Year: 2024

Runtime: 93 minutes 

Director: Sally Aitken

By Sarah Manvel

On the surface, “Every Little Thing” is a slight documentary about Los Angeles’s hummingbird lady, Terry Masear, who runs a volunteer rescue service for the city’s wounded or damaged hummingbirds. In reality this documentary is about how a society cares for its most helpless creatures and what it costs to provide care for those who will never understand the value of this kindness. This is a massive subject “Every Little Thing” is more than equal to. 

Several species of hummingbirds enjoy Los Angeles full-time but many others migrate to the city for the summer. That means Ms Masear spends each hummingbird season fielding messages from panicked city residents, who she calls rescuers, who don’t know how to look after the injured little birds they have found. The documentary follows one such season and the plight of a dozen or so birds, who were brought to her (absolutely enormous) home in varying states of injury. Large outdoor aviaries shelter the stronger birds, while smaller cages in her kitchen are the so-called ICU for the sicker little creatures. Ms Masear speaks to them as if they understand her, explaining every step of how she is handling them and sometimes apologising to them. Indeed the birds all have names given by their rescuers – Sugar Baby, Cactus, Raisin, Wasabi, Mikhail, Jimmy and Larry Bird among them – which Ms Masear uses respectfully, and which adds another layer of our investment in their survival. Obviously director Sally Aitken knew she was onto a winner here. Hummingbirds are impossible creatures and yet there they are, flitting around like fairies and enchanting all of us. Ann Johnson Prum’s slowed-down wildlife cinematography manages to both capture their inquisitiveness, their agility and their remarkable beauty.At the same time Ms Masear is a remarkable subject, a widow with a very difficult past who has clearly found tremendous solace in providing this safety and care. It’s clear she is an expert even before we learn through the titles she’s written books about hummingbirds, because she is able to gender the birds solely through their behaviour and to identify what happened to them by their injuries. For the birds’ purposes she’s also a careful and thoughtful nurse, prepared to spend hours on bespoke physical therapy. Some of this includes teaching the birds to fly again through the use of a perching twig she found fifteen years ago and that obviously has magical powers, because every bird taught with it recovers. It’s so kind, all the more so because these are not pets and they are not tame creatures despite their tiny size. These are animals who will never appreciate what’s being done to render them fit to return to the mortal combat of the wild. If you’re looking for metaphors, “Every Little Thing” has them in abundance.