“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 discusses these since it lets us know that we have to be both of these to balance our lives.

            In this essay, the hummingbird represents going through life without much thought. When Doyle talks about this he says that “It’s expensive to fly” (Doyle 95). What this means is that the hummingbird has to live his life fast because their lifespans are short. The main idea from  this quote is the word "expensive. It states that the hummingbird will die earlier than most animals.“The price of their ambition is a life closer to death;” (Doyle 95) because 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 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 95). What he is doing here is explaining the  specific details about the whale’s heart. A whale’s heart beats slower. The slower heart beat 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.

 Flying is 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. For example, when he says, “…and their penetrating moaning cries, their piercing yearning tongue, can be heard underwater for miles and miles” (Doyle 96). 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. 

            Why does Doyle pick a hummingbird and a whale? He selects these two different animals for that reason exactly. They are both opposites. Small verses big, fast verses, slow and surface verses deep. Picking these two different hearts is 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. The whale represents thinking over something and paying attention to every single 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. But, he compares all animals in this aspect of hears and motion by saying,  “ Mammals and Birds have four chambers. Reptiles and turtles have hearts with three chambers. Worms have hearts with one chamber, although they may have as many as eleven single-chambered hearts. Unicellular bacteria have no hearts at all; but even they have fluid eternally in motion, washing from one side of the cell to the other, swirling and whirling. No living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside ”(Doyle ). What this means is that the hummingbird’s 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 focus on important details. The main example 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 . We can either pay no attention to detail, or we can pay full attention to detail. It all depends on whether 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 stable between the two lifestyles. Having this balance will make human beings live up to their full potential. Sometimes you have to be a hummingbird, and sift through things in life, or you have to be a whale, and think adequate detail about it.
