My Own Personal Monotony

During an afternoon torrential downpour, about two weeks ago, my mother noticed something stuck on one of the hummingbird feeders. Turns out that a baby female hummer had gotten a wing and half of herself jammed in the space between the feeder and the ledge. My mother helped to get her unstuck, and we put her in a dish on top of the hot tub. Then the skies opened with violent rain, and I was afraid she’d drown in the dish.

After a quick google, I went in search of an eyedropper to try to feed her. I finally found a watercolor paintbrush whose handle is actually a chamber for water. I filled it with some Oriole nectar. When I went back out the tiny girl had fallen or jumped so that she was behind the hot tub, under the deck railing. I contorted myself so she could feed out of the tube, and to my great surprise, she did! It started slow, and she was shaking, but she did drink, and she did open her eyes, but she didn’t look old enough or strong enough to make it off the deck, never mind to fly on her own.

While this tiny bird drama unfolded, an adult male kept hovering about, and when not flying around, he sat on the bird feeder close by.

After she had eaten and moved her head away, I turned to kill a small wasp that had crept through the deck boards, possibly drawn to the nectar, but big enough to do damage to a bird not much bigger than a quarter.

As I stepped on the wasp, the little hummingbird flew straight up by my (astonished) face and into a tree right above the deck!

Fast forward to today, about two weeks later… I was outside photographing the gardens and was sitting on the deck steps with the camera and heard the familiar “whup whup whup” of a hummer going to the feeder. It was this small girl, and to my delight she stayed on the feeder for about five minutes, then moved to the forsythia bush where she stayed for another good while.

I have no way of knowing for sure, of course, whether this is my same girl – but I will think it was.