Hummingbird sightings

By BECKY NELSON
Bramblings
I bought a hummingbird feeder last week. I had never put one out before, rarely seeing a hummingbird at the farm. Within an hour of filling the feeder and positioning it near my living room window, I had my first visitor, a male ruby-throated hummingbird. I was thrilled to watch the amazing little creature eating his dinner.

Reading about hummingbirds, I discovered that they eat the nectar of red and orange flowers as well as gnats, mosquitoes, spiders, and fruit flies. Around here as we head into the garden early and suffer the savage bites of midges and mosquitoes, I am very happy to know they eat insects, as well.

After a few hours, we saw two distinctly different hummingbirds, apparently a male and a female. The next morning, we saw a different hummingbird female, much smaller than the first female we saw. It amazes me that something so small can survive. With their fascinating flight and hovering abilities, they are able to outrun predators I am sure, so with a steady source of food, they do all right.

I am hoping our little friends are nesting in our clump of lilacs about 30 feet away from their feeder. I sometimes now catch them sitting on the plant hanger that serves as a bird-feeder holder in the cold months at the edge of the lilacs, and they disappear into the foliage there or at the edge of the woods beyond. For the last few mornings, I haven’t seen the male, just the two females, so am thinking those tiny nests must be close. The process of building those nests is amazing, with females making them of thistle or milkweed down and pasting it together with pine resin and camouflaging it with lichen or moss. Breeding season is up here in the north, but hummingbirds are snowbirds, like many of our feathered friends, heading to the southwest and Mexico. I was reading that most of them fly over the Gulf of Mexico to get to their winter havens. I can’t imagine a tiny bird like that flying against winds and storms and making it the thousand miles or more across the big water.

A lot of folks have probably never seen a hummingbird, or given it much of a thought if they have. To me, their ability to blend in, unseen, is their amazing strength. People who have this gift amaze me as well. Living successful and quiet lives unobserved, not making any waves or splashes, these folks hold my admiration. I cannot keep my opinions to myself, and always run the risk of arguments with folks that disagree with me. I sometimes wish I could be a hummingbird … for the most part unseen with no splashy foliage or large presence that gets one noticed more easily. But looks are deceiving.

On researching the habits of hummingbirds, I read that the males are very aggressive and protective of food sources, chasing off rivals and spearing them with their long beaks at times. Just as not judging a book by its color, you can’t judge these tiny, often unseen, birds by their presence at your feeder. By the same token, those quiet folks that fly under the radar most of the time are also not to be judged. We all are woven together in the amazing patchwork and pattern of living things, and it makes me sad to see some of us taking advantage of others or not lending support to those who struggle.

I guess that is the biggest difference between humanity and the bird world. We have the free will to make decisions, pursue our passions, to help others along the way and try to make our world a better place for ourselves … and the hummingbirds. Whether that little personal improvement is planting some flowers for hummingbirds and butterflies to enjoy or working to cut down on emissions or plastic waste, we can all make little differences that gather into bigger differences for our fellow humans and our fellow living creatures that share our planet.