crowned fairies, red-tailed comets and amethyst woodstars, rainbow-bearded
thornbills and glittering-bellied emeralds, velvet-purple coronets and golden-
bellied star-frontlets, fiery-tailed awlbills and Andean hillstars, spatuletails and
pufflegs, each the most amazing thing you have never seen, each thunderous
wild heart the size of an infant’s fingernail, each mad heart silent, a brilliant
music stilled.
Hummingbirds, like all flying birds but more so, have incredible
enormous immense ferocious metabolisms. To drive those metabolisms they
have racecar hearts that eat oxygen at an eye-popping rate. Their hearts are
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built of thinner, leaner fibers than ours. their arteries are stiffer and more taut.
They have more mitochondria in their heart muscles—anything to gulp more
oxygen. Their hearts are stripped to the skin for the war against gravity and
inertia, the mad search for food, the insane idea of flight. The price of their
ambition is a life closer to death; they suffer more heart attacks and aneurysms
and ruptures than any other living creature. It’s expensive to fly. You burn out.
You fry the machine. You melt the engine. Every creature on earth has
approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend
them slowly, like a tortoise and live to be two hundred years old, or you can
spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old.
