Christopher Benfey
The Glitter in the Green: In Search of Hummingbirds by Jon Dunn
Hummingbird Salamander by Jeff VanderMeer
Cross Pollination: Heade, Cole, Church, and Our Contemporary Moment an exhibition at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site and the Olana State Historic Site Catalog of the exhibition edited by Kate Menconeri and William L. Coleman On Edward Hicks by Sanford Schwartz
The Glitter in the Green: In Search of Hummingbirds by Jon Dunn.
Basic Books, 331 pp., $30.00
Hummingbird Salamander by Jeff VanderMeer. MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 351 pp., $27.00
Cross Pollination:
Heade, Cole, Church, and Our Contemporary Moment an exhibition at the Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens, Jacksonville, October 28, 2020–January 17, 2021; the Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, February 23–May 23, 2021; the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, Catskill, and the Olana State Historic Site, Hudson, June 12–October 31, 2021; and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, November 20, 2021–March 21, 2022. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Kate Menconeri and
William L. Coleman.
Thomas Cole National Historic Site/ The Olana Partnership, 62 pp., $14.95
On Edward Hicks by Sanford Schwartz.
Lucia Marquand, 152 pp., $35.00
This spring I taught a course at Mount Holyoke on Emily Dickinson. We spent a week on her riddle poems, and I asked the students to try to guess the answer to this one:
A Route of Evanescence,
With a revolving Wheel— A Resonance of Emerald
A Rush of Cochineal—
And every Blossom on the Bush Adjusts its tumbled Head—
The Mail from Tunis—probably, An easy Morning’s Ride—
“Could it maybe be like seasons or fall or something?” one student wondered. “I was thinking it could be a rainbow or sunrise,” another suggested. “The ‘revolving Wheel’ makes me think of the sun, and the flowers turning their heads to it.” A third suspected it might be an insect: “The use of the word ‘Cochineal,’ which refers to a beetle that was crushed up to produce a red dye, makes me think that it has some red coloring on it.”
Dickinson’s riddles are capacious; all of these answers seem correct to me. A copy of the poem Dickinson sent to relatives was signed “Humming bird,” thus giving away her favored answer. But now, as I read the poem, I can’t help feeling that it hints at another kind of vanishing, the mass death of species. The revolving wheel of extinction is itself a route of evanescence.
The migration of birds is so mysterious, so thrilling, that it’s easy to see why the ancient practice of augury looked to birds in flight for signs of the future. That future, at least for birds, appears increasingly bleak; over the past fifty years, bird populations in the United States and Canada have fallen by 29 percent. Migrating birds take their bearings, or so we believe, from the sun, moon, and stars; from familiar landmarks glimpsed year after year; and even, amazingly, from sensing the Earth’s magnetic field. They are also drawn, with often catastrophic results, to the brilliant lights and reflective glass of buildings. According to some estimates, as many as a billion birds die every year in the United States flying into human-made structures. Species already at risk because of climate change, habitat loss, and the use of pesticides face the additional threat of such collisions.
According to a recent study, the rubythroated hummingbird, the likely subject of Dickinson’s poem since it is the only hummingbird that mates and nests east of the Mississippi, is among ten bird species “disproportionately vulnerable to collision fatalities.”1 (Their western cousin the rufous hummingbird is on a steeper decline, having lost 62 percent of its population between 1966 and 2014.) These migrants from Central America bulk up before flying nonstop across the Gulf of Mexico every spring, shedding a third to a half of their body weight in the twenty-hour crossing. It is heartbreaking to imagine a premature end to their travels before they reach their nesting grounds.
In her poem “Questions of Travel,” Elizabeth Bishop wondered what possesses people to journey great distances “to see . . . the tiniest green hummingbird in the world.” The English birder and photographer Jon Dunn offers some answers in The Glitter in the Green, which follows his search for hummingbirds—including the smallest, the bee hummingbird, or zunzuncito, of Cuba, which weighs less than a dime—from their northernmost point of migration, in Alaska, to their southernmost habitat in Tierra del Fuego. Several hummingbird species are on the verge of extinction; Dunn’s quest was “to see some of them before they were gone altogether.” Hummingbirds, whose range is restricted to the Americas, were among the plunder Europeans brought back from the New World. By the end of the nineteenth century, it was already clear that the lucrative trade in feathers for women’s hats—“murderous millinery”—along with the predations of sport hunters, might render hummingbirds extinct. At an 1887 auction in London, 400,000 dead hummingbirds were for sale. As late as 1932, 25,000 Brazilian hummingbirds were shipped to Italy to decorate chocolate boxes. And hummingbirds are still harvested in Mexico for love charms (as in Frida Kahlo’s Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird). As a forerunner to his own quest to encounter hummingbirds in their native habitats, Dunn mentions the artist and hummingbird enthusiast Martin Johnson Heade, who traveled to Brazil (just once, in 1863, and not three times, as Dunn says). “Between the frosts, taxidermists, and milliners,” Heade later
2020. In one unsettling finding, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology calculated that the twin beams of the September 11 memorial in New York, which shine for a week every September, used to alter the flight paths of 1.1 million birds a year. (The lights are now mercifully dimmed during periods of peak migration.) This seems a parable of our time: in mourning our own kind, we cause the deaths of others. See Christine Hauser, “Turn the Lights Out. Here Come the Birds,” The New York Times, April 10, 2021.
1See Priyanka Runwal, “Building Collisions Are a Greater Danger for Some Birds than Others,” Audubon, July 9,