“Joyas Voladoros” by Brian Doyle is an essay about balance: He displays balance by presenting two different extremes. The two extremes he describes are the hummingbird and the whale. The hummingbird is small, fast, and flies in the air.  The hummingbird represents going through life without thinking in adequate detail. The last animal he talks about is the whale. The whale is large, slow, and swims deep in the ocean. The whale represents going into detail with a lot of thought in life. In the last paragraph, he talks about the human heart. He does this because he is taking opposition and making balance between the two. He talks about this because he tells us that we have to be both of these to balance our lives.

In this essay, the hummingbird represents going through life without adequate detail. The first way Doyle talks about this he says that “It’s expensive to fly”(https://theamericanscholar.org/joyas-volardores/#.V9XsWWVlmgQ). What this means is that the hummingbird has to live his life quickly because their lifespans are short. The key aspect of this quote is the word expensive. The expense of flying is that the hummingbird’s heart will die off quickly: “The price of their ambition is a life closer to death;” (Doyle #) so it has to spend its entire life rushing through things. In this essay, the hummingbird represents someone who goes through life without much thought. 

In contrast to the hummingbird, the whale represents going through life with very adequate detail. The first time the author tells us this is when he talks about the detail of the whale’s heart by saying, “It weighs more than seven tons. It’s as big as a room. It is a room, with four chambers” (Doyle 23). What he is doing here is explaining the more specific details about the whale’s heart because it works differently than the hummingbirds heart. A whale’s heart beats slower. The slower heart beat not just makes the whales heart last longer, but it represents slowing down situations in life and not speeding through things, like a “hummingbird heart” does. The whale’s slow heartbeat represents someone who takes a deep breath and relaxes during a situation so they can put their best thought and effort into it. 

The hummingbird’s main attribute is the ability to fly. Flying is very important to the symbolic value of the hummingbird. What the symbolic value represents is that the hummingbird cannot focus on everything when it is flying. It can only focus on the broad picture of what it can see. The hummingbird cannot focus on certain things because it is far away from objects while it is flying. Also, with flight comes speed. Flight needs speed because it can’t have one without the other. 

Doyle also talks about how the whale swims deep into the ocean. He doesn’t just throw this into his essay as a little known fact. He uses this to represent going deep into detail with something. (quote) A “whale” digs deep into a situation and focuses on every single thing in something, as opposed to the hummingbird. The whale digs deep by swimming down into the ocean. Swimming down in the ocean means that you take a step back, take a deep breath, and then attack a situation. Attacking a situation for a whale means that it would actually think about a situation before attacking it, unlike the hummingbird, which would immediately rush into the situation without much care. 

Why does Doyle pick a hummingbird and a whale? He selects these two very different animals for that reason exactly. They are both opposites. Small Vs. big, Fast Vs. slow, and surface Vs. deep. Picking these two different hearts is very important for the actual big picture of this story. The hummingbird represents glancing or skimming over a situation in life without putting too much thought into it, while the whale represents thinking over something very hard and paying attention to every single little detail possible. 

In the last paragraph of this essay, Doyle talks about the human heart. Why does he do this? He does this because he shows that the human heart is the balance between the hummingbird and the whale, in more ways than one. For example, the human heart is between sizes of the two animals. He says “Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old” (Doyle #). What this means is that the hummingbirds heart is much smaller, so it will die faster. The hummingbird must live its life without much thought or care since it only has a little amount of time, unlike the whale. The whale has a big heart so it can take life and slow it down and really focus on important details. The main example, however, is the way they live. The hummingbird lives life without much thought, while the whale lives it with much thought. As human beings, we can balance these two things out perfectly. We can either pay no attention to detail, or we can pay full attention to detail. It all depends on whether or not we as human beings want to take the time to focus on a particular item.

So how can the audience of this essay use this in real life? By trying to be the balance of both animals. Being both of these will make humans live up to their full potential. Having this balance will make human beings live up to their full potential. Sometimes you have to be a hummingbird, and sift through things quickly in life, or you have to be a whale, and think I adequate detail about it.