The Rufous Hummingbird (Selasphorus rufus) is small even by hummingbird standards – about 8 cm long (3 inches to you and me).  True to his name, he’s a brilliant orange color with a flashy iridescent reddish violet throat (the female is mostly green with rusty orange markings).   
I’ve observed that hummingbirds are a lot like humans in some ways:  the smaller they are the bigger they act. The male Rufous is a case in point. He’s known as the feistiest hummingbird ever to take wing. This story is about one I’ve come to know extremely well this summer. To say he’s feisty would be a gross understatement.
He’s a tyrant. So much so, that we’ve given him a name:  Ivan the Terrible.
The real Ivan the Terrible (aka Ivan IV) was renowned for acts of unspeakable brutality. He ruled Russia from 1530 to 1584. The first to take the title of “tsar” (Russian for “Caesar”), he wrote the book on tyranny and his methods became a kind of template for how Russia is ruled to this day. Ivan the Terrible (“Grozny” in Russian) was ruthless and sadistic. By all accounts, he was a raving madman.
Among the stories about Ivan’s legendary ill temper is a truly horrific one involving the death of his only son, Ivan Ivanovich, and heir to the throne:  Ivan murdered him in a fit of rage. The cause of death was a severe blow to the head with a blunt instrument. Simply put, Ivan clubbed his son to death.
Then there is the chilling story surrounding the origins of St. Basil’s Cathedral near the massive main gates to the Kremlin in Red Square. St. Basil’s, with its riot of colors and clustered onion domes, is a fantastic feat of architectural imagination. As legend has it, when the cathedral was completed Ivan asked the architect, P. Yakovlev, if he could imagine a more beautiful edifice this side of eternity and when Yakovlev said “yes," Ivan had his eyes put out – as insurance against such an eventuality. But Yakovlev went on to build other cathedrals, so this is one story that probably isn’t true.
Still, it’s believable. When the Russian nobles (the so-called boyars) did not support him, for example, Ivan IV had them killed. Similarly, in 1570 he ordered the burning and looting of Novgorod (known in history as the Massacre of Novgorod). In the process, his hated Oprichniki (predecessors of the secret police) killed off the cream of the Novgorod aristocracy, but among his victims were many other inhabitants of the city who were tortured and murdered by the thousands (estimates vary widely from a “low” of 2,700 to as many as 60,000).
But this tale is really about the other Ivan, a manic hummer who has taken up residence in the fir tree that looms above the deck of our cabin. We have at least three other kinds of hummingbirds that frequent our hummingbird feeder (or did before the Great Orange Terror struck).  Male Broadtails (hardly paragons of non-aggression themselves) sometimes fight back but rarely prove to be a match for Ivan who is considerably smaller and even more considerably meaner. The Broadtails weigh more than Ivan and are about 10 cm (4 inches) long, making them roughly 25 percent more physically imposing. It’s as if a guy 5’2” harried the entire Los Angeles Lakers basketball team and eventually drove them out of LA.  
Seriously.  Ivan has driven the other hummingbirds away. At the beginning of the summer, our deck was literally humming (pardon the pun) with hummers. But the fun and games ended when Ivan showed up and quickly colonized the feeder.
It’s a rare event now when a single hummer attempts to take a sip from one of the red plastic flowers that encircle the bottle containing the highly sought-after sugar water. Once the scene of lively avian activity, it’s become a dead zone. Now there’s only Ivan, sitting on a branch in a strategic position ready to attack like some kind of deranged bug-sized kamikaze. In fact, sometimes the little terror just perches on a wire hoop a foot above the feeder surveying the surrounding air space for signs of a would-be invader.
But this morning was the last straw. We opened the shades and there to our shock and horror was a little female Broadtail hanging upside down from one of the “flowers” on the feeder – looking for all the world as if she were dead.
Was she dead? On closer inspection, she was quivering and clearly in distress, but still alive. How does one rescue much less resuscitate a stricken hummingbird?
Long story short, while we were standing there dumbfounded and vowing to make Ivan pay for this act of wanton brutality if it was the last thing we did, the “dead” hummingbird suddenly flew away. The bird was obviously stunned but not mortally wounded. We didn’t actually catch Ivan in the act, didn’t witness the crime, but he did it. And this is one bird that doesn’t deserve a right to due process or trial by jury.

Tom Magstadt writes and cooks in the log cabin of his dreams.  He lives on a mountain in Ouray County and frequents Colorado Boy almost enough to qualify as a regular.