loo I N A G U A 



bursting with energy; and as I have seen his grandsons do, it 

 whirled round and round its placid, more neutral colored mate. 

 At first she paid little attention but as his attentions increased, 

 she could not disregard their manifestations. He began swing- 

 ing back and forth on invisible wings, twisting, turning, going 

 into a frenzy of activity; he moved as though suspended by an 

 invisible pendulum, more and more swiftly; the dead leaves 

 underfoot rustled with the blast of air from his wings; they 

 emitted an angry buzzing as he reached the climax of his love 

 dance. She could not ignore him any longer and they drifted 

 away through the cacti to culminate their courtship on the 

 bristly spines of a cactus pad. In a tiny cup of soft fibers from 

 the silk-cotton tree decorated with gay lichens and minute 

 fragments of dead plants the female laid the fertiHzed eggs of 

 this first island mating. It was thus, I like to think, that the race 

 of Inaguan hummingbirds was begun. 



One breezy afternoon I was seated in the hut banging away 

 at my typewriter when an angry humming at the door at- 

 tracted my attention. One of the descendants, a thousand gen- 

 erations removed, of the first Inaguan hummingbird had en- 

 tered the open door and was vainly trying to penetrate the 

 transparent screening of mosquito netting that I had tacked 

 across the windows. I picked it off the mesh, placed it in a 

 near-by lizard cage and continued writing. It was a male. I had 

 hardly started when another began buzzing at the screen. I cap- 

 tured it too. For a few moments I admired the gorgeous pair 

 preening their ruffled feathers in the cage. Although I had 

 handled them as gently as possible my clumsy fingers had 

 pushed their plumage all out of arrangement. This did not 

 seem to disturb them, however, and they went about their 

 feather cleaning quite methodically, chirping the while in 

 thin trilling notes, and paying me not the slightest bit of 

 attention. Even when I picked them up again they did not 



