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30
Dec
2021
Thursday December 30, 2021
There should be a day for celebrating lost causes.
My little hummingbird didn’t survive the cold snap after Christmas. She showed up here after all the other hummingbirds had migrated south. I assume that the “atmospheric river” swept her up from the coast and dumped her in an Okanagan winter.
I had not bothered taking down my sugar-syrup feeders when all the other hummingbirds had fled south. So there she was, one day in December.
Temperatures dropped to minus-6 Celsius. And still she came back, every day.
Categories: Soft Edges
Tags: hummingbirds, cold, St. Jude
15
May
Thursday May 13, 2021
The hummingbirds are back. Probably two pair of them, although I’m not quick enough to identify individual features.
They seem to play, like otters, for the sheer joy of living. They perform aerobatics overhead that would make a stunt pilot green with envy. They soar vertically, flip over, dive at dizzying speeds, zoom past at low altitude, do barrel rolls, meet in mid-air, come to an instant stop…
I also notice they have different feeding habits. One visitor perches on the feeder while sipping nectar. Another hovers constantly while dipping his (or her) beak into the plastic blossom. For each bird, always the same blossom, always the same perch.
And I wonder which bird is headed down an evolutionary dead end.
Tags: vulnerable, Evolution, hummingbirds
4
Sep
2019
Our hummingbirds have flown south.
We hung out three hummingbird feeders all summer. Hummingbirds are scrappy little critters, even more so than finches. They fiercely defend their own territory, which includes what they think of as their own private Walmart of sweet nectar.
Even so, we’ve sometimes had three or four birds zipping around at a time, grabbing a sip here, a sip there.
The last hummingbird dropped in for a drink about two weeks ago. I think she was a female calliope hummingbird, although she didn’t stay still long enough for an unskilled bird watcher like me to check her anatomical details.
She fluttered up, slurped, and was gone.
And didn’t come back for a second martini.
That last little hummingbird prompted me to read up about bird migration.
Tags: autumn, hummingbirds, migration