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.
ruby-throated hummingbird
August 6, 2021
Bright sun. A goldfinch lands on a spent bergamot head and extracts some seeds. Two hummingbirds battle over my four, scraggly beebalms.
August 4, 2021
Cool and overcast. Goldfinches chitter over the chirr of tree crickets. For ten seconds, two hummingbirds share the bergamot.
August 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.
July 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.
July 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.
July 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.
July 15, 2021
Sunrise. A snort from the deer who sleeps under the crabapple tree. A hummingbird zips past the wild garlic.
July 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.
May 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.
May 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.
June 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.
June 10, 2020
Humidity thick as wool. Above the buzz of hummingbird dogfights, a distant roar of military jets, hopefully just on training runs.
June 10, 2020
Humidity thick as wool. Above the buzz of hummingbird dogfights, a distant roar of military jets, hopefully just on training runs.