Saving the Hummingbirds of Los Angeles, Despite the Odds

They say the measure of any society is how it treats its most vulnerable members. We could reverse engineer the idea and arrive at another perhaps obvious, though rarely stated (and even more rarely practiced) truth: that healing a society, maybe even a civilization, begins with healing its most vulnerable members. That thought runs through one’s mind while watching Sally Aitken’s Every Little Thing, a documentary as delicately beautiful as its subjects — the hummingbirds of Los Angeles and the woman who has made it her life’s mission to care for them.

Aitken’s film (which opens theatrically in New York this weekend and will slowly make its way around the country in subsequent weeks) follows the efforts of Terry Masear, who runs a rescue operation dedicated to rehabbing injured and orphaned hummingbirds from all over the greater Los Angeles area. She takes the creatures in, often responding to phone calls from strangers almost as if she were a 911 for these birds, then carefully treats them at home before eventually releasing them back into the wild. The process requires a lot of patience and precision — some have to be taught or retaught to fly, and they can be quite hesitant and scared to do so. The birds are already minuscule and delicate, and many of the ones Masear works with are babies whose mothers have disappeared or died, which puts them in even greater peril.

“When you see how vulnerable and helpless they are, you wonder how any of them make it,” we’re told. And not all of them do. Every Little Thing presents us with an understated roller-coaster ride of emotions, as we see Masear take in different hummingbirds, name them, and then attempt to nurse them back to health with only occasional success. There’s Cactus, which got thorns stuck in its body; Sugar Baby, whose wings were destroyed from being drenched in sugar water; Jimmy, who fell out of a tree after its mother died; and Larry Bird, suffering from a back injury. When a bird dies, Masear picks a red flower from her garden for the burial and digs a small grave in her backyard. She tells us the birds’ bones are so thin that within a couple of days, their bodies have disappeared, “like they weren’t even here to begin with.”

We might ask: Why hummingbirds, why now? We might even feel tragically disorientated watching a movie about rehabbing tiny birds set in a city that, as I write these words, is engulfed in apocalyptic flames. But the film is not ill-timed because its values are both timeless and pertinent, as contained within the woman at its center. Blunt in her language but soothing in her voice, Masear makes for a fascinating combination of fortitude and softness. Watching her carefully handle the hummingbirds — cupping them in her hands, drip-feeding them with syringes, cleaning their gossamer wings with cotton swabs, placing them in diminutive handwoven nests — we see someone capable of great tenderness, but we also feel that there might be more to this woman’s single-minded determination.

There is, indeed, a darker backstory here. The film opens on a fleeting 8mm image of a young girl running through a field toward the camera. Is this footage of Masear as a child? Throughout, Aitken cuts to similar flashes, but she does it so sparingly that the overall effect becomes not one of something being explained (and thus, perhaps, reduced), but of a gathering enigma — almost as if the film were becoming haunted by something unspoken. That said, Masear does eventually provide some quick details of her history and the circumstances that delivered her to this current life. But she seems reticent to reveal too much of her past, and her elusiveness drives our fascination. So many movies work toward specificity, toward a eureka moment of greater understanding. It’s harder, sometimes, to make one whose mystery grows the more we watch it.

Central to this mystery are the film’s breathtaking close-ups of the hummingbirds, including lengthy slow-motion passages showing us the absurd speed of their wings, their almost alien ability to suspend themselves in the air, and the ridiculous contortions of their tiny bodies. The sublime beauty of such images (captured by wildlife cinematographer Ann Johnson Prum) contrasts with the grainy footage of Masear’s past. But the two styles work in tandem, too, reaching across time and texture to forge a cinematic connection, tracing a journey from human pain to transcendence found in the otherworldly flight of a bird.

Aitken made one of my favorite movies of 2021, Playing With Sharks: The Valerie Taylor Story, about the diver, filmmaker, and activist who spent her life filming and fighting for sharks. There, Taylor’s life journey was about confronting the misperception of sharks as brute killers of the sea (a misperception she had helped foster earlier in her career, having provided some of the real-life shark footage for Steven Spielberg’s classic Jaws). Hummingbirds, obviously, are a different matter altogether; they’re not exactly known for populating our nightmares. But the two documentaries do demonstrate Aitken’s acuity as a filmmaker — the way she leans into the physical, mythic majesty of the sea in Playing With Sharks and the almost hallucinatory grace of hummingbirds in Every Little Thing. And we watch both movies, we’re convinced that we’re seeing something greater and more powerful than the sum of its cinematic parts. Before our eyes, Every Little Thing comes to embody the fragile yet uncontainable mystery of all life.