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The First Hummingbird Feeder

Yrette

A bottle, some sugar water, and something red: those are the ingredients, from Alaska to Trinidad’s Yerette and beyond. We tend to think of hummingbird feeding as a newish phenomenon, but get a load of this.

On January 15, 1698, Benjamin Bullivant wrote to the famous entomologist James Petiver with miscellaneous news from New England:

The Hum-bird I have shot with Sand, and had one some Weeks in my keeping. I put a Straw for a perch into a Venice Glass Tumbler, ty’d over the Mouth with a Paper, in which I cut holes for the Bird’s Bill (about as long and as small as a Taylor’s Needle) and laying the Glass on one Side, set a Drachm of Honey by it, which it soon scented, and with its long Tongue put forth beyond its Bill, fed daily; it muted [defecated] the Honey pure, and was a Prospect to many Comers; it flew away at last.

Guess what I’m going to be building next spring.

Ruby-throated Hummingbird

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Photo Quiz

A few years ago, Kenn Kaufman pointed out that the “photo quiz” was not an innovation of Birding or British Birds or Continental Birdlife.

No, the first birding photo quiz appeared in Bird-Lore in December 1900, with the intention, as Frank Chapman put it,

of arousing the student’s curiosity [and] impressing the bird’s characters on [her or ] his mind far more strongly than if its name were given with its picture.

In honor of the sesquicentennial of Chapman’s birth, coming up this summer, we’ll be “re-running” the Bird-Lore quizzes on and off over the next months.

Here’s one that seems especially timely:

Chapman photo quiz I

What is it? Please respond in the comments, and be sure that you include an account of how you identified the bird, not just its name.

And if you already played in 1900, please give others a chance before jumping in.

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Giddiness of the Head

Albin

At the end of his account of the Wood Lark, Eleazar Albin offers some practical advice to anyone keeping the species in captivity. Keep the cage clean, he says, and don’t hang it out in the rain. Feather parasites can be avoided by giving the birds fresh sand to dust in and letting them bask in the sun. And to cure

Giddiness of the Head, [caused] by too much feeding on Hempseed … give them Meal-worms, or Ants and their Eggs.

The males should be given liquorice, candy, and “a blade or two of Saffron once a Week”:

this makes him long winded, and lavish in his Song.

Not necessarily an advantage in a cagebird, I’d think.

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Eating Alcids

These past few chilly days have been the perfect chance to catch up a bit on the literature of Arctic exploration.

Exploring the Kamchatka in the early 1740s, Georg Wilhelm Steller observed murrelets on their breeding cliffs:

At night these birds stand in long rows on the edges of the cliffs, from which in their sleep they often fall into the water, and are in great peril of being caught by Arctic foxes, which commonly lie in wait for them at the base of cliffs. They breed in June; their eggs are green and almost as large as those of a hen; boiled, they harden somewhat, but they have an unpleasant taste; that notwithstanding, the inhabitants of the Kamchatka climb the highest cliffs in search of them, even risking their lives.

The adults, too, were highly sought after:

They capture them with nets, and in the evening with nooses, too, fastened to long, sturdy sticks; and these birds are so stupid and careless that even thought they see birds being taken right next to them, they keep standing still until they too have the noose around their neck.

Steller even preserves the local recipe:

They dig pits in the ground and roast the whole bird there, without plucking it or removing the innards, and when it is sufficiently cooked, they strip off the skin and eat it that way.

And so did Steller and his shipmates.

The meat is tough and sinewy, but … not bad, by the culinary standards of Kamchatka.

Me, I’ve been drinking a lot of hot chocolate and eating a lot of gingerbread.

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