LITTLE BIRDS

THE LAST THING I expect after days of watching hummingbirds chattering and dog fighting their wings blurred at 50 beats per second and feathers flashing iridescent reds, violets and oranges - is to find one sitting silently in my unaccus-tomed hand.

Our lives have crossed at Casa de San Pedro Bed and Breakfast in Hereford, where Sheri Williamson, a leading hummingbird expert and cofounder of the Southeastern Arizona Bird Observatory, is examining and banding the birds.

After hatching a few months earlier, maybe as far north as Alaska, the female rufous hummingbird is pausing in Arizona during her first migration to wintering grounds in south-central Mexico.

I'm part of a different kind of migration, one in which life-listing birders (and casual observers like me) fly in for one of two annual peak seasons when as many as 15 hummingbird species are found locally and Southeastern Arizona earns its reputation as the hummingbird capital of the United States.

The rufous is resting, a bit dazed, after the strangest few minutes of her life. First, a remote-controlled net dropped around the feeder where she was drinking. She fluttered and chirped in protest, but, once firmly in Williamson's grip, settled down.

That's not always how it goes. “Some of them really thrash and squirm and squeal and hiss and sputter and shriek and growl and carry on like savage little Tasmanian devils,” Williamson says.

After fitting the rufous with a numbered band made of soft aluminum, Williamson measures the beak, wings and tail. She blows into a yellow straw to part the belly feathers and expose the bird's translucent skin to assess its fat content, then slips the young female into a sling for a weigh-in on an old spring scale. The bird comes in at 3.7 grams, a little more than an old copper penny.

As I hold the rufous, awaiting her departure, what I feel doesn't register as anything I'd consider weight. What I do feel is a steady beat against my hand the rhythm of her lungs drawing more than 200 breaths per minute. Those lungs, along with a heart that can pump 20 times per second, form the dynamo that will power the rufous on the longest migration relative to size of any bird in the world.

Assuming she leaves my hand.

HOLDING THAT RUFOUS is the highlight of a trip I almost canceled — there's no point in going to see hummingbirds where there are no hummingbirds.

It's easy to romanticize the little birds. They're among the world's most miraculous creatures, equally beloved for their vivid hues, sprite-like days spent darting among flowers, and aerobatics that let them hover and fly backward as efficiently as they fly forward. So, hummingbirds make frequent appearances in needlepoint patterns, undergrad poetry journals, and treacly songs by Cat Stevens and Seals & Crofts.

As gloriously designed as they might be, hummingbirds don't live easy lives. Last year, during the traditional spring peak in midApril, reports came in of hummingbird numbers at maybe 5 percent of normal. Then, even those birds vanished.

“I'd see maybe one hummingbird — not one species, but one individual — every five or seven minutes,” says Mary Jo Ballator, who maintains a feeding station at her Ash Canyon Bed & Breakfast in Hereford.

Williamson believes that a series of events hit Arizona's hummingbirds hard: a drought that's going on 15 years, the freeze in February 2011 that left hummingbirds dead on the ground and killed plants the birds depend on, and the Monument and Horseshoe 2 fires that swept through the Huachuca and Chiricahua mountains, respectively, in the summer of 2011, destroying nesting and feeding habitat.

“The foothills were so scorched, they were inhospitable,” Williamson says. “So the hummingbirds came down to the San Pedro River. It was like a refugee camp here. All of a sudden the local birds had these strangers piling in on top of them. It was chaos.” Less understood is how conditions beyond Arizona might also have affected the populations. A sky island rising above the desert, the Huachuca Mountains are part of a migratory superhighway that connects Arizona with the Rockies, Mexico's Sierra Madre and the tropics. The area's remarkable diversity is what draws a combination of resident species and those, like my little rufous friend, who pass through.

So Arizona's hummingbirds, if you will, are canaries in the coal mine for a big swath of North America. Ballator heard reports from New Mexico and California of abnormally low hummingbird numbers and speculated whether fires or deforestation down there had destroyed habitat along the migratory corridor.

Tom Beatty, whose apple-orchard feeding station in Miller Canyon is famous as the go-to spot for white-eared hummingbirds, recalls attending a lecture about jaguars and learning of a cold wave that dropped temperatures to near zero in mountains 150 miles south of the U.S.-Mexico border. Such weather could have killed birds, as well as food sources that typically sustain Arizonabound hummingbirds.

Then in August, near the start of the second peak season, the hummingbirds reappeared. Ballator recalls the exact day: "On August 10, it was like someone lifted a curtain or opened the door."

