Hummingbirds: A Life-Size Guide to Every SpeciesBy Michael Fogden, Marianne Taylor, and Sheri L. WilliamsonHarper Design, 2014There are over 300 species of Trochilidae in the world today, over 300 species of hummingbirds, living in virtually every kind of climate, embarking on sometimes very long annual migrations despite being all but insubstantial – little balls of eiderdown, knitted together by a will as strong as mahogany. They’re native to the Americas, and in temperate months, almost anybody who’s ever spent time in a fairly large flowered area has probably seen them, although who knows how many times those hummers were mistaken for the flower-visiting insects that fly in their same manner and forage in their same manner and are only slightly smaller than many of the birds themselves?It’s an arresting moment, when the mistaken identity is cleared up and you realize you’re seeing not an insect but an incredibly tiny bird, a delicate and iridescent flitting thing flashing from flower to flower. Your imagination at first simply seizes up; it must be a insect you’re seeing! We know by our oldest instincts the grace and ambit of bird movements, and there’s nothing here like them. Hummingbirds can move their wings in a full circle, they can hover and back-track, and they flap their wings so quickly – up to 80 times per second in some species – that it’s often hard to see any flapping at all.In that first astonished moment, it seems impossible that detailed identification of these phantom creatures could ever be made. Which makes all the more astonishing the achievement of Michael Fogden, Marianne Taylor, and Sheri Williamson in their new book Hummingbirds: A Life-Size Guide to Every Species, produced in a beautiful volume by the HarperDesign imprint of HarperCollins. In Hummingbirds, our authors lay out an entry on every single extant species of hummingbird, with accompanying full-color photos, and the signature fun part of the book is that each of those full-color photos is life-sized. As you turn the pages, as you study each of these astonishing creatures, you repeatedly remind yourself that there’s no scaling happening here: these birds really are this small.Our authors provide a quick and comprehensive introduction about hummingbirds in general – their hyperactive metabolism, their appetites (necessarily voracious, considering their metabolism), and every aspect of their physiology, including the aforementioned rapid-fire wingbeats, which turn out to be not always so rapid-fire:

It is commonly supposed that hummingbirds flap their wings faster than other birds. This is generally true, but only because they are smaller and have shorter wings than most other birds. Surprisingly, when the larger hummingbirds are compared with birds of equal size, they are found to have slower wing beats. The Giant Hummingbird, for example, flaps its wings only 10 times per second, slower than the 14 times per second of the much bigger mockingbirds.

The behavior of the birds is also given an authoritative introduction, everything from mating, which, for the males, has a decidedly louche feel to it:

Hummingbirds are polygamous, and all nesting activities are carried out by the female unaided. Flowers and nectar are so abundant at some times of year that females can feed themselves and rear two nestlings with ease. As far as males are concerned, breeding begins and ends with courtship and mating, and many spend an inordinate amount of time advertising their services.

… to nesting, hunting, and the rearing of offspring. It’s a fine orientation for readers not quite up on their hummers, but the real delights of the book is the one that follows, the glorious page-by-page tour through the world’s hummingbirds (minus some 80 or so of the very rarest of the rare, which are described more briefly - and without pictures – at the rear of the book). These pages show the birds in bright detail, a short run-down of each species’ quirks, and a map marked in red to show their individual distributions.Turning these pages, you’re struck by how many of these entries include an assessment of the species current preservation status that says “Least Concern.” True, some of these birds are extremely endangered – but a good cheering percentage of them are not.Considering how fragile these tiny birds appear, the steady repetition of all those “Least Concern”s comes as a low jolt of pleasant surprise. As unscientific a term as it might be, this is a very happy book – it’s a requisite gift for the birders of your acquaintance.