Hi Tweets,

Gerrie Patterson writes:

>I have just had a call from CBC Radio asking what I thought of the fact the
>Xantus' hummingbird we had here for 10 months has not been accepted as a
>"true" sighting . I am curious to know if someone can tell us who the people
>are that make this decision and perhaps how they would decide.

Gerrie, as a voting member of the BC Provincial rarities committee, I was
one of those people, and I was one of the two people who voted, not once but
twice, against the acceptance of the Xantus's Hummingbird Hylocharis
xantusii to the BC List. My eventual decision was neither arbitrary nor
perverse, and I'm happy to have the opportunity to share my reasoning with you.

As I am much in favor of increased transparency in the horrendously slow and
usually totally hidden workings of North American rarities committees
(bafflingly called in North America, 'bird records' committees, as though
records of non-rarities aren't important enough to record), and since
relating the intellectual process by which I arrived at that decision will
no longer compromise the adjudication of this particular candidate bird's
acceptibility, please allow me to explain how I travelled from an initial
acceptance to an unassuaged doubt. Please understand that I won't speak for
any other member of the BC committee than myself; should another BC
Provincial rarities committee member want to describe the reasoning
underlying his or her accepting vote, I'm sure that would be an interesting
point/counterpoint.

Let's get to it, then. At first, acceptance to me seemed clear-cut: species,
sex and age were incontrovertible. Very late autumn and very early winter
are traditionally times for appearance of Deep South vagrants and 'mirror
migrants' in the Cascadian Region as they are in their eastern geographical
analogue, the Canadian Maritime Provinces. There were convenient hurricanes
(Nora, Rick) in just that part of the world to strew storm-driven vagrant
waifs from hell to breakfast. What more could a rarities committee member want?

So, at first, I voted for unqualified acceptance and addition to the BC List.

But a few brain cells at the back of the head weren't entirely convinced,
and couldn't sleep for thinking about it. They went about for a couple of
weeks fuming and frowning and muttering to themselves, just grunting at
their friends when they said hello in the street, clearly unhappy about
something. Finally, they decided to look at the mechanics of storm-vagrancy.

*Just then*, there was a long discussion on this and another list in which
the question of what happens when a hurricane bashes through the Caribbean
and north into the US scattering Caribbean seabirds and over-water migrants
and where the heck are all those Caribbean island endemics I shouldn't have
to travel all that way to see? I'll skip the details and get to the
observations and conclusions: typically the only birds which cast up as
storm waifs immediately after a catastrophic storm are 1. seabirds and 2.
passerine migrants already in transit over the water. Endemics? The
hurricane kills them. Dey dont go nowheres, mon, dey stays right here.

Alright, let's look at this again. An individual belonging to a sedentary
southern Baja endemic species with no history of vagrancy gets sucked up by
a hurricane and dropped down somewhere close to Vancouver BC. I checked all
the Bird Alerts on BirdWest for the same period, but there were no-- repeat,
no-- other Baja endemics reported anywhere. So much for fallout (see above.
'the hurricane kills them').

Now I'm becoming a little uneasy about this bird's origin. Let's look at
something else. Let's assume the bird is a bona fide vagrant, and let's
assume that because it's a sedentary species, it's gonna sit where it lands,
so to speak. Well, it remained in the vicinity of one or two yards through
several seasons where a migrant would have left: it behaved as a
transplanted sedentary species should. The reasonable inference from that is
that it couldn't land anywhere else until it reached SW British Columbia,
thousands of miles north of Baja California. But there were no weather
systems at the time of sufficent energy to A) transport this bird here while
preventing it from landing somewhere between Baja and here, B) getting it
here in a timely way over such a long distance and C) being sufficiently
energetic to get it here in a short time, but not so energetic that the
storm kills it. The last two points are vital.

Consider the type of bird it is: a hummingbird. One thing stressed in all
the popular books about hummingbirds, and common knowledge to anyone who
feeds them, is how frequently they need to rehydrate (that's 'drink', to
non-ornithologists like ourselves). This is not preference on the birds'
part: without frequent pitstops to tank up, they die. Twenty-four to
thirty-six hours without water is the time period frequently quoted. They
are so absolutely dependant on that combination of sugars and water we call
nectar (if it's wild) or sugar-water, that they will not leave the proximity
of flowerbeds or feeders except to migrate, and fight wars over these
resources among themselves which would be fearsome to be near if they were
larger animals.

Let's look again at the storm-waif hypothesis. To reach SW BC from southern
Baja in the survival-period of a non-rehydrating hummingbird, the hurricane
transporting it must move northward at about a minimum of 180--200 km/hr for
at least one full day. But the average hurricane slouches along at about at
an average speed of only 20-50 km/hr, and a fast-traveller no faster than 60
km/hr. Two things, then: first, hurricanes don't move fast enough to be the
method of transfer within that window of survivability; second, the
Hurricanes Nora and Rick pooped out and dissipated in areas well away from
SW BC and were the bird travelling within the storm, it would have had the
opportunity to bail out far aouth of BC. The inescapable conclusion? There
were no weather systems capable of transporting the Xantus's Hummingbird
from southern Baja to SW BC in a timely way, therefore the bird could not
have been weather-transported.

Then how could it reach SW BC so very far north? As the species' behavior
shows, migration or long-distance vagrancy was foreign to it; its behavior
at the Pattersons showed it would stay where there was food and water
regardless of season: it behaved throughout as a transplanted sedentary
species, not a temporarily-marooned migrant. So, hurricanes don't work, and
there was no pattern or other occurrence of similar south Baja sedentary
endemics in vagrante delicto to the exceedingly well-covered north including
California and Oregon. So if there is no plausible natural transport
mechanism, what the heck's left?

