Patients sometimes behave like our Snoopy

Hummingbirds need a lot of food in the evening. Then they roost and drop their body temperature. This bedtime calorie load and reduced metabolic rate enables them to survive the night.

We had just moved a few blocks across a suburb in the north of San Diego. Some young relatives of my German wife visited us almost immediately in a new house that was in chaos. An afternoon project was to obtain and install a new hummingbird feeder (I could not bear to harm …