Anthropomorphizing Anna’s Hummingbirds

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim
Photo by Sujean Kim

I visited Seattle last week with my sisters and my younger nephew, Benjamin, who lives in Cincinnati. On one of our walks, Benjamin saw an Anna’s Hummingbird, and pointed it out to his mom as excitedly as a chill teenager might. We saw a few over the course of the week and always stopped to watch them flit about.

My friend, Aaron, lives in Michigan and is another hummingbird fan. When he and his family came to visit a few years ago, his enthusiasm made me realize that I take them a bit for granted, as we have them here year-round. We have at least two who live near our backyard. I’m watching one now, out my office window, darting between blossoms on our Meyer Lemon tree as the last remnants of the summer light fades away.

I try not to anthropomorphize animals too much, but it’s hard. Hummingbirds seem adorable, but they have a mean streak. Often, when I’m in the backyard, they will swoop nearby and hover, sometimes just a few feet away. I usually hear them before I see them, a steady stream of clicks and the telltale hum. I used to think they were just being curious or were coming by to say hello. I think it’s more likely that they’re being territorial and are making it clear to me that I’m not wanted.

Last Friday, I saw through my window that one of the hummingbirds had flown through a gap through my enclosed raised bed and was struggling to get out. I immediately went outside and opened the door so that it could escape.

It could be my imagination, but I feel like that hummingbird has made it a point to visit me every day since. This morning, I sat on my bench examining one of my unfinished projects, when the hummingbird flew a foot away from me and hovered. I looked at it and said hello. It looked at me calmly for several seconds, as if it were returning the greeting, silent except for the steady vibration of its wings.

I like to think that it’s decided that I’m its friend and is easing up on its territorial ways. It’s also possible that it’s still irritated that it got trapped in my cage and is making a point of letting me know.

It doesn’t matter. I think it’s wonderful. I feel very lucky.

Bald Eagles: “The Best Motherf***ing Bird There Is”

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

This past Saturday, my partner and I were in Point Richmond and spotted a bald eagle flying high overhead. The white head and tail feathers were unmistakable, and we stood there, staring in awe.

I saw my first bald eagle 15 years ago in the Boundary Waters in Minnesota. I could not believe my eyes or ears. It is such an iconic bird, yet for the first three decades of my life, they were endangered. I was never sure I’d ever see one.

I can’t remember the first time I saw one here in Northern California, but they no longer surprise me. Heck, there was even a pair living in Piedmont last year, just a few miles from where I live. It still feels special, though.

The very next morning, two flew high overhead while we were doing our regular habitat restoration at Skyline Gardens. They were accompanied by a turkey vulture, a red-tailed hawk, and an irritated raven trying (and eventually succeeding) to chase the large raptors away. I couldn’t believe my luck as I stared up at them in wonder.

About ten years ago, I saw Corey Arnold give an amazing presentation at Pop-Up Magazine about how bald eagles were seen as pesky flying rats in Alaska because of how they picked through trash en masse. It muted my awe of bald eagles a little bit.

But not that much. This morning, I wondered what Matt Kracht’s The Field Guide to Dumb Birds of North America, which my nephew had recently given me for my birthday, had to say about bald eagles. I wholeheartedly agreed with its assessment:

Is this bird flawed? Hell, yes — it’s a bird. But it stands for the promise of something good. Please, don’t even get me started, because this is the best motherfucking bird there is. Period.

Sunsets Are Special, Even Though They’re Not

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

I have a colleague who makes it a point to watch every sunrise and sunset. I am in awe of her, but I’m also simultaneously troubled and resigned by how Herculean this feat feels, especially as an early riser who lives in a moderate climate. How hard is it to stop what you’re doing for 10-15 minutes at the beginning and end of each day and to look outside and enjoy the show that nature offers us every day?

Plenty hard.

It’s Fogust here in the Outer Richmond neighborhood in San Francisco. Sunsets and sunrises have been hard to come by. But yesterday afternoon, the skies cleared, and by evening, it was glorious. I haven’t been walking much recently, but I’ve lived in this neighborhood long enough to know that, when there’s a reprieve in the summertime dreariness, you take advantage.

At Eagles Point Overlook at the start of the trail at Lands End, there was a scattering of people taking it all in, clearly waiting for the sun to set. I wondered whether any of those folks were like my colleague, ritualistically waiting for nature to call it a day, or whether they, like me, had decided that this Monday evening was too beautiful to waste inside. I ambled along slowly, stopping often to photograph the rays of golden light wafting through the trees or to watch flocks and flocks of pelicans gliding along the Bay toward the ocean.

