Cool and clearing. Dew drips from the porch roof onto the orange jewelweed, which this morning for the first time receives no visits from a hummingbird.
ruby-throated hummingbird
August 21, 2025
Gray skies. A sheen of moisture on everything. Somewhere up in the woods, a tree lets go of a dead limb. I lock eyes with the hummingbird hovering a foot from my nose.
August 16, 2025
In the wake of a quick hummingbird with her elegant wand, a bumblebee continues to work the jewelweed, clambering up into each orange throat.
August 14, 2025
Overcast and breezy. The orange jewelweed below the porch has grown so tall, I can actually see the hummingbird visiting the topmost blossoms now—the green blur of her wings, the dew slicking her bill.
August 11, 2025
Sunrise reddens the western ridge as the flat-tire moon fades, alone in the sky. Jewelweed flowers along the stream nod and sway as the first hummingbird makes her rounds.
August 7, 2025
Neither hot nor cold under a clouded-over sky that’s faintly blue, permitting sunshine but not shadows. The hummingbird circling my hung-out red bandanna appears to have developed a taste for my salt, tapping all over with her lightning-fast tongue.
August 6, 2025
Yesterday’s red bandanna, hung out to dry in the rafters, attracts first one, then two hummingbirds. Inevitably, they fight. The winner settles on the closest tree branch.
July 27, 2025
Fog rising into blue. Everything drips. A hummingbird sits on a small branch in a small walnut tree, head swiveling all about.
July 25, 2025
A warm breeze abuzz with hummingbirds and mosquitoes. A red-eyed vireo sings a few notes and falls silent. Inside a hollow locust tree, something is beating.
July 21, 2025
Cool and clear at sunrise, with a sliver of moon like an open parenthesis for something left unsaid. A hummingbird drawn in by purple bergamot sips from the drab white soapwort instead.
July 20, 2025
A crescent moon above the ridge at dawn is lost in fog by sunrise. A hummingbird bothers the bergamot, and a wood thrush is singing as lustily as if it were still June.
July 19, 2025
Overcast and damp. A hummingbird visits the jewelweed growing in the drip line from the roof, which still drips from a shower at dawn. A wood thrush sings.
July 8, 2025
Cool, cloudy and humid. A paper wasp drinks rainwater from a spicebush leaf. In the front garden, hummingbirds circle the purple, mop-headed bergamot.
July 6, 2025
A cool and humid sunrise, with the silence of a long holiday weekend continuing to linger. The buzz of a hummingbird. A firefly goes past with his unlit lantern.