REVISITING: A Charm of Hummingbirds

The annual migration is about to begin, so my backyard is rife with inter-species fighting. Can't they all just hum along? WRITTEN AND ILLUSTRATED BY PETER MOORE

WHAT’S THE BUZZ? A charm of hummingbirds, of course. That’s what you call hummers when they gather in groups. And the more of those charms, the better. These jewel-like birds are pollinators, they keep the chickadees in line, and they beat their wings 53 times per second, on average.

Plus they’re so damn cute.

If Leo Tolstoy had written 53 words per second, he would have completed War and Peace in a little over three hours. Maybe if I drank hummingbird nectar (4:1 water to sugar ratio) my jokes-per-minute would improve?

Not so sure it would help my drawings, however. And I’ve never seen any good illustrations by hummingbirds.

Random hummingbird fact #1: They drink twice their bodyweight in nectar every day. For me to match their intake, I’d have to drink 2,400 pints of sugar water a day. Which wouldn’t leave much time to write/draw/paint.

Hummingbirds do excel at many other things, including:

Aerial battles amongst themselves. We have tw…