A New Documentary About a Hummingbird Rehabber Peeks At Life on a Different Scale

About 70 minutes into Every Little Thing, an energetic young bird named Jimmy goes on a rampage. Weeks into his rehabilitation after a fall from his nest, the orphaned Allen’s Hummingbird is ready to move into a shared living situation, a roomy cage with a rambunctious duo dubbed “The Wild Boys.” Terry Masear, our hero, has him in her hand just outside the enclosure when—“Oh, shit”—he breaks loose and shoots up to the ceiling.

What ensues is the calmest, lowest-stakes chase scene Hollywood has to offer. Masear follows him to the corner of the room, where he threatens to explore a heating duct, then flits to the flowery wallpaper, until, with a two-handed snatch, she apprehends him at torso level. “Jimmy, that was really evil,” she chides, almost admiringly. After all, he just flew for several seconds of his own volition. That’s the goal around these parts.

Much of Every Little Thing, a film screening nationally starting this month, rings true to the old maxim, “hurry up and wait.” The documentary chronicles three months of Masear’s work nursing Los Angeles-area hummingbirds back to health, following her patients’ recovery from beginning to end. We’re introduced to Masear’s clinic as she fields calls and texts from concerned Angelenos and takes injured or abandoned birds into her care.

Then it’s about the painstaking, all-consuming work of treating and watching, through cycles of feeding, exercise, and socialization. The individual moments of rehabilitation work can sometimes feel unremarkable. And yet, the entire documentary hums with an anxious question: Which of these birds will make it back into the wild?

“You kind of have this perception, maybe, as someone from the outside: Oh, someone who looks after hummingbirds! That’s gotta be so sweet!” director Sally Aitken tells Audubon. “Actually, it’s about saving lives. There was an unbelievable sort of seriousness with which the work happens.”

Two decades ago, Masear began volunteering with the experienced L.A. hummingbird rehabber Jean Roper and learned to care for the birds herself, eventually leading Los Angeles Hummingbird Rescue from her home in West Hollywood, a journey she chronicles in the 2015 memoir Fastest Things on Wings. She’s since relocated from Southern California to Portland, Oregon, so most of her work with the collective, which has rescued more than 10,000 birds throughout her involvement, is over its hotline, advising residents who discover nestlings, fledglings, and other birds in need of support, and pointing some toward trusted rehabbers in the area.

The film’s setting, an ornate Beverly Hills manor where an ad hoc aviary stands in for Masear’s original clinic, sometimes seems to have sprung out of a fairy tale. But the summer of work captured in Every Little Thing is very real. Like many avian rehab efforts, caring for hummingbirds takes a unique dedication, necessitating specialized training and a federal certification. Between the sips of nectar young patients need every half hour and the flight training to equip them for life beyond the clinic, the work is exacting. Masear’s bedside manner is meticulous, wry, and slightly uncanny; much of the film’s magic comes from her empathic sense for what each bird needs to progress, physically and psychologically.

Strong-spirited Cactus is recovering from a serious wing injury after falling onto one of the prickly plants. Sugar Baby is a resilient optimist despite missing feathers after a resident with poor judgment drenched her wings in corrosive sugar water. Mikhail is in a lovesick cohabitation with Alexa, though the relationship’s not likely to last—they’re different species. Charlie, who practices feeding other nestlings by sticking her beak in theirs, is eager for adulthood.

“You don’t think a bird that weighs three grams can have such a range of emotions, and such a powerful grasp of their circumstances and their environment and the other birds around them,” Masear tells Audubon. “But it’s amazing what they take in and what they process and how they respond to it.”

It may not be possible to fully understand hummingbirds without seeing the world through their eyes—and the film’s footage helps by bringing its subjects into sharp focus. Emmy-winning wildlife cinematographer Anne Johnson Prum uses a Phantom Flex camera at an extraordinarily high frame rate to capture their buzzing flight, both in treatment and in the wild. Luxuriously slowed, we see the birds closer to their own pace, flitting among flowers and hovering to survey their terrain. “I wanted to illustrate the birds in this otherworldly sense—in the way that Terry apprehends the world, which is that there’s a higher dimension here,” Aitken says.

Aitken interweaves Masear’s journey with that of her avian charges, a format that adds meaning both to her story and theirs. As a child in Wisconsin, Masear fostered big, creative aspirations but also struggled with a traumatic family environment, experiences she carries into care for animals that must fend off hostile rivals once they leave the nest. The film also takes a thoughtful but direct approach to the subject of mortality: Masear’s steely realism emerges in moments where she sticks a shovel in the ground to bury two avian patients and reflects on her husband’s gradual decline and death. Bearing witness to life’s calamities, we realize, is just as crucial as offering support.

Hummingbirds’ lives may be short—they live only about five years—but they make every second count, perhaps ten times as much, given their 1,200 beat-per-minute heart rates. And it’s that understanding that makes Masear’s commitment to these tiny beings that much more profound. Every Little Thing is not a story of grand achievements. It is about learning to love on the scale of centimeters, to imbue the greatest significance in the smallest bodies, to wait patiently as a battered bird musters the confidence to make one more flight.