Hummingbirds in History
When European settlers first saw hummingbirds they thought they were a cross between an insect and a bird!
How could so much life be bound up in these buzzing little bundles of feathers?
Why such extravagant colors?
They wondered what magic caused these flying gems to suddenly darken, then light up once again as they turned their little heads in front of those blurred, whirring wings?
It was obvious from the very beginning that various Native American cultures had found decorative, ceremonial, and mythological uses for hummingbirds.
The pilgrims met American Indian ambassadors with hummingbird earrings.
Soldiers and missionaries in Mexico met Aztec kings who wore cloaks made entirely of hummingbird skins.
Hummingbirds quickly captured the imagination of the Euro-Americans, too.
Fantastic tales emerged like the one that said hummers in autumn stick their long beaks into the trunks of trees and die, only to resurrect again in the spring; or another that said hummingbirds migrate on the backs of geese or swans.
Even Christopher Columbus wrote of hummingbirds in his diary.
And just a few years after his discovery of the new world, a hummingbird skin found its way to Rome as a gift to the Pope.
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