On top of that, I had a decade of what Silvina called “indoctrination.” From raising a daughter who we encouraged to love YouTube videos with cute animals without once thinking about the context or source. Animated movies where birds talked and smiled like people, and maybe the animal was the villain, or maybe not, but it, too, talked and made faces and in every way tried to be part of the human world. That had distanced me from anything useful I might’ve known about animals. Something not tested or something foundational where you should seek the exception. Something toxic from the monoculture.

“Using ‘us’ when thinking about the environment erases all the different versions of ‘us,’” Silvina once said. “Many indigenous peoples don’t think this way. Counterculture doesn’t always think this way. Philosophy, knowledge, policy exist that could solve our problems already.”

So maybe at first the frisson of mystery and intrigue came from reading what I’d printed out while idling in the parking garage, doors locked, before heading home. Alert for every possible Larry approaching.

“Hummingbirds are aesthetic and aerobic extremists,” read one site. “Their tiny bodies hover akin to flying carpets; did one just zip by? Hummers evolved high in the Andes Mountains with progressive colonization of lower altitudes and expanded latitudes, especially to the north, and eventually to the far reaches of Canada and Alaska. They remain restricted to the Americas, with the vast majority of the 300+ species residents of South America.”

“Information isn’t story,” Silvina wrote. “No animal should be condensed to a summary in an encyclopedia.” But all I had was information at first. And a dead bird’s body. Because that’s all she’d given me.

“The naiad hummingbird (Selastrephes griffin) is of moderate size (less than 12 cm body length) with an especially long migration that delights the most diligent of birders across its range. Although difficult to find and observe by humans, the brilliant colors and patterns of the males are adaptations to catch the eye of their mates.”

I had a large female specimen, then. Pitch-black. No-nonsense.

“They are fine athletes whose stunt repertoire includes backward flight, treading air, and maneuvering precisely in gusty wind. And whose migration between the Pacific Northwest and Argentina equates to several back-to-back ultramarathons.”

I tried to imagine traveling that far as an adaptation, through so many different kinds of terrain. This was an epic journey—and one only allowed due to incredible specializations. The changes a human being would have to undergo to inhabit such places without equipment. Wouldn’t they change your point of view, too? Wouldn’t you become someone else?

Like many species that have northern-skewed ranges for breeding, S. griffin is a snowbird and migrates closer to the phylogenetic nexus of hummingbirds in South America. S. griffin winters (December–March) in the Andes (where, of course, it is actually summer). Oxygen is limited at these altitudes (> 2,000 meters) as well as during the bird’s migration; nonetheless, S. griffin maintains extraordinary metabolic rates that are enabled by adaptations in the hemoglobin protein that binds oxygen to iron. These changes to the heme group are inducible during their migration and winter in the Andes but are not present during their summers at lower elevations in North America.