She lives unchaperoned. Not the kind of parentless existence teenagers dream of with no homework, curfew or dinner plates stacked with vegetables that had to be eaten before you could leave the table. It’s not like that.

Her dad died, suddenly, violently, most likely in a sword fight … it’s hard to tell. She found his body in the dirt between two rose trees. Several days later, her mom disappeared during a flash wind storm that destroyed their living space. Now Ruby lives on a branch, an elastic twig actually, in a gnarled old sweetgum tree.

Ruby’s life now is consumed by two things: looking for food and hiding. There’s free food in many yards by way of sugar-water feeders, but Ruby was taught that people who try to attract wildlife to their suburban homes are nut cases – hummingbirds today coyotes and mule deer tomorrow. Still, many Anna’s Hummingbirds (that’s what Ruby is) go for the colored water and they have been known to use their long, pointed beaks as swords to defend it, sometimes to the death, giving credence to Ruby’s theory that her dad somehow got in between some hummingbird amped up on sugar water and the human-made container that dispenses it.

Typically other hummingbirds are the only friendly winged creatures in a hummingbird’s environment, so without the tiny, teacup-shaped nest she was reared in, Ruby is always on guard. Her neighbors pretty much suck, starting with the crows. They’re big and strong and omnipresent. They bully and boss other birds around, they’ll eat anything and are perfectly content to steal or eat people-food crushed into the roadway. When they arrive Ruby takes flight.

Some of the other birds seem nice. Mourning doves seem kinda fat and soft, Ruby thinks, like an old grandma bird, but they’re not much for conversation and they sort of whimper when they fly which is irritating. There are finches and kingbirds and waxwings and sparrows and swallows … and turkey vultures, the 747s of the bird world, and while Ruby has never seen one up close (thank god) every so often one flies so high that it blocks out the sun, casting a shadow that frightens the hell out of her.

Ruby often shares a tree with a warbler, he has handsome yellow feathers and sings, well, sings like a bird. From Ruby’s perch, it gets monotonous and one day she asks the warbler, what’s up with that? The warbler said, “I’m told that if my singing’s real good, just the right pitch, other warblers will like me and that could mean more and better food and more chances for bird sex.”

What a freaky little dude Ruby thought, knowing that to a hummingbird, status only comes from how fast you can fly and what stunts you can do. Ruby has a red throat and a green back and chest but she looks brown unless she’s flying or the sun hits her just a certain way. She weighs maybe three grams. If she’s scared she can get close to a flight speed of thirty miles per hour and in a dive, she can reach flying speeds approaching fifty MPH.

Hummingbirds are a lot like people forced to spend every day at home because they’re afraid of germs, that is, they want to eat all of the time. In Ruby’s case, however, it is a physiological fact. She expends so much energy in flight that she constantly needs to replenish calories, so she sticks her beak into hundreds of flowers each day to extract the nectar that becomes her fuel. She rests on her sparse little branch and then makes trip after trip to the flowers around her two-or-three-square mile range.

Yesterday, Ruby saw a roadrunner and thought, that fuckin’ running around everywhere is for the birds. Why travel by foot if you have wings? Ruby’s mother always said that roadrunners come from Arizona and that if you even spend a little time in the desert, a screw will come loose.

So one day becomes the next. Some days the sun warms, some days angry birds force Ruby out her own tree. At midday, hummingbirds usually gather in small groups. It’s not a standing meeting or anything, just seems to happen. On one occasion, Ruby asks, to no bird in particular, “Is this all there is?” After several awkward hummingbird minutes, an old bird with a purple-gray throat says, “Of course not, there’s Mexico.”

“What’s In Mexico?”
“Didn’t your parents tell you?”
“The only thing I know about Mexico is that mom said the United States was Canada’s Mexico … whatever that means.”
“Well, we all fly there when it starts to get cold?”

I hope she comes back. It’s hard to make friends.

Photo credit: @Michael on VisualHunt.com / CC BY-NC-ND