I have a strange but positive issue with the cucubrita family. This family includes pumpkins, squash, zucchini, cucumbers etc.
You see, I grow a lot of them, cook and eat them, and also pressure can and preserve those that I cannot eat in time. In the process, I cut and clean them before cooking or canning. I separate the seeds and preserve them. But, a few seeds escape the separation, or are knowingly discarded because they appear thin or somehow unappealing. So, all these left over seeds end up with the pulp and often into my vermicompost bin. A few times, it gets recycled by going out from the bin on to my garden beds. A few times the composted soil containing the bins spill over and land outside of vegetable beds.
What is interesting, is that much of these seeds remain alive and viable. So, at the right time in the season, they suddenly sprout, in unexpected places. How unexpected? Well, they crop up on the ground in my backyard, or in corners of vegetable beds designed for other plants such as tomatoes. They even sprout inside my vermicompost bin.
Since they produce food – dense and nutritious food, and I like them, I do not like to kill these suddenly appeared sprouts. Given a chance I transplant them to a proper bed, or try to let them grow right on the ground, if it is not in my walk path.
One that grew on the ground next to my vegeie beds
Now, the thing is, all these cucubrita plants looks somewhat similar when they first sprout. Their primary leaves that point down while pushing through the soil by their “shoulder”, usually yellow in colour, looks nearly indistinguishable, except perhaps in their size. For example, a cucumber seed is similar shaped but smaller, so the original sprouted leaves are also smaller. So, I usually do not know what kind of plant this will be, within the family. But by the time secondary leaves come out and starts growing, the distinctions appears. Each of these leaves have their own unique pattern. I can more or less identify proper pumpkins, although there are way too many varieties within pumpkins themselves. Then there are the squash varieties, a huge diversified group. Then there are gourds, cucumbers etc.
Sometimes I just don’t know and cannot guess that kind of a cucubrita this one will be, partly because we also get hybrids that did not exist in my garden before and I am not particularly aware of the types.
One of the side effects of growing food in your backyard is that your garden becomes alive. If you are growing organic and do not use any industrial poison in way of insecticide, herbicide, fungicide or any other of the “cides”, you are helping to preserve the small creatures at the bottom of the food chain, from the soil microbes and worms to hordes of butterflies and insects that crawl, leap or fly about as your neighbours. And if you do not mow your lawn constantly to prevent wild flowers to bloom, and let the grass grow long before each mow, you allow a whole lot more of food for even larger animals such as rabbits and hares.
Along with all these creatures, come the creatures up the food chain that like to feast of these. You get a look-see and overhead flyby or perching on nearby tall trees by birds of prey like hawks and eagles that notice the frequency of rabbits and hares visiting your garden, primarily to eat the flowers and long leaves of the wild dandelions.
Meanwhile, the profusion of flowers – from large orange bright ones from the pumpkins and squash, to tiny ones on some cilantro plants that I am allowing to produce seeds for the next season growing season – attract a huge horde or insects, from crawling ants to all kinds of flying insects from multiple types of bee to various kinds of butterflies.
Then there are insects that also like to eat at the ripping fruits around the garden – from crab apples to cherries plums and figs. These fruits will also attract fruit eating birds.
This profusion of insects in turn attract an unbelievable variety of eight legged spiders that make their webs in critical locations, hoping to snack on the profusion of these flying meals. Most insects have six legs and two antenna, while spiders belong to a different group of joint legged invertebrates called arachnids, and are grouped with scorpions, ticks, and mites. They all have eight legs. The thing is, many of these spider like creatures are also in loose soil, and often comeappear when I dig into them with my fingers to check it. They come up, along with centipede and millipede, and immediately get busy trying to bury themselves back in dry loose soil. Worms on the other hand, will prefer wet or moist soil. All these, too, are meals for other creatures, such as birds.
Chickadee
And thus come the insect eating birds, who will go for both the flying insets as well as insect catchers like the spiders.
Most of us know of birds like chickadee and hummingbirds. We think chickadees eat seeds and hummingbirds feed on flower nectars. True. But these birds are also prolific insect eaters. Therefore, they are constantly on the move in the garden, often in large numbers, looking for a more mobile form of meals compared to honey.
Rufous hummingbird
Then there are the wrens, tiny group of perching birds that are insect eaters and known for taking a special liking to spiders. One of these shy birds, called Bewick’s wren, have been making nests in or near my garden and raising chicks successfully year upon year. That is one reason I have a few bird boxes placed in my backyard, often used by small birds to make their nests.
Bewick’s wren
Two hummingbirds are common sights in British Columbia. One is the resident one that has evolved to survive the high latitude winters. This is the Anna’s hummingbird. The other, also highly visible in the warmer months, is a summer visitor from south of the border. This one is the rufous hummingbird. In many ways, they look similar. Both are same size and more or less same shape, and look greenish from the back.
The main difference by which one can distinguish one from the other, is that the Anna’s hummingbird has absolutely no rufous – brick colour – anywhere on them, while the rufous hummingbird has on its sides and even belly. There are other subtle differences that one might miss – such as spots of white around the eyes of the Anna’s and the fact that, I think, the Anna’s hummingbird’s beak has the hint of a slightly downwards droop. The rufous, in my view, has a dead straight beak, like a fencing sword.
Anyhow, both of them will take insects. Also, there are many flowers that they like to poke at and sip from. Further, most of us have a few hummingbird feeders hanging around. So hummingbirds are here. They are usually not scared of humans. At times, one comes within a food of my face, hovers in the air for a second or two, to take a close look at the red coloured emblem on my cap, just to figure out if it is a flower or not. Convinced it is not a flower, it flies away. Usually they are too close and too sudden for me to click a picture so close to me. Perhaps one day I will get one.
