Young Hummingbirds On the Loose!

Summer. I love it. But I really, really love August, a month that doesn't get much respect because people remember it as too hot, too humid, too something or other. Here's how I see August. Everything is still growing and blooming as hard as it can. Baby birds have fledged, by and large, and are absolutely everywhere, at least on my ridgetop in southeast Ohio. Wherever I walk, I'm scolded by parent birds, who are telling me they have young ones hidden nearby. I hear a strange continuous rustling in pine needles and follow the sound to a male hooded warbler, puffed up, tail dragging, skittering slowly over the forest floor as he leads my eyes inexorably away from his nest. It is SO cool. To enjoy August, all you have to do is stop complaining and show up.

 

This is a typical move by a juvenile ruby-throated hummingbird. Young flight muscles tire easily, so they're always looking for a place to stand while learning to ply the flowers for nectar. You will not see an adult rubythroat busting a move like this.

They vie for privileges at the crocosmia blossoms with spicebush swallowtails. Crocosmia "Lucifer" is native to Africa, and is naturalized in places like Costa Rica and Scotland, my goodness. While it spreads in my beds, I haven't seen it popping up in other places in my yard or in southern Ohio. It grows from a bulb, but you don't have to lift it in the winter. Just leave it right where it is! For whatever reason, mine just went NUTS this summer of 2021. It was a gift from my friend Bonnie many years ago, but this year it took center stage, delighting the hummingbirds and swallowtails and me.

The young hummingbirds stop frequently to rest and preen.

 

  

I love being in on the intimate moments when they're acting like birds instead of insect helicopters.

Sometimes, when the sunlight is bright and clear and striking the flowers just below my studio window, I get some acceptable photos. Like this one:

And this one, which is one of the better hummingbird photos I've taken. The trick is having sufficient light and fast enough shutter speed to freeze those wings.The brighter it is out there, the more likely you are to be happy with your shot.

I absolutely love the video game thrill of keeping my lens on a rapidly moving hummingbird. Or warbler, for that matter.

Pretty little glittering scrap of life, lighting up my world.

 

 I'm very grateful that the stem borers that attacked and killed my cardinalflowers last summer are nowhere to be seen this summer. This hardy native has thrown seed children all over the bed where it first started, and marched up along the north side of the house. I've aided the dispersal, transplanting many seedlings up into the front yard beds, which is now aflame with crimson blossoms and the little green sprites who feed on them. It is most satisfying. I've also given lots of cardinalflower seedlings to local friends, who very much appreciate these Ohio-tested natives adapted to our conditions. The trick in growing and propagating cardinalflower is not to deadhead it. Let it go to seed and disperse, then lay the ripe seedheads on bare soil where you want it to come up. Don't mulch a cardinalflower bed! you'll inhibit recruitment of seedlings. Do keep it moist. Be generous with water, especially in dry spells. 

Super tall stalks appreciate support, and hummingbirds love to perch on the rungs of tomato cages, too. Win-win. 

 

This is how the original bed, which I've had going for at least 20 years, looked in 2017. Borers killed these plants, but new ones have spring up and will soon be as tall and beautiful as the originals. In the meantime, the crocosmia has spread like mad, and I'll have to take some of it out to make room for more cardinalflower. A great problem to have!
 

Feeders are fine, as long as you keep them absolutely spotless and free of mold and bacteria. But there's nothing like watching hummingbirds feed the way they were designed to, at the plants they evolved with. Plant it and they will come!

JZ

When Hummingbird Meets Butterfly

Staying home a lot is not a bad thing when you love your home. Magical things can happen when you stay home. 

 Making your home a lovable place is work, but if that work is done with joy, you don't feel it, except in your muscles when you get up the next morning. It is a gift you give yourself. 

This past summer I learned how to make and use outdoor rooms. It's pretty simple. You run some extension cords from the basement, get some comfortable furniture and a Yeti thermos full of something nice like lemon mint water, and set up with your laptop, camera and binoculars in the shade of a handy tree, say Jemima's Japanese maple. This is now your office, and you get to work out amongst the salvias, with orthopteran music as your soundtrack.

On this particular late September day, some late rubythroats were working the salvias and zinnias in my terraced bed. My bedsheets flapped gently in the warm breeze behind. I couldn't stop snapping photos. The cream-colored sheets add a dreamy touch, don't you think? 

