Abstract
Nestled away in the pandemonium of the city of Niagara Falls is a quiet paradise, a place where the touch of human kind has not tainted but rather enhanced nature. Here, an environment of greenery and lush vegetation is home for more than 45 tropical birds, and while the surroundings may closely resemble a hummingbird's natural habitat, the steady influx of humans is certainly not a normality out in the wild.Yet for one hummingbird, this man-made surrounding provided perhaps the most perfect setting - so perfect that it was here where this Sparkling Violetear (Calibri coruscans) chose to build a nest. More remarkable, however, is the fact that this particular hummingbird succeeded and hatched what is now the first South American hummingbird successfully reared in North America.
Owner of the hummingbird exhibit, John Petrella summed up his excitement about the event when he exclaimed, "I'm a father" on April 29, 1992.
"I was so excited when I went in that morning to check on her and found she was no longer sitting on eggs, but that there were two babies in the nest. I couldn't believe my eyes," Petrella said. "In fact, I nearly gave up hope because not more than one month before she had the babies, she abandoned a nest because the eggs were not fertile. I didn't think she'd ever have a baby," he said.
Yet when Petrella saw that the eggs had finally hatched, he "hovered over them like a mother for the whole day, and while only one baby survived, I wasn't about to let the other one go," he said. He spent the day at the greenhouse keeping close tabs on the mother and her baby. He had previously named the mother "Freddie, until I realized it was a female," Petrella laughed.
Petrella quickly realized that Freddie was looking for insects to feed the baby. "There weren't enough flies in the house, so I set out on a fruit fly hunt and I must have called every place in the region looking for a supply. I finally found a professor who teaches at a university about two hours from my place, who said he had some. I got in my car and drove straight there to pick some up."
When Petrella arrived back at the house, Freddie was waiting for him at the door. "As if she knew I was coming, she immediately came right over to me and affectionately picked at my eyes and my face with her beak. She wouldn't leave me alone. When I brought the fruit flies over to the nest, I held the container and she stuck her beak inside. Then she flew over and immediately fed them to the baby. She repeated this process over and over until she felt it had enough food."
Yet the friendliness of this Sparkling Violetear was not a new phenomenon. Petrella said she had been quite friendly for some time.
"Freddie started to be really friendly about half a year ago. She used to come pretty close to me when she realized that I was the hand that fed her, so to speak. Soon, she came within about an arm's length and I held up a feeder. To my surprise, she started feeding out of it almost immediately. From that day on she was always the first in line for nectar, and she would actually fly out of the greenhouse and into the back