Artificial transport. Ugly words to a lister, but I'm no longer one and I
don't care, so I can view and test the possibility with equanimity and what
I cheerfully hope is neutrality. In absence of a convincing natural
mechanism, an inadvertent or deliberate introduction into BC is the only
other possibility. The bird might have flown into a wheel-well or
baggage-hold of a northbound jet, or been deliberately and surreptitiously
kept as a local aviary bird, or intentionally imported and released, for
whatever reason (exotic birds would rather frequently show up in Richmond,
particulary near Vancouver International Airport, YVR, when importers,
fearing detection, would release their birds and other animals rather than
be caught red-handed). But in the absence of a natural mechanism, given this
species and its sedentary nature, human transport seemed at least as
possible, if not more so.

Let me stress, Gerrie, that by this point I didn't know which was the more
plausible, natural or artificial origin for this bird, and that is the
crucial point: I *didn't* have a reasonable certainty which. At this point
in my thinking, I realised there was now an equally reasonable doubt that
the bird arrived here on its own effort, and at this point in the
deliberations of many a rarity committee member the removal of reasonable
certainty forces a 'reject' vote (or 'non-acceptance' in the flannelmouthed
euphemistic Bureauspeak increasingly employed by these committees).

To remove that doubt, I tried to think of any way that it could be proven
either way: if natural, how to pick up a single stay-at-home hummingbird
from southern Baja California and not let it make a landfall until it
reached the Patterson's yard thousands of miles to the north in one jump
without killing it and without bringing any of its Baja buddies along. If
artificial, how, and if deliberate, why? Was an illegal aviary in the
vicinity? Was someone importing hummingbirds illegally? Was the bird an
escape or a deliberate release? I even considered the possibility that the
bird could have been deliberately released as a 'salted' rarity by an
unscrupulous lister, as in the famous English 'Hastings Rarities' case of
the earlier part of the century. I tried to think of *all* the
possibilities, both natural and artificial. The answer to them all was: I
don't know; nothing I can think of can dismiss the other possibilities;
there is no compelling piece of evidence either way. Reasonable doubt. Can't
accept. Reject, then. The rules say it's gotta be one or the other, and ya
can't duck a decision.

Reject. I so voted in the first circulation. Given the vast enthusiasm,
rock-solid ID and tourist benefits around this bird, I thought to myself:
oh, boy, this is a good way to raise an army of one. I was astonished to
discover another committee-member had likewise rejected, forcing a
re-circulation of the record. Well, I thought, maybe somwthing new's turned
up that will nail it one way or the other. But in the second round, the
storm-waif hypothesis was again invoked, again without detailed application
of how it would work with this particular bird. Nothing arose in the
second-round discussion either to illuminate any of the points on which I'd
been thinking or to speak to the doubts I had about natural origin. There
was nothing to compel a radical re-interpretation of the available evidence
so as to permit me to change my vote to acceptance with a clear conscience.
So, in the second circulation, I again voted against acceptance on the
grounds that in my judgement there was a reasonable doubt of the bird's wild
origin, reasonable certainty of which being the one condition necessary to
accept any rarity.

To steal something from somewhere (has the flavor of the Holmesian canon),
extraordinary sightings require extraordinary proof. Such proof wasn't there
nor was it provided in the entire time the bird was there, except to show
the bird behaved as a good little sedentary species should: the closest was
the idea of storm transport, but merely invoking the 'hurricane storm-waif'
hypothesis without detailed development of how it worked in this instance
was simply unconvincing.

Disturbingly, in his weekly Birds column in the Globe and Mail on Saturday,
Peter Whelan mentioned the fact that when the Xhummer was first seen, people
noted a small injury on its nape. One of the situations I have seen this
superficial injury/nape-feather disturbance before was on birds which have
attempted to remove their heads from a mist-net's mesh so forcibly that such
damage occurs where the net-strands 'hook' the nape feathers. The
injury/displacement could as easily have had a natural cause, but such an
observation deepened my uncertainty of the bird's origin.

So, Gerrie, that explains why I voted against accepting the Xantus's
Hummingbird as a fully wild bird which arrived here under its own power, not
that I believe it didn't, but that after looking at all the available
evidence, thinking hard for several weeks pro-and-con, then repeating that
thinking again in the second round, continually testing and re-testing the
possibilities again pro-and-con, there exists in my mind less than the
reasonable certainty that an 'accept' vote would require. We don't know, we
never will, and when the day's over, that makes the matter one of judgement,
but as just one conscientious member of the BC Provincial rarities
committee, I gave your hummingbird the most honest and critical judgement I
possibly could before rejecting the record for inclusion to the BC List.

And is it a 'real' sighting? Well, the identity, the sex and the age are
beyond dispute. The bird flew around and amazed and pleased everyone and
worshipped the God of Hummingbirds with a healthy thirst for sweetness. Of
course it was real. The controversial issue was one of provenance.

>We all know we saw it anyway!

Yes, indeed! And both your bird and your wonderful hospitality brought so
much happiness to so many people that, to me, *that* is the best thing to
remember about it. It is the many outward-expanding ripples from the great
kindness you and your family put into this part of the world which so many
people will remember when they think back on the Xantus's Hummingbird in
Gibsons, BC. Regardless of the decision whether to add or not add the
species to the BC List, or keep or erase the pencilled-in tick on a
life-list, I hope you'll see that's where that tiny mite's *real* value lay.

Michael Price
Vancouver BC Canada
mprice at mindlink.net