Ornicopia 11: Are hummingbirds the only birds that fly backward?

110.  Arehummingbirds the only birds that fly backward?   While hummingbirds are probably the championsof backward flight, they are by no means the only birds that can fly in thisway. When two herons or egrets fight, periodically one of them caught at adisadvantage in the dispute will flutter backward.  Occasionally warblersfluttering at the tip of a branch as they pick off insects will flutterbackward to a better position.  Flycatchers regularly flutter backwardwhen they overshoot some flying insect.  It is probable that any birdwhich uses fluttering flight can move backward when pressed to do so.

 

NOTE:  It’s funny that this 1001 Questions Answered About Birds entry is a bit of an authors’ editorialmisstep. 

 

Pose the question in theway they did, leading off with the “champion” description in the first sentence and ALLanyone really wants to know is more about hummingbirds. 

Forget (for now) lovely herons, egrets and warblers. 

HOW do hummingbirds do it and, more importantly, WHY dothey do it? 

The answer to the secondquestion is, of course, obvious: Because they can. 

It is part of the greattalent, freedom and commitment to that talent and freedom that God gave them. 

A long time ago I had afriend whose salient trait was that he invariably drove in the wrongdirection fast.  He was a nice person (basically; troubled, alittle hostile, but a good soul), but he was the opposite of thehummingbird: a sadpoor human heavily burdened with a highly symbolic deficit. 

I would giveanything to fly and I’d love tofly like a hummingbird.

 

Eno:Driving Me Backwards (Link) 

Faust: Don't Take Roots (Link) 

 

From:  1001 Questions AnsweredAbout Birds by Allan D. Cruickshank and Helen G. Cruickshank (Toronto, General Publishing Company, 1958).

Small Nostalgia (Judy Nylon)

      

  

Judy Nylon photographed by Eno


Because I feel very little nostalgia for anything, this can be short.  

        I could hazard a guess about why this is, but "hazard" would be the operative word and, as they used to say, I don't want to "go there."

Judy Nylon, London 1971

        Earlier this week, however, I felt some small nostalgia for a few moments and wondered where Judy Nylon was and what she was doing these days?

        I only met Judy a couple of times and didn't know her very well at all, but when I first (unexpectedly) was introduced to her in 1977, over lunch at Gallagher's Steakhouse on West 52nd Street in Manhattan,  I was extremely excited because she was a major celebrity known to me through the pages of Rock Scene magazine, as a back-up performer on John Cale's Fear lp (on the song The Man Who Couldn't Afford To Orgy) and a "name-checked" personage in Eno's song Back In Judy's Jungle on the Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) album.  The circumstances of the lunch might possibly make for interesting reading, but would distract from the main point.

Judy Nylon and Pat Palladin -- Snatch

 

      Judy was tall and striking.  An American expatriate in London, contemporary with some other eventually to be better-and-less-well-known American female London ex-pats, including Chrissie Hynde, Kate Simon, Pat Palladin, Gerry Hall and (I might as well mention for the sake of completeness) Ruby Wax, Judy was terribly friendly, nice and well-mannered and a great lunch companion.  In those days, I was working at ABC Records in the publicity department while also attending art history graduate school, and Caroline and I ran into Judy a few other times, in the ABC offices and at rock clubs around town.

Judy Nylon today

      A brief but completely good memory, I was pleased to use social media to summon Judy's shade and fill in the colors the other night.  She currently works as part of an interactive online art/literature collective called Aether9.  She occasionally gives interviews (mostly about the past) and they are highly articulate and, dare I say it, wise.  (In one, she fielded a question about Patti Smith's "achievement" about as deftly and delicately as one can possibly imagine.)  She even responded to one of those ridiculously, but addictively, readable "Proust Questionnaires" for one publication in a highly impressive and entertaining way.  And she still looks like Judy, which prompted feelings of small nostalgia in me.  Wherever Judy is tonight, I hope she's well and happy.

Pal Judy lp

June 1, 1974 -- Happy Anniversary