Heart Beats

Consider the hummingbird for a long moment.  A hummingbird’s heart beats ten times a second.  A hummingbird’s heart is the size of a pencil eraser.  A hummingbird’s heart is a lot of the hummingbird.  Joyas voladoras, flying jewels, the first white explorers in the Americas called them…
Each one visits a thousand flowers a day.  They can dive at sixty miles an hour.  They can fly backwards.  They can fly more than five hundred miles without pausing to rest.  But when they rest they come close to death:  on frigid nights, or when they are starving, they retreat into torpor, their metabolic rate slowing to a fifteenth of their normal sleep rate, their hearts sludging nearly to a halt, barely beating, and if they are not soon warmed, if they do not soon find that which is sweet, their hearts grow cold, and they cease to be.
…
Hummingbirds, like all flying birds but more so, have incredible enormous immense ferocious metabolisms.  To drive those metabolisms they have race-car hearts that eat oxygen at an eye-popping rate.  Their hearts are built of thinner, leaner fibers than ours. Their arteries are stiffer and more taut.  They have more mitochondria in their heart muscles — anything to gulp more oxygen.  Their hearts are stripped to the skin for the war against gravity and inertia, the mad search for food, the insane idea of flight.  The price of their ambition is a life closer to death; they suffer more heart attacks and aneurysms and ruptures than any other living creature.  It’s expensive to fly. You burn out.  You fry the machine.  You melt the engine.  Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime.  You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old.
—     Brian Doyle
From his article:  “Joyas Voladoras”
Appearing in:  “The American Scholar“;  dtd:  12 June 2012
Link to the online article:  https://theamericanscholar.org/joyas-volardores/
[Mr. Doyle passed away a number of years ago, but he was a frequent contributor to the site.  Please visit the original site if you have some spare time.    —    kmab]
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