MEXICO CITY — Gently holding a baby hummingbird between her hands, Catia Lattouf says, “Hello, cute little guy. Are you very hungry?”
It’s the latest patient at her apartment in a toney section of Mexico City where she has nursed a whole bunch of the tiny birds back to health over the past decade.
Under Lattouf’s caress, the bird relaxes little by little, allowing her to judge it.
A young man who rescued it after it fell from a nest onto his patio watched attentively.
“It’s a broad-billed hummingbird,” the 73-year-old Lattouf said, as she moved an eyedropper to its beak. “Oh, mama, you wish to eat!”
This is commonly how Lattouf’s days have gone since she turned her apartment in Mexico City’s Polanco neighborhood right into a clinic for sick, injured or infant hummingbirds, about 60 of which currently flit around.
Lattouf, who studied French literature, has turn into a reference source for bird lovers, amateur and skilled alike, across Mexico and other parts of Latin America.
Her improvised clinic also supports more formal institutions just like the Iztacala campus of Mexico’s National Autonomous University, which sometimes refers cases to her attributable to an absence of resources, time and space, said certainly one of its researchers, the ornithologist María del Coro Arizmendi.
Arizmendi said there are 22 species of hummingbird in Mexico’s sprawling capital, of which the broad-billed and the berylline hummingbird are probably the most common.
In Mexico, there are some 57 species and around 350 across the Americas.
With dozens of the tiny birds buzzing overhead, along partitions and the window of her bedroom, Lattouf explained that she began caring for them a yr after surviving colon cancer in 2011.
It began with one hummingbird that had an eye fixed injured by one other bird.
A veterinarian friend encouraged her to attempt to help it. She named it Gucci after the brand of the glasses case she kept it in.
The bird became her inseparable companion, perching on her computer screen while she worked.
“It wrote me a recent life,” she said of the nine months the bird lived along with her.
It helped pull Lattouf out of the sadness and loneliness she had experienced after her husband’s 2009 death followed by her own bout with cancer.
Her illness had pushed her to sell her five high-end boutiques to give attention to her recovery.
Later, friends and acquaintances began bringing her more hummingbirds.
She began studying the best way to higher take care of the birds which might be native to the Americas and typically weigh only a fifth of an oz or less and are about 4 to five inches long.
“Most come to me as babies. Many come to me broken,” she said.
Some have injuries to wings after colliding with things or falling from nests. Some have infections from drinking contaminated water from hummingbird feeders, that are popular in town.
Since May, the demand for her services has jumped. Someone put a video about her work on the social platform TikTok that has been viewed greater than 1.5 million times.
Lattouf says she never turns away a bird. Together along with her collaborator Cecilia Santos, who she calls the “hummingbird nanny,” they take care of the birds in long days that stretch from 5 a.m. into the night.
Many of the hummingbirds are within the bedroom where Lattouf sleeps. They stay there until they’re strong enough to fly and feed themselves.
Then she moves them to a neighboring room to arrange them to eventually be freed. Their release is available in a wooded area on town’s southside.
Lots of them do manage to return to the wild, however the ones who die under Lattouf’s care are buried near her constructing between small plants.
Town is stuffed with threats to hummingbirds. There are the sleek black grackles that attack the birds and destroy their nests, in addition to constant construction projects that replace flower gardens with concrete.
But Lattouf stays optimistic and is betting on other bird lovers planting more flowers to feed the nice pollinators.
“Nothing is guaranteed,” she said. “I feel God gives life and God takes it, but we do all the things possible.”
