Hummingbirds: Warrior birds and feathered jewels

Rosa Dyer
7 days ago
8 min read

Welcome to the second episode of this Animal Highlights series where we are exploring the theme of animals, collecting and museums. I’m really excited about this week’s episode because we are focusing on one of my favourite animals, hummingbirds! These tiny, fierce birds are some of the most beautiful and iconic animals found in the Americas, and they understandably have been a focus of fascination, mythology and art for many cultures across the world. In this episode we talk about hummingbird ecologies, as well as their representation in Latin American mythologies. We also talk a bit about their strange role in the relationship between Euroamerican natural history and Victorian fashion industries.

Object Focus: A Victorian Feather Fan

As with most of the episodes in the Animal Highlight series, the starting point for this episode comes from an object in a museum. In this case, a beautiful feather fan that is on display in the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, UK.

Woman's feather fan with ivory handle, Pitt Rivers Museum (1944.10.81). Source: Pitt Rivers Museum

While we don’t have a whole lot of information about its precise history, it was likely made sometime around the mid-19th century, before coming to the museum in 1944. It follows a trend in Victorian fashion for accessorising with brightly coloured feathers, beetles and stuffed birds, a trend known as the “Brazilian style”. At least parts of this fan were likely made in artisanal manufacturing houses in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, where the production of imitation flowers made with bird feathers rose to international prominence in the first quarter of the 19th century. It exists in the same world as some of the objects discussed last week in relation to the Huia, reflecting a European trend for bird taxidermies incorporated into woman’s fashion accessories.

The fan is circular in shape, and primarily constructed out of an array of colourful feathers, bird taxidermy and bright green beetle wing covers (or elytra). The main body of the fan is arranged to resemble something that to me looks like a mix between a bird's nest and the unturned face of a fantasy flower, and is mounted on a carved ivory handle. Around the edge are bright orange and blue parrot feathers, most likely from the wings of a species of Amazon parrot found in rainforest environments in South America. Towards the centre, the flower is lined with white fluffy down feathers, possibly from a swan. But it is the central component of the piece which draws the eye most compellingly: nestled in the centre are two tiny taxidermized hummingbirds, one a rich iridescent navy blue with chocolate brown undertones and the other a bright green and blue. I’ll be honest, I have tried to identify the exact species of hummingbird, but the skins are somewhat degraded and the way they have been mounted on the fan make it quite difficult to identify them just from visual analysis. They are posed as if in flight and are surrounded by tiny imitation roses, also made from red and green bird feathers and decorated with sparkling green beetle wings. The overall effect is a bit hard to describe; on the one hand, the level of skill and intricate detail taken to create the object is undeniable, yet at the same time I must admit these tiny bodies suspended in an imaginary flight pose, intended to invite talk and wonder when shown off at Victorian parties do make me feel a little uneasy.

Hummingbird Ecologies

It was this feeling I had about the fan, and how it intersected with my first-hand experience of seeing wild hummingbirds in South America that got me thinking about these types of hummingbird fashion objects a bit more critically. I was really lucky last year to be able to take part in a bird monitoring project in the cloud forest of Ecuador, where we caught, examined and collected data on live hummingbirds. This experience totally changed my perception about these birds, and so before talking more about the specifics of how hummingbird bodies came to be within museum collections, I think we first need to talk about the life histories and ecologies of hummingbirds when they are alive.

Found only in the Americas, there are 363 species of hummingbird, all classed within the family Trochilidae. They are found all the way from Alaska to the Tierra del Fuego, but the majority of species live within Central and South America. They are the world’s smallest birds, and I think some of the most extraordinary. They have the fastest metabolism of any bird or hot-blooded mammal, their hearts beat around 1,200 times a minute and their bodies can reach temperatures of over 40 degree Celsius! They are mostly nectivorous, living off a high energy sugar diet of flower nectar, which requires them to be constantly feeding when they are active during the daytime. This high-speed life requires them to be hugely acrobatic flyers, they flit around at high speed (30- 60 mph), beating their wings up to 80 times a second to enable them to hover in front of flowers and lick up nectar with their highly specialised tube shaped tongues.

One of the things that made me love these birds when I saw them in Ecuador was how feisty and aggressive some of them can be, some species are highly territorial and will fiercely guard flowers or hummingbird feeders against rivals. Some species even have serrated edges on their long beaks to enable them to defend their resources more effectively! I love the below video by Ze Frank on Youtube who gives a brilliant overview of their feisty nature (CN: some adult humour)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Biagyb7AcK8

