Almost every hummingbird I’ve ever caught has ended up in someone’s ear. During this, I held the bird, smiled, and pretended hummingbirds didn’t stress me out. They’re so small.

I never aimed to catch them. My nine-meter nets, stretching from the ground to above my head, were inefficient at it anyway. Hummingbirds were only a happy accident.

They’re held like a fragile dart – I’ve watched countless people mime throwing them – and when you catch a hummingbird, you do a couple special things.  One of these is placing it into a person’s ear. You ask first, of course, and usually, they respond with a shocked, “what!?” before you explain that hummingbird hearts beat at over 1000bpm, and you can hear it, like a vibration.

To conclude the ritual, you lie the hummingbird flat on its back in someone’s palm.

“Make a wish,” you say. “And blow on it.”

It’s a silly bird trick. Birds are never naturally in that position, so they feel the pressure on their wings and believe they’re still contained. By blowing on them, you flip them over enough that they fly away.

It’s also because hummingbirds are miraculous, in the most scientific way possible. We don’t understand them. A female ruby-throated hummingbird can live up to twelve years, and in that time, her heart beats more than a human’s does in eighty.  It’s evolutionary magic that they exist at all.

Make a wish.

A smart kid once told me his hummingbird-wish came true a year after he made it, but my first time, I wasn’t thinking.  I was shaking, a three gram – that’s a penny! – bird motionless on my hand, its long beak outstretched and its red throat shimmering.

I never made a wish, but over the years my role transformed from the kid holding a hummingbird to the person catching one.  And that conversion from student to teacher is all I could’ve wanted.

It’s the summer of 2016, pre-dawn, and I’m in a government-issued Ford Focus, bouncing down residential roads. As a field technician for the Neighborhood Nestwatch bird banding study, my destination is one of fifty I visited that summer. Peering at addresses, I wish, as I did most days, they were easier to spot. It was always a little nerve-racking to think I may’ve shown up at the wrong house.

Hummingbirds are known for turning up in strange places. The Bahama woodstar is a Caribbean bird, but there’s a handful of records in south Florida, plus a 2013 record in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, of all places. No one knows how it got there.

Thankfully, I never went that far off-course.  Most days, I arrived, arranged my nets, and spread out my supplies, an anti-climactic start for me, but an unusual one for our volunteer homeowner.  When I had an interested crowd, I showed off a special pair of pliers I used to apply tiny “bracelets” to bird legs and a myriad of other tools, from rulers to empty pill bottles.

The process of banding is simple: set up net, catch bird, tag it, take data, and release. My project, with all its citizen scientists, added more aspects.  Scanning for addresses was one of them. Hummingbird-wishes were another.

Fifty houses is a lot to visit in one season. I’ve forgotten most of the average days, but the amazing thing about my program is that the visits were more striking for the people watching than for me. That’s rare. I’m usually ten-times more fascinated by nature than others around me. In fact, my normal, often exhaustive state is wishing more people cared.  For the summers I banded, I made that happen with the help of hummingbird-wishes.

There’s something special about holding a bird. Symbolism tells us flight means freedom. We learn that birds can do something humans only wish they could.  It was common for me to show up at a house, and for kids and adults alike to recall the exact birds they held a year before.

They also remember funny facts about them, things even birders don’t know. American goldfinches smell like maple syrup in May.  Professionals hold mourning doves with the “ice cream cone grip,” and the American robin is a poopy, poopy bird.  House finches don’t bite, so if you catch a bite-y brown-bird-dipped-in-raspberry-sauce, it’s likely a purple finch, or a “purple pinch,” if you will.

Hummingbirds make wishes come true.

That’s a fair bit of romanticizing, I know. In reality, hummingbirds are assholes. They’re one of few backyard birds that gets territorial over food sources, and sometimes males will claim feeders and chase all others away. But that doesn’t stop me from wishing on them, even if my “facts” aren’t the most scientific. My program’s backbone is research, not silly bird tricks, but the education and the data collection play equally important roles.

The study wants survival data; by color banding birds, we mark individuals so homeowners can recognize them. They then record dates and times these birds visit their yards. That’s the science. The education is inspiring people to care, and it consists of a mix of facts and stories.

I’ve never been good with names, but “Pinkerton” has stuck with me through the years. Like most families in the program, I met their yard before I met them, arriving in 2014 at dawn.  My heart sank when I saw their lawn, all classic suburbia and monocultured grass. I wished for luck, but I had no hummingbirds.

In six hours, we caught only two song sparrows. A long day, made only harder by the presence of their young daughters, who wanted to see more. During the ample down time, we talked about habitat. Mr. Pinkerton nodded along as we explained how grass is an ecological wasteland.

We returned the next year to find a garden of native plants.  Not only that, but one of the girls had done a project on habitat, and she showed us a fantastic poster of her yardbirds, the ruby-throated hummingbird right in the middle.

To an environmentalist, that may seem like a miracle; we all know how hard it is to convince people to change. I can’t say every house was like that, but we had some great ones.

A scientist once called my teachings an “emotional appeal,” and he was right, I agree, but I would never say it with his condescending tone.  An educator isn’t a textbook. I wasn’t there to instill facts and give ‘em a multiple-choice test at the end. I wanted to shock them, to inspire them, to put a hummingbird into their ear because that leaves an impression. People never forget hummingbird-wishes and maple-syrup-goldfinches, and so they pay more attention to the world around them.  They learn and share their knowledge further. That’s the goal of education, and if it comes from an “emotional appeal,” so be it. I’ll do it in a hummingbird’s heartbeat.

Marcy, who holds a party for us, has spent the past thirty years tailoring her yard for wildlife. She calls her seventeen acres “Cunkleman’s Safe Haven” and we always catch a crowd of people, a spectacular spread of food, and ridiculous amounts of birds there, once capturing nineteen different hummingbirds.  Her expansive gardens are a wish come true, for nature and for her. She bought the land, had a vision for it, and made it happen.

At other houses, we didn’t have such a dream, but we made it work. One suburban house has a yard with native herbaceous plants and trees but no bushes.  I struggled all day there. As I worked, I spotted a hummingbird chasing a tufted titmouse that kicked up a racket.  Confused, I watched closer, eventually spotting a tiny lichen nest in the native maple above us. We didn’t catch a ton of birds that day, but the family monitored their hummingbird nest for the whole summer.  I call that a success.

My teachings set people on a path to learn, and while I couldn’t reach everyone – not every wish comes true, after all – my effort did do something.  When you blow on a dandelion, you don’t know where the seeds will land, but you know they’ll end up somewhere.  Education is much the same.

I believe in change because I watched it happen.  The Pinkertons had no hummingbirds before they planted a garden. Marcy’s house has nineteen because she’s dedicated her life to making it so.

Causing change is exhausting, I understand. It leads to dead-ends, and when miseducation slams us in the face and apathy buries us further, it’s hard to keep going. There’s no formula for connecting with people, but I spent years watching hummingbirds grant wishes, and because of that, I have hope.

We can inspire change. Things can be different.  Nature has its own scientific miracles and its own stories. Together, they transformed me from student to teacher, and I’m not alone.

We just need to make a wish and blow our hummingbirds away.