Salvia greggii "Cherry Chief" is a favorite, as it always has a few fresh scarlet blossoms full of nectar to offer each day, floating high on wiry stems where it's easy for hummingbirds to access them. 

Salvia guaranitica "Black and Blue" is a favorite of mine. Last fall, I cut them off and saved the roots to these plants in long planters set on the cold floor of my greenhouse, so I wouldn't have to go looking to buy them again this spring. When it warmed up, they sent out new growth and we were off! Saved a ton of money and made another successful experiment. I love this shot, with the hummingbird glugging down nectar or perhaps a tiny flying insect.

I heard a persistent buzzing, as of a hummingbird investigating something, off to my right, and that was how I found out that the chrysalis I had hung on a tomato cage, thinking it might be a bit off, had hatched successfully!  I watch the chrysalides I bring into the house for safekeeping over the two weeks it takes them to metamorphose. If one looks a bit off-color or anything other than perfect, I take it back outside just to be safe. I don't want anything infecting my precious jewels.

Well, this one was a bit off color but turned out to be perfect anyway, and a beautiful female monarch had emerged without my knowing it only an hour earlier!

And wouldn't you know, there was a hummingbird pestering the poor creature!

Who knows what the hummingbird had in mind? Just deviltry. This is a juvenile male, as evidenced by its darkish streaky throat. Figures.

The monarch wasn't having any of it, and she snapped her wings open and closed to try to startle the hummingbird into leaving her alone while she finished drying her new wings. 

In the end, I had to holler at the durn hummingbird. I think it's the first time I've yelled at a hummingbird...no, no, I have done that before. I used to yell at Bela, one of the four hummingbirds I raised in the summer of 2003, because he was soo bad, first to fly and constantly pestering the other three before they were ready for release. 

Bela was just as unpleasant as he looks here. He was much better once he got out in the yard. 

Aren't we all? (I loved him just as he was). 

Oh man. I just realized that the bonsai behind him is the one that got so big I couldn't keep it in a pot any more, and I planted it out on Bill's grave last spring. Wow. It's coloring up out there; it made it through the summer OK, even though May froze its leaves off twice. Pfffft. 2020. 

The four orphaned hummingbirds' story is told in my book, The Bluebird Effect: Uncommon Bonds with Common Birds, in a huge chapter that threatened to take over the whole book. At one point I was considering calling the book My Hummingbird Summer and Other Stories.

Where was I? Yelling at a hummingbird, right. Well, the whole point of this post is to say that something very special has happened with me and monarch butterflies this fall. Starting in early September, I began work on a photography project that I am still working on now. Yes, my last caterpillar just writhed around and became a chrysalis. It's 9:40 pm on October 11...late for me, and wicked late in the year, but I was determined to stay up until it happened, to record the event with my iPhone on timelapse setting. 

Guess when I started making timelapse videos of this caterpillar? Around 8:45 this morning. With monarchs, you have to BE THERE or you'll miss it. I've probably got 50 timelapse videos to delete now, ones where nothing much is happening, but I got it, and I got it good. The timelapse is still running.

All this makes me nostalgic for the old days. My love affair with monarchs started in the summer of 2010. I had sketched and painted the various stages of metamorphosis, but I knew there had to be a better way to capture it--get the whole thing, not just snapshots. So I put my tiny Olympus point and shoot camera on a little bitty tripod, and I sat next to the metamorphosing caterpillar, pushing the shutter button every few seconds, through the entire caterpillar to chrysalis transformation. Then I waited two weeks and was somehow miraculously THERE for its emergence as a butterfly. I did the same thing, click click click click, for the emergence and wing drying.

In the end, I had 1250 photos. I wasn't sure what I was going to do with them, but at least I had the data.

So, as I often do when I'm trying to figure something out, I wrote about it, and one of my pieces ended up as a commentary for All Things Considered, back in the good old days a decade ago when I contributed natural history commentaries. Imagine! We had something else to talk about but spreading disease and beastly human behavior.  Oh, for those days...In the end, I wound up giving the 1250 photos to NPR, where a brilliant producer named Mito Habe-Evans stitched them together into the animation you see below. It's still one of my favorite things I've ever done. And all without iPhones or timelapse or anything but persistence and a little Olympus camera. Oh, and being there. Enjoy it! 