Hummingbirds in Latin American Indigenous mythologies

The fierce nature of these tiny birds is reflected in their presence in Latin American Indigenous mythologies. Interestingly, across central and south America, hummingbirds are characterised in Indigenous cultures in fairly consistent ways. In a study from 2016, Nicole Sault notes that hummingbirds are repeatedly represented as highly resourceful, acrobatic warrior birds, often associated with combat, life, death and fertility in South and Central American cultures. For example, among both the Maya and Aztec peoples, the hummingbird was seen as a warrior, who used their sharp bill and agility to win battles against enemies, and those who died in battle were sometimes believed to return as hummingbirds. In the Shuar culture in Ecuador, the hummingbird or jempe is the being which brings fire to the people, using its speed and cunning to steal it from the cave of an enormous giant. Their characterisation seem, understandably, to reflect the ecological and behavioural realities of the birds themselves: quick, acrobatic fliers (allowing them to outsmart giants to steal fire, or travel deftly between the realms of life and death), aggressive defenders of territory (warriors) and pollinators of flowers (symbols of fertility)

Huītzilōpōchtli, the Aztec god of Sun and War, whose name translates as "hummingbird on the left", depicted in the Codex Telleriano-Remensis — *Huītzilōpōchtli*, the Aztec god of Sun and War, whose name translates as "hummingbird on the left", depicted in the Codex Telleriano-Remensis

What I find especially interesting is that there is very little acknowledgement of these fierce warrior characteristics in European representations of the birds, either in fashion or European natural history in the 19th century.

Hummingbirds in European Natural History Illustrations

One of the things we didn’t talk too much about when introducing the lives of hummingbirds earlier in the episode, is their beauty. They are undeniably spectacular animals, and across the nearly 400 species, their plumage displays a huge variety of colours, and forms of brilliant glittering iridescence, often bright blues, greens, purples and reds. While Indigenous mythologies around hummingbirds tend to reflect aspects of their ecology and life habits, it was their visual splendour upon which Euro-American interest was decidedly centred. Just as we saw with the Huia, the systems of extraction and consumerism which entangled the Huia within the worlds of Western science and fashion are also central to the story of the hummingbird and how it comes to be placed at the centre of our feather fan.

From the mid-19th century onwards, many naturalists in America and Europe sought to record the natural history of birds around the world. However, hummingbirds presented a problem for ornithologists outside of Latin America: while other birds such as parrots and macaws had already been removed and shipped to Europe as pets by the 19th century, the size and high metabolisms of hummingbirds meant they could not survive the processes of capture and transport by boat to Europe in the same way. This meant the only way for Europeans to encounter hummingbirds without travelling to the New World was either as dead specimens or through the illustrations of naturalists.

One American, Martin Johnson Heade set out to Brazil in 1863 with the intention in his words, to “paint these winged jewels, the hummingbirds, in all their variety of life”. He called the series of illustrations “The Gems of Brazil”. This title I think exemplifies the Euro-American imagination around hummingbirds, which positioned them alongside other materials like gold, rubies or diamonds, as natural resources of beauty which could be obtained and transported into Europe. This categorisation seems to be inherently linked to colonial extractivist mindsets around Brazil and the New World in general, that is, as a land of high value exotic resources (both biological and mineral) which could be removed for the enrichment of Euro-American higher classes.

*Orchid and Hummingbird near a Mountain Waterfall (1902), oil on canvas by Martin Johnston Heade. Public domain image*

In Heade’s illustrations, you can see there is a specific interest in communicating the visual splendour of the hummingbirds. The scenes focus on the bright colours of the birds, they are positioned ornately in tranquil poses next to similarly colourful flowers and foliage. This primary association with flowers is also reflected in how the hummingbirds on feather fans are positioned, and several scholars such as Patricia Dalcanale have noted a clear connection between the particular flight poses of hummingbirds in natural history illustrations and the positioning of hummingbird taxidermy in woman’s fashion. It seems clear that the makers of these objects were taking inspiration from their representations in natural history publications.

The flat form of the fan provides a stage for exploring interactions between hummingbirds and flowers, but in a very particular and stylised way. Fans provide a surface for engaging on some levels with the ecology of the birds, but not others. The relationship between hummingbirds and flowers is in part acknowledged, yet the flowers themselves are unrealistic, often modelled from roses or camelia’s, which are rarely the true foods of hummingbirds in the wild. The high speed, combative nature of the birds is notably absent in both the illustrations and the fashion items, the birds are instead presented as docile, ornate things of beauty, to be gazed at as one might a precious jewel.

A process of pacification?

What strikes me most about these processes of capturing hummingbird bodies for European audiences through natural history illustration and fashion accessories, is that there is a particular process of pacification which separates the lived ecological realities of the birds. It transforms these tiny, fierce warrior birds into passive feathered jewels. Whereas in Latin American Indigenous mythologies, the hummingbird is consistently seen as a highly independent, strong and fierce being, aligned closely with heroes and warriors, in its translation to European audiences, the hummingbird's symbolic resonance is transformed into the delicate, feminine, fragile and gentile. Perhaps it was the very fact these birds could not survive their removal from their natural habitat to European soils that solidified the impression of fragility? In the absence of being able to show European audiences the ecological realities of the birds in motion, both naturalists and craftspeople instead chose to emphasise the visual elements of the birds, something which particularly in the case of taxidermy, was an effect deemed to be preservable even through the processes of capture, killing and transportation across the Atlantic.