Male Anna’s hummingbird displaying georgette
Hummingbirds have two kinds of coloured feathers. Some are fast colours and others have structural colour. What is fast colour and what is structural colour. Well, we all know what is fast colour. That is colour on our fabric or paper that are not water soluble and will not wash away. The colour is there to stay.
Structural colour is something else. They are largely made of feathers that have colourless transparent parts, which, when flexed at the correct fashion by the bird and the lighting is good, what happens is that sunlight refracts internally, splits up like when passing through a prism, and only some selective colours end up reaching the eyes of the observer. These are structural colours. They appear to have a hue, and in some cases the colours can even change depending on angle of view, giving the feathers appear iridescent.
The male hummingbirds, both Anna’s and Rufous, have special feathers at its throat that they can flare up in a way where they look like shimmering pink, for an Anna’s, or more brighter red for a Rufous hummingbird. These throat feathers for the males are display feathers, for impressing potential females. These are called Georgettes. The same feathers, when not flexed, and kept tucked in, appear blackish and dull. The bird can control the colours of their georgette as and when needed.
Violet Green Swallow
And we should not forget the swallows, such as the colourful violet green swallow, which is also an insect eater.
These are the creatures that make my garden a living garden, and part of the reason is that I grow food without poison, and let the grass grow taller and weeds make flowers instead of constantly mowing them. When the grass grows tall enough, I mow it in one shot and the huge amount of grass mulch is then used as bedding for some vegetable patch, to be composted and returned back to the soil by microbes. All this, in turn, helps to keep the garden alive.
I distinctly remember when I first saw a hummingbird outside of a zoo. I was in Jamaica, visiting on a freighter ship where I worked as an engineer. I could barely distinguish it’s details since it was so small and fidgety, moving from flower to flower at the entrance to someone’s house. I had known about them, but was not expecting them, when a local resident pointed it out to me. It was gone in a few seconds, suddenly shooting off like a bullet. I so wished it had stuck around for a little longer. Those days, I only had an instamatic point and shoot camera, not suited to take pictures of birds that small under it was sitting on your hand. The the experience of seeing it for the first time, never left me.
I had of course seen a somewhat similar bird of my own birthplace – the old world sunbirds. They are perhaps not directly and closely related to the new world hummingbirds, but the old world sunbirds, flowerpeckers and spider hunters sort of evolved to similar shape and size in a process known as convergent evolution. Distantly related creatures, when adapting to identical lifestyle, often evolves to similar shape and size. This is how whales, dolphins and porpoises, which are mammals and were once four legged land dwellers, begin to look like fish, which internally some of them still hold the bones of vestigial hind legs, while for some others the legs have turned into flippers or paddles.
In my home state, West Bengal of India, the sunbirds were called Moutushi (মৌটুসি). Like hummingbirds, it makes tiny nests hardly four inches or so wide, and lays marble sized tiny eggs and raises a few chicks. But unlike the hummingbirds with their straight beak, the sunbirds usually have a downward curved beak. The sunbirds are, on average, just a tad larger than the hummingbirds, and although expert flyers and some have been noted to hover motionless in the air while drinking flower nectars, they usually will perch while doing so, whereas hummingbirds at the ultimate flyers in aerial acrobatics. They can not only hover motionless in the air, but can fly vertically up, or down. They can fly sideways left or right, and even backward – something that no other bird, or even man made helicopters can do as of today.
Hummingbirds are birds of the Americas, found from Alaska down to Tierra Del Fuego. But their greatest concentration and variety are to be found in the tropical belt in south America.
Here in British Columbia, Canada, I have seen only two kinds of hummingbirds. One is more prominent and found more often than the other. This is a migratory species – the Rufous Hummingbird. It lives south of the border in USA, but ventures up north into Canada in the summer, feeds on the local flowers, makes nests, lays eggs and raises young, before heading back south for the colder months.
The other, is the only resident hummingbird of the land – Anna’s hummingbird. They are similar is size and appearance and are greenish on their back with iridescent colouring and beautiful georgette on the throats of the males. People can and do mix one up with the other. But the best way to distinguish one from the other is that the Rufous usually has brick coloured feathers on its sides while the Anna’s has no rufous colour anywhere on it, and the male has some white around the eyes.
I see a rufous hummingbird perhaps five or six times as often as I see an Anna’s. They come to our backyard, not just for the flowers or the feeders, but also for the insects. Hummingbirds, as well as sunbirds and their relative the spider hunters – will take flying insects too.
This year, out backyard is being visited by both kinds of hummingbirds and often. And some of the males are still chasing partners. And thus, I could see a glorious male looking around for a female and advertising itself on a thin branch of my plum tree. On occasion, I even got the pair, male and female on the same branch.
Contrary to the normal angle of observation, where the photographer is on the ground and the bird is above him, here the roles were reversed. I was at my window on the top floor, say the 3rd floor above ground. The bird was on a branch a floor below me, and I was watching it almost vertically down.
Also, I was wearing a baseball cap with a bit of a red marking on it in front. On occasion, the female, which was constantly moving around searching out the flowers and the feeders, and drinking from them occasionally, came close to check if that red thing on my cap was a flower. It would come to almost a food from me, while I was leaning out of the window, and hover there, intently watching that mark on my cap, before deciding it was not a flower. It would be still and hover for a second or two before flying off. It was too close for me to focus on it and take a picture, since I had a long lens on me which would not focus on anything close.
But, on the other hand, I got some great shots including normal and slow speed videos of the birds.
