 John Lawson described how children would catch hummingbirds while they were buried deep inside of flowers, drinking their nectar. Lawson wrote that the children would then “keep them alive for five or six days”;[9] he did not clarify whether their period of confinement came to an end with their death or release. The Philadelphia painter, collector, and naturalist Charles Wilson Peale had a little more success keeping the birds alive. The hummingbirds he held captive for over a year spent their days zipping through his house, chasing after dust motes suspended in sunlight, or resting on his wife’s shoulder to be fed with sugar-water.[10]

Hummingbirds on Hats 

In 1810 Alexander Wilson wrote that hummingbirds are “one of those few birds that are universally beloved.”[11] This widespread affection did not mean that hummingbirds were protected, however. In 1653 van der Donck wrote that hummingbirds were very difficult to keep alive, but one could “prepare and preserve them between paper, and dry them in the sun, and send them as presents to our friends.”[12] For the next 250 years, hummingbirds would make their way into collections and jewelry just like the emeralds and rubies to which they were sometimes compared. 

During the second half of the 19th century, wearing the feathers or entire bodies of birds on hats and jewelry came into fashion, and hummingbirds were suddenly harvested at an industrial scale. Jewelers used the “brilliant heads of the humming-bird family, set as necklets, ear-pendants, brooches, etc.”[13] Milliners placed the birds on hats of every fashion imaginable – in 1889, you could buy a “turban of old-blue velvet” with “trimming of a monture of fancy feathers and a cluster of humming-birds”, a toque with “two narrow bands of humming-bird trimming”, or a capote with “diadems of humming-birds placed behind folded brims of maroon or bronze velvet.”[14] At its peak, the fashion industry in New York, Paris, and London processed hundreds of thousands of hummingbirds every year, harvested from North America to the Amazon, in so many hues that “a case of ‘various humming’ is as full of surprises as that ancient toy the kaleidoscope.”[15] It wasn’t until 1918 that the birds received complete federal protection with the passage of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

Early European colonists in America reacted to hummingbirds with an understandable mix of scientific objectivity, innate curiosity, and delight – along with impulses to acquire, tame, and conquer, which have fortunately now been curtailed by law. Of course, hummingbirds had a prominent role in indigenous American societies long before European colonization, and for more on that topic I would recommend watching Noah Comet’s presentation on the cultural history of hummingbirds:

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[1] Josselyn, John. New-England’s Rarities Discovered in Birds, Beasts, Fishes, Serpents, and Plants of that Country. United States: W. Veazie, 1865.
[2] Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, vol. 5. United States: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1848, p. 25.
[3] Lawson, John. A new voyage to Carolina: containing the exact description and natural history of that country ; together with the present state thereof ; and a journal of a thousand miles, travel’d thro’ several nations of Indians ; giving a particular account of their customs, manners, etc. [London: s.n. Printed in the year 1709]
[4] Wood, William. Wood’s New-England’s Prospect. United Kingdom: The Prince Society, 1865.
[5] Donck, Adriaen Van Der, and Jeremiah Johnson. Description of the New Netherlands. New York, 1841.
[6] Josselyn, 1865.
[7] Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 11, North Carolina, Part 2, Jackson-Yellerday. 1936, p. 404.
[8] Audubon, John James. The Birds of America. United States: J.J. Audubon, 1842.
[9] Lawson, 1709.
[10] Wilson, Alexander., Bonaparte, Charles Lucian. American Ornithology: Or, The Natural History of the Birds of the United States, Volume 2. United Kingdom: Chatto and Windus, 1876.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Donck, Adriaen Van Der, and Jeremiah Johnson, 1841.
[13] “Only a Feather,” Millinery Trade Review, vol. 1, no. 11, November, 1876, p. 132
[14] “New York Millinery,” Millinery Trade Review, vol. 14, no. 9, September, 1889, p. 17
[15] Millinery Trade Review. United States: Marriotte & Company, vol. 1, 1876, p. 36.

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