doyle_joyas_voladoras - Joyas Voladoras Brian Doyle FROM...

Joyas Voladoras
Brian Doyle
F R O M T H E A M E R I C A N S C H O L A R
CONSIDER THE HUMMINGBIRD for a long moment. A hummingbird's heart beats ten times a
second. A hummingbird's heart is the size of a pencil eraser. A hummingbird's heart is a lot of the
hummingbird. Joyas Voladoras, flying jewels, the first white explorers in the Americas called
them, and the white men had never seen such creatures, for hummingbirds came into the world
only in the Americas, nowhere else in the universe, more than three hundred species of them
whirring and zooming and nectaring in hummer time zones nine times removed from ours, their
hearts hammering faster than we could clearly hear if we pressed our elephantine ears to their
infinitesimal chests.
Each one visits a thousand flowers a day. They can dive at sixty miles an hour. They can fly
backward. They can fly more than five hundred miles without pausing to rest. But when they rest
they come close to death: on frigid nights, or when they are starving, they retreat into torpor, their
metabolic rate slowing to a fifteenth of their normal sleep rate, their hearts sludging nearly to a
halt, barely beating, and if they are not soon warmed, if they do not soon find that which is sweet,
their hearts grow cold, and they cease to be. Consider for a moment those hummingbirds who did
not open their eyes again today, this very day, in the Americas: bearded helmetcrests and booted