Photo by my son Jaime Mejia a couple of years agoA little hummingbird flew around me this morning, it reminded me of tinkerbell, I looked around in awe trying to follow its flight around my head. I left for work, feeling happy and strong. I decided to investigate more about these little beauties I like so much.
Photo by my son Jaime Mejia a couple of years ago
out of heaven
still glittering
the hummingbird
© 1998 Larry Gates
Jewels: precious possessions of great worth; rare excellence; great durability.
Precious: of great price or value; excessively delicate; of great spiritual worth.
also likes to put things into perspective.
They can give you encouragement and strength because they always just keep on going.
They are pure pleasure how they zoom in and hover around the feeders and flowers.
Tiny Great Miracles of God's Creation
CO Broadtail Hummer, originally uploaded by bill.bryant99.
Job 12:7
“But now ask the beasts, and they will teach you;
And the birds of the air, and they will tell you;
Or speak to the earth, and it will teach you;
And the fish of the sea will explain to you.
Who among all these does not know
That the hand of the Lord has done this,
It is the tiniest of all birds and is the only creature that can stop suddemly while traveling at full
speed.
It can hover or fly forward, backward, up, or down, its wings moving in the configuration of an
eight, the sign for infinity.
Hummingbirds have three primary states, sitting, hovering and flying,
It's "Ruby Throated" Tuesday!, originally uploaded by MrClean1982.
The hummingbird shows us how to take great pleasure in spreading joy and love and beauty to all around us; we can then take that inner joy into new and different surroundings.
The hummingbird brings us the gift of beauty. The ruby throated hummingbird is one of the most common species in North America. This energetic little bird migrates 1800 miles from the Eastern US to spend winter in Central America. This distance alone indicates the hummingbirds stamina and perseverance. They can show us how to go the distance without becoming depleted.
Hummingbirds instinctively know how to use flowers for healing and teaches us how to draw the life essence from them to create our own medicines - as in our usage of flower essences, essential oils and herbal tinctures. Hummingbird reminds us that if we find joy in what we do, we become light as a feather, and life is rich with nectar.
The Ruby-throated hummingbird teaches is that becoming fat can be beneficial if it is necessary as an energy buffer to survive. The second lesson is that fat birds with very high plasma glucose levels do not become diabetic. Part of the preventative mechanism is anatomical and physiological. Nectar feeding birds are unusual in that they consume large amounts of water along with the sugars they typically consume. Birds have a relatively low glomerular filtration rate and are able to reabsorb essentially all of the glucose that is filtered into the urine . It is not clear how they avoid showing symptoms of "glucose toxicity" such as glycated hemoglobin, but the levels of hemoglobin A1c are lower than in humans. One hypothesis could be that the turnover rates of red blood cells and proteins are substantially higher in birds than in mammals. For example, the lifespan of red blood cells in birds can be 21 days or less vs. about 120 days for humans, so there may be less opportunity for glycation. Turnover rates for metabolic pools are thought to be proportional to body mass to the 1/4 power , which would indicate that metabolic pools exchange about 12 times faster in hummingbirds than in humans (Kleiber, p. 216 and 390). This is congruent with the high ATP turnover rate in active muscle . Whether or not birds avoid obesity and diabetes by dint of their rates of living, the neurobiology and endocrinology of avian fat deposition are complex, and students of migratory birds have suggested that they could offer important clues concerning prevention of obesity and diabetes in humans .Diabetes and the metabolic syndrome are rightfully considered to be kinetic disorders that do not develop unless several major controls fail. Typically, sensitivity to insulin and to glucose ("glucose effectiveness") both diminish, creating insulin resistance . Hepatic glucose production may continue (instead of shutting off) even if plasma glucose and insulin are both elevated. The rate of production of insulin by the beta cell must also fail to compensate for the decreased sensitivity . These are conditions that come about in humans because of sedentary habits and obesity . In migrating birds, there may be a decline in insulin sensitivity, but it is unlikely that regulation of beta cell function or hepatic glucose production becomes abnormal. Hummingbirds combat kinetic disorders by dint of their highly aerobic lifestyles and necessity of maintaining close feedback between energy intake and energy expenditure. Unlike humans who have "uncoupled" food intake from functional needs, animals that must flap their wings at 50 beats per second in order to feed have a hard time staying fat.
What is awesome about humming birds is that aerodynamically, these birds are not able to fly, and yet they do!
As scientists try to figure out how hummingbirds are flying, I think God is smiling. It's just another thing only The Creator knows, and that's fine with me. Life should have some mystery, don't you think?
(c) 2009 April Lorier
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