RUBYTHROAT 195 



never developed patience by bringing up a slow growing 

 family are always high tempered. Evidently this is true of 

 the humming bird. The young grow up very quickly, and 

 surely none are more high tempered and more ready to 

 fight. 



A friend of mine one day found a humming bird that 

 had in some way injured its wing and could not fly. He 

 made a splint out of a piece of match straw, carefully 

 bound up the wing and fed the bird on sugar sirup with 

 an occasional small gnat or beetle. In a very few days 

 the bird was able to fly, but by this time it had become 

 so tame that it did not care to leave the house. It would 

 sit on the back of a chair or fly about the room for hours 

 at a time. Its wing was not very strong, so it was not 

 able to make long flights or to remain in the air long at 

 a time. He used to fill an old fashioned fountain-pen 

 filler with thin sugar sirup and hold it up for Mr. Ruby- 

 throat, who would come and thrust his bill into the end of 

 the glass tube and suck up the sirup. My friend being 

 somewhat of a musician, and having a scientific turn of 

 mind decided one day that he would like to know just how 

 many times Mr. Humming Bird moved his wings in a 

 second when he was hovering before the fountain pen 

 filler sipping sirup. Accordingly he took his violin and 

 picked out the tone that exactly harmonized with the 

 hum of Rubythroat's wings. The tone was "A" below mid- 

 dle "C" and as it takes two hundred-fourteen vibrations 

 per second to produce this tone this tiny little bird 

 actually fluttered his wings two hundred and fourteen times 

 a second. It seems almost impossible that so small a bird 

 can generate energy enough to do this enormous amount 



