NEXT AVENUE - SPECIAL SECTION
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Hummingbirds: More Than Little Blurs at Your Birdfeeder By Craig Miller
Jon Dunn summed up his passion for hummingbirds succinctly. "You're dead inside if you don't like hummingbirds," he says. The 48-year-old naturalist and photographer’s paean to the tiny flying gems, "The Glitter in the Green," chronicles Dunn's far-flung travels to find and photograph the birds he describes as being "dipped in rainbows."
the natural world as a resource to be used by us. Generally, in the wild we can't get that close to things, but hummingbirds are different. Even in the wild they'll feed, relatively unconcerned by our approach. They just do not perceive us as a threat. And I think that deep down that's really reassuring for us. Next Avenue: They're also some of the most remarkable little machines in the animal kingdom. They really are. Their hearts can beat a thousand to one thousand and two hundred times a minute, which, when you think that our average heartbeat is about eighty beats per minute, that's amazing in itself. And at night, of course, they've got to sleep and they can't feed. And so, the whole hummingbird kind of shuts down and they enter a state of torpor and they slow their heartbeats right down to under a hundred beats per minute, so its energy requirements are just pulled right back. And then when day breaks and the hummingbirds awaken, they effectively reanimate and come back to life. Next Avenue: And somehow, they have the energy to migrate thousands of miles every year.
Next Avenue tracked down Dunn at his lair in the Shetland Islands (just north of Scotland) and asked him to share some insights from his book. Next Avenue: You've photographed and written about all manner of wildlife, but hummingbirds are the only species to which you've devoted an entire book. It seems from your writing that it's their tenacious personality as much as their color that attracts you. Jon Dunn: Yeah, my theory is that we're used to a lot of wildlife treating us with caution and we've given them ample cause to do so. You know, we've had millennia now of treating
Yeah, that's right. The rufous hummingbird -- it's one of the smaller
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