BELOIT, Wis. -- Joan Salzberg planted her backyard garden with flowers, shrubs and trees she hoped would attract wild birds to the tiny wooden houses, baths and feeders she strategically placed outside her kitchen window.
She never imagined her bird sanctuary ultimately would attract close to 700 bird lovers from across the country who flocked to her home this fall to catch a glimpse -- however fleeting -- of a South American hummingbird rarely seen north of the Mexican border.
"Once word got out on the Internet, people came, and they came and they came," said Salzberg, 77, who nicknamed her home "Bluebird Headquarters" long before her tropical visitor turned her residence into a top tourist destination for bird lovers from across the country.
Bird experts say sightings of the green-breasted mango inside the United States are rare, making the one in Salzberg's yard on a recent warm October morning that much more unusual.
"Birds from the Yucatan aren't suppose to be in southwestern Wisconsin," said Donnie Dann, a bird conservation expert from Highland Park, Ill., who recently made the approximately 90-mile trek to see the iridescent green aviator. "But that's one of the wonderful things about birds. They fly, and sometimes they act in a bizarre and unexpected way."
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Salzberg said she did a double-take when she first saw the exotic bird lapping up her secret recipe of sugar water from a red strawberry-shaped feeder she'd placed outside her kitchen window. With her view from the breakfast table, she could discern the visitor was a hummingbird because of the way it hovered in place at the feeder before darting back into the nearby woods.
But the bird looked about twice as big as the ruby-throated hummingbirds that regularly visit her feeder. Plus, its long black beak had a D-shaped hook at the end -- something she'd never seen on any of the local hummers -- and it had a cinnamon swirl running along its sides. She also could see a distinctive black patch edged in white on its belly -- a sign the bird was a youngster. Adult mangoes have a fully green chest.
Because she couldn't find a picture matching the markings and traits of the strange visitor in any of her local bird guides, she called a friend, Mike Ramsden, who successfully snapped pictures of the creature. When members of the Wisconsin Society of Ornithology, a group of bird experts and hobbyists, tentatively identified the bird as a green-breasted mango, Salzberg gave him her approval to post news of the sighting on the Internet.
Word flew among bird lovers that Salzberg also had given her permission for visitors to come see the lost bird for themselves, prompting the massive migration to the two-story brick home that she and her husband Karl had built on the site of a former apple orchard.
The Salzbergs asked only two things of their visitors -- that they not stomp on their well-manicured yard and that they write down their names, home towns, the date and time they saw the mango and their impressions of the bird in a loose-leaf notebook left near the backyard entrance of their home.
Anna Pidgeon, an avian ecologist in the Department of Forestry and Wildlife at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said she couldn't get away from work to visit the Salzbergs' home, but she said she looked forward to seeing the photographs of the mango taken by members of the Wisconsin Society of Ornithology.
"Hummingbirds are the diamonds of the bird world in terms of their coloration so I'm excited just to see a picture of it," Pidgeon said.
Theories abound about how the bird ended up in her garden. Pidgeon and other bird experts said it could have been blown north from Mexico by a tropical storm. Others believe a mutation in its navigation system could have put it off course shortly after birth.
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Salzberg has her own theory.
"I think he saw my St. Francis statue out there in the garden and he thought it this would be a nice place to stay," she said, pointing to the statue symbolizing the patron saint of birds.