Still, numbers are down from historic highs. Beatty can recall times when he ran through 47 quarts of food in a day — the most he used in 2012 was 6 quarts. But Williamson believes that after the initial destruction, the Monument Fire actually created prime conditions. It opened the forest canopy and infused soils with nutrients. Wildflowers thrived, and because hummingbirds prefer natural nectar sources to feeders, they dispersed more than usual. Then, as the bloom waned and southbound migrants came through, the hummingbirds returned to feeders and gardens.

So, I head down to see what I'll find at Beatty's and Ash Canyon.

TOM BEATTY MIGHT have had a more eventful year than the hummingbirds. In 10 minutes, the Monument Fire swept through his property beneath Carr Reef, a place where he and his wife, Edith, have lived since 1967. The fire burned more than 1,200 of his 1,300 apple trees, as well as manzanitas, sycamores and live oaks used for nesting or food by hummingbirds. Then the rains came and sent cascades of boulders and mud through his property.

"We still have a green place, but we're living pretty hard here," Beatty says.

We climb to a canopy-covered seating area that looks out on feeders hanging from limbs of white and silverleaf oaks. Thanks to feeding stations like Beatty's, spotting hummingbirds might, at first glance, seem easier than other bird-watching. For one thing, the birds come to you.

But hummingbirds are so frenetic, and with endless variations between males, females and juveniles, identifications are challeng-ing. Although Beatty takes pride in the white-eareds that helped put him on the map — "They're worth their weight in gold," he says — he thinks visitors focus too much on life lists and photos and not enough on just watching.

"There are people who come here, then a white-eared shows up the moment they get here," he says. "And they go click, take their picture and don't even sit down. It's a trophy-hunter mentality, is what it is."

The white-eareds are gone for the season, but I'm amazed by the activity as Anna's, broad-taileds and magnificents dart about."

See, you don't know any better, how's that?" Beatty says with a chuckle. "Sometimes you hear a background noise, just like the creek here. It's a solid noise, and you don't know what it is until someone points it out to you. That's 2,000 hummingbirds flying around!"

Late afternoon, I stop at Ash Canyon for what Ballator calls "tank-up time," when hummingbirds can drink one-third of their body weight before nightfall. I'm hardly immune to hummingbirds' ethereal charms. But what I find most enthralling is how such beautiful creatures can be as surly as sleep-deprived, Red Bull-swilling middle linebackers.

"They're monsters; they hate each other," Ballator says as a frenzy of hummingbirds dive-bombs and rousts each other from feeders. After swirling chases, they finally reach a fragile truce and settle in, glancing up frequently to take stock of rivals and scan the skies for the next blitzkrieg.

A soundtrack of staccato cheeps and whistling wings plays off thunder rumbling in from the Huachucas. Part of what drew Ballator to this property from the Bay Area in 1992 was the 5,200-foot elevation. Like Beatty's place, hers is in a transition zone between desert and mountains. "So I'm doubling up," Ballator says. "I get mountain species, like magnificents, but also Lucifers, which is a high-desert hummingbird."

Sure enough, a male Lucifer, its throat flaring purple, alights on a nearby feeder. A few minutes later, Ballator points out a male magnificent, which lives up to its name with a purple head and an almost neon-green throat.

When we move to a second spot, a plain-capped starthroat, a less-vivid, but rare hummingbird and a big draw for Ballator, lands. By this point, my eyes are more attuned to the variations, so when a male violet-crowned arrives, its coral-red bill, white belly and regally hued head make it impossible to miss.

If I BOTHERED to keep a life list, it would have grown by three in that hour at Ash Canyon. But nothing will compare to the mem-ory of this rufous.

While other hummingbirds fly away at the first opportunity, she's in no hurry, perhaps relishing some body heat before heading out into the surprisingly cool evening.

So the minutes pass — four, five, six — and I'm able to appreciate the delicate pattern of her plumage and the alert intensity of her eyes. I'm also, by nature, a worrier, and I ponder just how such a tiny thing will complete a journey that I can scarcely imagine making by car.

"It takes awhile for them to get their acts together," Williamson says. "Just like kids of any species, they have innate calendars and compasses to tell them when to leave and where to go, but sometimes it takes them a little while to respond to all of that. In its first migration, a bird will come through the same area from three days up to a week later than it will after it has the route mapped out in its head and is responding more efficiently to its own internal cues."

Suddenly the rufous is gone, 10 feet up, then out of sight, in search of a place to spend the night, on her own, and still weeks away from journey's end.

• For more information about the Southeastern Arizona Bird Observatory, call 520432-1388 or visit www.sabo.org.