Birds · plate 30 of 60
Hummingbird
Trochilidae
Eats every ten minutes. Crosses the Gulf of Mexico anyway.
Only 2.6% of people are Hummingbirds. (estimated)
If you're a Hummingbird
You run hot, fast and alone, and you get an astonishing amount done between meals. A hummingbird's heart can beat over a thousand times a minute, its wings blur at dozens of beats per second and it must feed roughly every ten minutes while awake; you have the same relationship with coffee. You guard your patch fiercely and fly off at the first sign of a slow conversation.
A ruby-throated hummingbird weighing less than a coin crosses the Gulf of Mexico, around 800 kilometers of open water, in a single non-stop flight.
The Hummingbird as a spirit animal
Matching a Hummingbird says you are energetic, independent and faintly terrifying for your size. You are bold with anyone who crowds your space, including people far bigger than you, and you cover more ground in a day than most people do in a week. The flaw is that you cannot idle: you need constant fuel and constant novelty, and you crash hard when either runs out. Eat something. Then go.
Grounded in how the species actually lives; nothing borrowed from anyone's tradition. Why we put it that way.
How to get along with a Hummingbird
Do
- Keep it short; they take in a lot per second and leave when the flow stops.
- Feed them. Often. Small amounts count.
- Give them their own patch and don't stand in it.
Don't
- Don't try to slow them down to your pace; theirs is the only one they have.
- Don't mistake small for harmless. Hummingbirds chase hawks.
When it goes wrong: A Hummingbird under pressure gets sharp and darty and will take on anyone in range; back off a step, offer sugar and let the engine cool before you continue.
The Hummingbird in a relationship
You love in bright bursts and move on fast. Male hummingbirds put on dazzling dives and then leave the female to build the nest and raise the chicks alone; whichever role you are in, you are more comfortable with intensity than with duration. The right partner has their own flowers.
Field notes
Every animal is placed on six personality traits derived from how the species lives. Your answers are placed on the same six, and the closest animal wins. How the scoring works
- Sociability
- 1
- Boldness
- 7
- Energy
- 10
- Curiosity
- 5
- Devotion
- 3
- Roaming
- 8
- Hummingbirds are the only birds that can hover for long periods and fly backwards, thanks to a shoulder that lets the wing trace a figure of eight.
- On cold nights a hummingbird drops into torpor, letting its body temperature and heart rate fall to a fraction of their daytime levels to survive until breakfast.
- Hummingbirds remember which flowers they have emptied and how long each takes to refill, and time their rounds accordingly.
Hummingbirds in literature
- Hummer — The Burgess Bird Book for Children, Thornton Burgess (1919)
- The Hummingbird — A Route of Evanescence, Emily Dickinson (1891)
- The Humming-Bird — Birds, Beasts and Flowers (Humming-Bird), D. H. Lawrence (1923)
Characters from public-domain works. Company, not a verdict.
Closest personalities
The animals whose profiles sit nearest to the Hummingbird's. If you got Hummingbird, one of these was probably your runner-up.
Other birds
EagleOwlRavenPeacockPenguinFlamingoAlbatrossParrotSwanWoodpeckerFalconOstrichPigeon
Among the 60
Popular Science Monthly, Popular Science Monthly (1874). Public domain, viacommons.wikimedia.org.All credits
