Hummingbird

The hummingbird is a bird of the Americas alone, and it carried its greatest weight of meaning among the peoples of Mexico and the Andes. The supreme god of the Mexica (Aztecs), Huitzilopochtli, the god of the sun and of war who led his people to their promised land, bears a name meaning the hummingbird of the south, or the left-handed hummingbird, and warriors who died in battle or on the sacrificial stone were believed to be reborn as hummingbirds and butterflies, accompanying the sun across the sky. The tiny, brilliant, fierce and tireless bird was thus bound to the sun, to war and to the honoured dead.

The hummingbird's biology is extreme enough to rival its mythology: its heart can beat well over a thousand times a minute in flight, and to survive the energy cost each night many species enter torpor, a controlled, dramatic drop in metabolic rate and body temperature that can slow the heart to under fifty beats a minute, without which the bird would starve to death overnight given how little fuel its tiny body can store. It is also the only bird capable of sustained hovering and true backward flight, achieved by rotating its wings in a figure-eight rather than the simple up-and-down stroke of other birds.

Among the most famous of all images of the hummingbird is one of the vast geoglyphs of the Nazca of southern Peru, a bird traced in a single continuous line across the desert on a scale visible only from the air, part of a landscape of figures whose ritual purpose is still debated. Across the tropical Americas the hummingbird, which seems to hang in the air and to drink from flowers, gathered associations with the sun, with renewal and with joy, delight and vitality. Reborn warriors, the sun's companions and an emblem of brilliant life, hummingbirds carry a symbolism drawn from the bird's dazzling colour, its impossible hovering flight and its restless energy.

Hummingbirds are also key pollinators, and their long co-evolution with particular flowers is close enough that some plant species are pollinated almost exclusively by a single hummingbird species whose bill length matches the flower's own shape and depth; the loss of either partner threatens the other, and several hummingbird species are now listed as threatened or endangered by habitat loss across their range, giving the bird bound up with the sun and the honoured dead a genuine and current conservation stake as well. Hummingbirds are found nowhere outside the Americas, roughly three hundred and sixty species confined to the New World, which is why no comparable hummingbird symbolism developed in Old World traditions; European and Asian cultures instead read similar meanings of swiftness and delight into their own small, fast-flying birds.