My First Wild Hummingbird: Berkeley, California in 1974 with Dorothy and Frank Pitelka

To those of us born and bred in northern Europe in the 1940s seeing a hummingbird in the wild seemed an impossible dream. So when I did see my first one in the wild I can remember where I was and what I was doing.

I had just arrived at Dorothy and Frank Pitelka’s* house on Hilgard Avenue in Berkeley, California. For reasons I will not go into further here I had been invited to the Department of Zoology and its Cancer Research Laboratory by Dorothy. I flew in after a meeting in Canada in late June 1974 After having been driven from San Francisco airport, past the ‘little boxes made of ticky-tacky’ and across the Golden Gate bridge around the bay to Berkeley we were talking when I noticed movement in the garden (‘yard’), a near vertical terraced affair full of flowers. And there was an Anna’s Hummingbird (Calypte anna) searching for and finding nectar. I had no idea they occurred so far north. My hosts were amused that I was so excited at seeing such a common—to them—bird. But I was.

Anna's Hummingbird
Robert McMorran, United States Fish and Wildlife Service

After dinner Frank drove the short distance to the Berkeley Hills and as we walked he described every bird he saw and recognised every song he heard. He was an ecologist and renowned ornithologist. I did not until recently know much more about his background (more in another post) but I have found that he actually wrote the account of the birds of the Berkeley Hills.

I found a photograph of the Pitelkas’ garden from when the house was last sold but noticeable for their absence in 2005 were the delphiniums. Frank was utterly enthralled by English delphiniums (and marmalade) when on sabbatical leave in Charles Elton’s Bureau of Animal Populations at Oxford in the mid-1950s. The garden always had delphiniums and the breakfast table had Oxford marmalade. Both were there, along with the hummingbirds, when I made a return visit for a couple of days in 1978.

Since then I have seen lots of hummingbirds of different sizes in many parts of Central and South America but it was the first that really sticks in the memory.

*Dorothy Riggs Pitelka 1920-1994; Frank Alois Pitelka 1916-2003