For the past month, the whales have been putting on a show along the coast, and I had hoped to take a peek just in case. But about two-thirds of the way there, I felt the sunset calling to me, and I decided to take a detour down the long set of stairs to Mile Rock Beach to watch nature’s clock wind down. There would be no whales there, although if I were lucky, I might catch a sea lion bobbing in the waves, checking out all the strange bipeds congregating on the shore.

I didn’t see any sea lions, but the pelicans kept coming. I felt grateful for how reliably these prehistoric birds flew along these shores in their graceful lines and V-formations, and I thought about how this wasn’t the case not so long ago. These wonderful birds never failed to mesmerize me.

Folks had gathered here too, waiting as the sky changed colors and the waves softly crashed onto the sand. I watched a group of friends amble up a large rock as the sun began to disappear. They watched in wonder, then marked the moment with some selfies.

Beyond the pelicans and a pair of oystercatchers foraging for their supper, the only other animals I saw were these other humans who had been drawn, like me, to watch this quiet spectacle. I enjoyed it. How primal it is to watch the sun go down. How easy and sad it is that we suppress this instinct.

400 Species Observed on iNaturalist

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

For most of my life, whenever I went on a walk, I would feel a pang of regret about not being able to identify trees or plants. Today, I passed 400 species observed on iNaturalist, 402 to be exact. I find this miraculous given how nature-blind I was up until four years ago. The silver lining of the pandemic was that I ended up learning a lot about birds and native plants, and I am deeply grateful for that.

My 400th species was the Northern Rough-winged Swallow. I saw a bunch of them in a tree by the parking lot at San Joaquin Marsh Wildlife Sanctuary, a glorious treasure that’s hidden in plain sight in Irvine, California.

I knew that they were swallows from their flight pattern, but I had never seen a flock of swallows just chilling out in a tree before. I’m used to Tree and Cliff Swallows, both of which tend to flutter about constantly and frenetically. I used Merlin to identify the exact species, which iNaturalist later confirmed. Then I just stood there with my Dad, watching them in wonder, before finally walking into the marsh to continue congregating with some other feathered friends.

Many thanks to Travis Kriplean, who helped catalyze my deep dive into the world around me by sharing his own journey so generously and comprehensively. I started my iNaturalist account in the Fall of 2000 with Travis’s encouragement and also with great skepticism, as I didn’t quite understand how iNaturalist worked, and the interface felt… challenging. I was dipping my toes into a mushrooming curriculum that Travis had developed, and I thought I would use iNaturalist to document my findings. I didn’t realize the giant nature-related U-turn I was about to take thanks to a run-in with a big, beautiful, brown bird.

I also have to give a lot of credit to Dario Taraborelli, who unwittingly primed me for all of this. I met Dario 15 years ago through Wikimedia, but I had no idea how much of a birder he was until I started following him on the Site Formerly Known As Twitter. (He, like me, is now mostly on Instagram.) He often posted glorious photos of birds, a stark and welcome contrast to the rest of my feed back in the day. He also sang the praises of iNaturalist, so much so that I knew about them well before I attempted to use the app.

Strangely enough, I don’t think this deep dive into nature would have been possible without iNaturalist and social media in general (and Instagram in particular). It still boggles my mind that iNaturalist’s interface manages to facilitate any kind of community, but it’s how I met Marisol Villareal, whose encouragement and engagement on Instagram helped me feel like I was a card-carrying member of a state-wide fan club, even though I’m still largely clueless. It’s how my friends, Jon and Linzy, met Rudy Wallen, an unassuming and generous nature savant, who also happens to live on our side of town. For all of the terrible that social media has wrought onto all of us, this is a great example of what social media can do when it works.

The Birds Are Watching

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Up until a few years ago, I never noticed birds on my balcony. When I first started consciously paying attention to the birds at the start of the pandemic, I would occasionally hear a Dark-eyed Junco serenading me, but I never saw it unless I went onto my balcony and looked.

Then one day, I noticed a House Finch feeding on some chickweed growing in a pot with the dried up remnants of a neglected houseplant I had killed many years earlier. If a pot of weeds could attract birds, I wondered what native plants might do. A few weeks later, I populated my balcony with native plants and also put out a bird feeder.

Now the birds come every morning, even when I forget or can’t feed them. But when I do put out seeds, I am always amused and amazed by how quickly the birds come. They are obviously watching and listening.

The Dark-eyed Juncos are the first to arrive, followed by House Finches. Later in the morning, the doves arrive, eventually followed by the crows. I know most of the smaller birds are hanging out in nearby trees, although I wish I knew exactly where the juncos come from. The bigger birds are far less conspicuous.

After I put out my bird seed, I sometimes like to turn the tables on the birds, peering out into the neighboring landscape to see if I can spot them. The other morning, I decided to bring my camera with me to document some of my larger winged friends watching me from afar.