It was only later in life, following a long and distinguished career as a scientist and lecturer in agriculture at the University of West Indies’ St Augustine campus that he began to really see the birds.Ī ruby-topaz hummingbird. When Theo Ferguson was a young boy growing up in Grenada the beauty of these “fairies of the natural world” eluded him like other boys his age, he occasionally pelted them with stones when bored.
So blessed are the Fergusons with these diminutive visitors that they named their home of 34 years Yerette, Amerindian for “home of the hummingbird”. When you view them through a long lens, you see behaviours that are unimaginable, the uniqueness of each bird Entering the space, a tropical oasis of vivid, trumpet-shaped blooms, the air beats with the frenzied wings of these tiny creatures, which flit, zoom and shimmer among the scarlet feeders like miniature rainbow-coloured strobes. Fifteen species have been spotted in the garden, including a new discovery in October 2019, the glittering-throated emerald. The Fergusons’ lush garden, in the shadow of the silk cotton tree, teems with hundreds of hummingbirds daily. Theo and Gloria Ferguson have transformed their garden into a haven for hummingbirds. Hummingbirds are found exclusively in the Americas and this vast continent has approximately 345 species, mostly located in the northern Andes. Today, the twin islands of Trinidad and Tobago have 19 species of this tiny creature, each the size of an adult thumb. It took decades for the island’s hummingbird population to recover – with some species disappearing altogether. The trade in thousands of birds was only halted with the introduction of the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act. The hummingbird’s striking plumage, exemplified by names such as ruby-throated, emerald-chinned and blue-chinned sapphire, was highly prized in the courts of 19th-century Europe, where its feathers were worn as jewellery. The birds’ population and that of its human defenders was nearly decimated when the first European settlers arrived on the islands 500 years ago. The Amerindians and their myths could not protect the hummingbird for ever. In their fury, the gods opened up the earth and summoned the sulphurous lake of pitch to consume the village and its people. However, the tribe induced the wrath of the gods by dining on hummingbirds at a celebratory feast. According to the legend, the La Brea Pitch Lake – a sprawling bitumen wonder in the south-west of Trinidad, now a Unesco world heritage site – was once the home of the Chima Indians. So bewitched were they by these bejewelled creatures that they created a myth to protect the birds, which they believed represented the souls of their dead. It could be that this tree was a mere sapling when the indigenous people who first lived here named this land Iere, or “Land of the Hummingbird”.
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