Valley woman’s hummingbird rescue takes flight again
The hummingbird lady is back.
Almost four years after Marion Brady-Hamilton’s home-based hummingbird rescue operation ran afoul of state regulators, she has returned to nursing abandoned babies and injured adults — this time with all the proper paperwork in place.
On a table in the living room of her northwest valley home, a blue plastic pet carrier sits open with two of the tiny birds inside — a female broad-tailed hummingbird and a male calliope hummingbird, each with an injured wing.
She’s been caring for the female, named Emily by the people who found it, since December. The male has been with her since New Year’s Day.
“His name is Chance, as in second chance,” Brady-Hamilton said.
If he keeps healing the way he has, Chance could be ready to return to the wild in a matter of weeks. But Emily’s prospects are murkier. Her injured wing appears to have been broken before, and it’s unclear if she will ever be able to fly again.
“She might be a permanent resident,” Brady-Hamilton said.
The now-retired North Las Vegas crime scene investigator rescued her first hummingbird in 2008, while working as a volunteer at Gilcrease Nature Sanctuary. She named the baby bird Squeak and took him with her to the office and to crime scenes because he needed to be fed so often. He would perch on the cubicle wall by her desk and chirp for food.
She had been rehabbing hummingbirds for almost five years by the time she was featured in the Las Vegas Review-Journal on July 7, 2012. Two days later, a state game warden who read the story decided to have a look at the woman’s paperwork.
At the time, Brady-Hamilton thought she was doing everything by the book. She thought her work with birds was sanctioned under a permit held by Gilcrease. As it turned out, the nature sanctuary didn’t have a valid permit — and even if it had, it would not have covered birds being cared for off the property.
So Brady-Hamilton quit taking in hummingbirds and started filling out forms instead.
She said she immediately applied for wildlife rehabilitation permits from the U.S. Fish &Wildlife Service and the Nevada Department of Wildlife. She was finally issued a federal fish and wildlife permit in January 2014 and got her state rehabilitation permit in late March 2015.
Since then, she has successfully nursed and released 14 hummingbirds, not counting the pair in her living room.
All told, she figures she has returned about 75 hummingbirds to the wild, including the ones she cared for before she was licensed.
“I’ve had babies that are the size of my pinkie (finger)nail or the size of the Lincoln head on a penny,” she said.
Brady-Hamilton considers the work a “stress release,” but it’s also labor intensive. A newly hatched hummingbird might need to be fed every 10 to 20 minutes.
She feeds the tiniest hatchlings with a catheter no thicker than a strand of angel hair pasta.
Eventually, the babies graduate to drinking sugar water from apipette, and then they learn to feed themselves by way of “feeder training,” which is exactly what it sounds like.
To prepare the birds for their eventual return to the wild, Brady-Hamilton and her husband built a 6-foot-tall flight cage in the backyard and stocked it with flowering honeysuckle, a feeder and a birdbath.
“By the time I release them, they know what a hummingbird feeder is, they know what flowers are, and they fly really well,” she said.
She doesn’t advertise her services or charge for them. She said most of the calls she gets are referred to her by Gilcrease, although she can also be reached through her Hamilton Hummingbird Rescue page on Facebook.
According to state records, Brady-Hamilton is one of only two licensed wildlife rehabilitators in the valley and one of only five anywhere in Nevada. She is the only one specifically licensed to handle hummingbirds.
She expects her phone to start ringing soon. The flowers are blooming, she said, which means baby hummingbird season is on the way.
Contact Henry Brean at hbrean@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0350. Follow @RefriedBrean on Twitter.
