As delicate yet bursting with wonders as its subject, The Hummingbirds' Gift is a beautiful, slim volume chronicling the rescue and rehabilitation of tiny twin orphan hummers. Sy Montgomery, whose 20 books include The Soul of an Octopus, poetically relates the tale of the diaphanous creatures and their savior with scientific facts, anthropomorphizing and more than a little tension.
Montgomery was invited to shadow Brenda Sherburn, San Francisco Bay Area sculptor and hummingbird rescuer, after the featherless babies were brought to WildCare, an urban wildlife hospital. She helped with the every-20-minute feedings of their carefully concocted diet--a mash based on crushed fresh fruit flies. Monitoring the inch-and-a-half-long birds, which were eventually identified as Allen's hummingbirds, one of the four types on the West Coast, their foster moms found mites, requiring delicate, potentially traumatizing Q-tip baths. "Zuni" and "Maya" were moved to ever-larger cages, learning to perch, "rev" their wings, then hover--a skill specific to hummers, which can suspend in the air for up to an hour.
Their release, in stages, was as suspenseful as any sporting event. Dangers lurk, even in Brenda's backyard of feeders and blossoms, including Anna's hummingbirds, which can kill in competition for nectar. Zuni and Maya had become strong, wise "bubbles fringed with iridescent feathers," and fledged successfully. Hummingbird, bumblebee, honeybee and butterfly populations are all shrinking, yet Montgomery optimistically muses that if baby birds can be resurrected, "perhaps our kind can heal our sweet, green, broken world." --Cheryl McKeon, Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza, Albany, N.Y.