The Nazca Lines, and the Emblem of Joy

Among the most famous of all images of the hummingbird is one of the vast geoglyphs of the Nazca of southern Peru, a bird traced in a single continuous line across the desert on a scale visible only from the air, part of a landscape of figures whose ritual purpose is still debated. Across the tropical Americas the hummingbird, which seems to hang in the air and to drink from flowers, gathered associations with the sun, with renewal and with joy, delight and vitality. Reborn warriors, the sun's companions and an emblem of brilliant life, hummingbirds carry a symbolism drawn from the bird's dazzling colour, its impossible hovering flight and its restless energy.

Hummingbirds are also key pollinators, and their long co-evolution with particular flowers is close enough that some plant species are pollinated almost exclusively by a single hummingbird species whose bill length matches the flower's own shape and depth; the loss of either partner threatens the other, and several hummingbird species are now listed as threatened or endangered by habitat loss across their range, giving the bird bound up with the sun and the honoured dead a genuine and current conservation stake as well. Hummingbirds are found nowhere outside the Americas, roughly three hundred and sixty species confined to the New World, which is why no comparable hummingbird symbolism developed in Old World traditions; European and Asian cultures instead read similar meanings of swiftness and delight into their own small, fast-flying birds.