Okay, so it’s kind of silly, but kind of fun too.  Today is the first day of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s March Migration Madness. Sixteen birds. Eight match-ups in this round. And, a really cool set of brackets, just like the basketball tournament.

Today it’s the barn swallow (Hirundo rustica) versus the tree swallow (Tachycineta bicolor).

Photo Credit: JayMilesPhotography via Compfight cc

Photo Credit: Kelly Colgan Azar via Compfight cc

I’m rooting for the barn swallow–the home team.  Some of the blue and rust colored birds spend the summer in New Mexico and raise their young here; tree swallows just pass through on their migration.

A few years ago I spotted my first barn swallows at a rest area on the west side of  I25, south of the Colorado border.  They had built their mud nests in the corners of the covered porch, or portal, of the little stucco-covered building.  The adults were flitting back and forth between the field and nest, catching insects on the fly to feed the hungry baby birds.  The travelers and swallows scarcely seemed to notice each other.

Tomorrow’s match-up: the yellow warbler versus the rusty blackbird.

Photo Credit: P. Nixon

The last day of September was warm, but the little bird hadn’t been able to find many petunia or geranium blossoms as she flitted from one yard to another.  Just before the sun went down she discovered a feeder filled with clear sweet nectar.  With no other birds around to taunt and tease her, she was able to drink her fill.  Afterward, she  perched  on a nearby line tied between two rough-hewn vigas, under cover, and fell asleep.

As the darkness deepened and the air cooled, her heartbeat slowed and body temperature dropped. Sometime during the night her toes loosened their grip, just slightly, and she slipped backward.

The next morning I found the hummingbird hanging from my clothesline.

That was more than two years ago and the memory of the little bird came back to me when I  saw Judy Tuwaletstiwa’s tzintzuntzun:awakened by a dream at the New Mexico Museum of Art (NMMoA).  It was a cold January morning and I wasn’t getting any work done so I took a break and went to the museum.

Tzintzuntzun (pronounced zin-zoon-zoon) is the indigenous Mexican word for hummingbird and Tuwaletstiwa’s piece celebrates the life of one of the tiny creatures whose nest and remains she discovered near her studio and preserved under plexiglass–the beak, a wing, sixty-four miniscule feathers painstakingly arranged in a grid.

I stood and examined  those feathers just like I had studied the bird on my portal.  She didn’t appear to be breathing as I took advantage of the opportunity to get an up close look; I thought she was dead.  While Dave carefully disengaged her feet from the cord, I held a paper bag.  It was then that we detected the tiniest of movements.

I traded the bag for a shoebox  and we set the hummingbird in the sun on our east portal so we could keep an eye on her while we ate a bowl of cereal.

Photo Credit: P. Nixon

Lanny Chambers, a hummingbird expert, has since told me that the bird was probably in torpor, a short-term state similar to hibernation, used by some animals and birds to slow their metabolisms, conserve energy,  and survive cold nights.  Normally, the bird would have roused herself shortly before sunrise.  Chambers thought the bird I found was probably an inexperienced youngster.

While we drank our coffee the bird began to stir.  She fluttered her wings, raising up a few inches, and within moments was out of the shoebox.  She paused for a moment on the branch of a pinyon tree and then took off.  She was headed south the last time we saw her.

Note:  I also discovered several thousand butterflies at the NMMoA and wrote about them in a guest post for their blog.

Tuesday is trash day and on that morning last week I was getting ready to leave town.  I made a quick pass through the pantry looking for stale cookies, dusty tins of unused spices, and out-of-date cake mixes to toss in my white trash bag .  I paused when I found a half-eaten bag of tortilla chips.  A few days earlier the flickers and woodpeckers had finished the last of the big blocks of bird seed that I hang in the backyard and I wasn’t going to have time to buy more before leaving.

I knew it probably wasn’t a good idea but I tossed the bag on the floor and crushed the chips underfoot.  On my way out to the trash bin I dumped the crumbs under the empty feeder.  It was  a couple of hours before I went back downstairs to see if  the birds had discovered the treat.  They had.  A Steller’s jay and a scrub jay were facing off across the mound of chips and, as I stood watching, a magpie showed up.

While the jays and magpies squawked at each other, a polite group of western bluebirds sat around the edge of the heated birdbath having a drink of water.

Photo Credit: chethan shankar via Compfight cc

Steller’s jays always remind me of moving to New Mexico.  Our first house was a dark, dingy little place that a friend nicknamed “the dumpalow”.   It had a sagging roof, stained, plush green carpet, and torn curtains.  The one bright spot was a built-in table in the kitchen at a large west-facing window. Just outside were two bird feeding stands–four-by-four posts set in the ground, topped with weathered plywood.  I started with cracker and bread crumbs and soon figured out the best place in town to buy seed.  Dave and I were delighted with the number of birds that showed up.  A favorite was the blue jay with the saucy black crest, like no other bird either of us had seen.

The Steller’s jay is native to the western United States and was described during the Kamchatka Expedition to what is now Alaska in 1741 by Georg Steller, the ship’s naturalist.  Long before the Russian explorers showed up the Makah people of Washington state called the bird kwish-kwishee and told this story about how it got its distinctive crest from a mink named Kwahtie with a bow and arrow.

Feeling a little guilty about feeding the jays junk food I sent an email to Wild Birds Unlimited.  Within a couple of days I received a polite response from Brian Cunningham in the hobby department.  He said that many birds do like whole dried corn or cracked corn, but had never heard of anyone feeding them tortilla chips.  He advised that foods processed for humans contain oils, salts, and seasonings that aren’t good for the birds on a regular basis, but conceded it probably wouldn’t hurt them this one time.  My thought exactly.