Cloudy and cool. A hummingbird buzzes in, and I wonder if she’s the same one I saw in the woods yesterday sitting on a branch, almost still.
ruby-throated hummingbird
8/9/2021
Sunny and humid. The electric whine of annual cicadas ebbs and flows. A hummingbird flies into the forest’s wall of leaves at top speed.
8/6/2021
Bright sun. A goldfinch lands on a spent bergamot head and extracts some seeds. Two hummingbirds battle over my four, scraggly beebalms.
8/4/2021
Cool and overcast. Goldfinches chitter over the chirr of tree crickets. For ten seconds, two hummingbirds share the bergamot.
8/1/2021
Goldfinches like a cheering section for the sun. A hummingbird hovers 18 inches from my face, then goes around for a side view.
7/30/2021
Breezy and cool. A female hummingbird zooms back and forth between the bergamot patch and the hillside treetops already aglow in the sun.
7/26/2021
5:15. The moon through thin clouds. A whip-poor-will’s distant chant. 9:15. The sun through thin clouds. A hummingbird’s mid-air defecation.
7/17/2021
The sun comes out and with it a hummingbird, unfazed by the presence of visitors, including a three-year-old boy gleefully destroying an old log.
7/15/2021
Sunrise. A snort from the deer who sleeps under the crabapple tree. A hummingbird zips past the wild garlic.
7/10/2021
A male hummingbird buzzes in to the bergamot patch, but sips nectar from the soapwort instead. The catbird improvises on a towhee’s tune.
5/18/2021
Even on a morning this incomparable I can be squinting at my phone and nearly miss the sun on a hummingbird’s back.
5/4/2021
Sun! A female hummingbird alights on a twig and a male begins rocketing back and forth in front of her. A cuckoo calls from the powerline.
6/26/2020
Five hummingbirds briefly orbit the feeder before taking off after each other. A gnatcatcher bombs the driveway with a nestling’s fecal sac.
6/10/2020
Humidity thick as wool. Above the buzz of hummingbird dogfights, a distant roar of military jets, hopefully just on training runs.