The "new Blogger" is giving me fits; won't let me into html to load the video. I've tried twice to embed it here. If you're reading from your phone and you see nothing in the space below, scroll down and tap View Web Version at the bottom of the post. If that doesn't work, here's the link to the video on YouTube.  Monarch Metamorphosis

Bokeh Bird

This female ruby-throated hummingbird is sitting on one of the little shish kebab skewers that I provide for my clients. My clients being the gazillion birds who frequent my yard, who I'm trying constantly to please in creative ways. I've stuck the bamboo skewers, which are exactly the right gauge for tiny hummingbird feet, into the links of the chain holding up one of my hanging baskets. The skewers are almost never without a perching client, because they're close to the feeders and just right for fussy hummer feet.

I haven't known the term "bokeh" for too long. It sounds a bit like a Chet Baker word, doesn't it? It's Japanese, and it refers to the gorgeous thing that happens when the background of a shot goes all blurry and nice. What's behind this bird is my barn-red house siding with a blooming Achimenes "Pink Nighty" in a hanging basket. Wooo. That is some off-the charts nice bokeh. Especially the little dark patch framing the bird.


As soon as I saw her there on the skewer, with the flowers behind her, I knew I had a killer photo op. She was scratching away at her neck and head.

 

 You'd think a hummingbird's scratching foot would be lightning fast, but it isn't at all. She's got to bring that tiny leg up and over her big long wing, and that's really awkward. So she scratches very slowly.

Then she looks at her foot as if wondering how it got there, up over her wing, and how she's going to get it back where it belongs.

At length, she does, and she rests for a few moments.

Then it's time to scratch the other side of her face. You really must click on this one to embiggen it. Then you can see them all larger.

 

Because she is a hummingbird, there is always an argument in the offing. She cusses at an incoming bird

and sizes up her opponent. A second later, she shot straight up into the air in pursuit, and my precious moments with her were over.

I'm ridiculously attached to the few remaining hummingbirds in my gardens. I want them to stay forever. They won't, of course, but until they go, they'll get their portraits made. September is the month when the hummingbirds leave. Seems everyone leaves in September. But that also means everyone is passing through in September, and I get to photograph the parade!

Hummingbird Decoy Works!

Along about Christmastime 2017, a package arrived from my new friend Susan Rankin-Pollard, a wonderful artist who specializes in picture book illustration.  See her amazing work on her Instagram account here. We'd met at a Highlights retreat where I was teaching, then been to Ecuador together for Sue's first real bird expedition. She was bitten hard by the birding bug, and what a place to receive one's baptism! In the box were some amazing ginger snaps from the Carolina Cookie Company, plus some lovely gewgaws that brought me joy. One of them appeared to be a hummingbird decoy. Well, maybe it was meant as  a Christmas ornament, but I decided to hang it outside this summer, hoping to attract hummingbirds.

 

 I am here to say it worked! I'm sure I'd never have had any hummingbirds on the cardinalflower unless that decoy had been doing its job. 

No way would they have checked out Pelargonium "Happy Thought" unless I'd hung the decoy.

 

When I see this, I imagine the bird going Neeerrrrrrroooooowwwww! under its breath.

 

Seriously though, I stare out the window a lot. Much less so this summer, because I'm nose to the grindstone on 20 watercolor paintings for Saving Jemima. They aren't just vignettes--they're full bleed full page chapter head illustrations. And they're SUCH FUN and SO AWESOME to do. I was meant to paint blue jays doing interesting stuff in cool settings. So lately I look at my work a lot more.  I've got a brutal deadline of October 1 to finish them, and September is just a hash of travel and speaking engagements and sending my kids off to far-away places. But that's life--it's what happens around the deadlines you set for yourself, that seem perfectly reasonable when you set them.

Thanks I'm sure to the bejeweled hummingbird decoy that brings them in to my gardens from far and wide, I see hummingbirds doing cool stuff every time I look up, and every once in awhile I raise the big rig and bang away at them. 

Caught this little feller flying backerds with rotational scoops of his tiny wings. Like backpaddling a canoe. That's really hard to do with anything but a hummingbird wing, because unlike most birds, the movable part of a hummingbird's wing is reduced to just the wrist and hand. If you're not at work and won't get stared at, spread your arms out to the sides and pretend you're a big hawk flying backward with rapid backstrokes. Doesn't work very well. It's hard. Now pull your elbows in tight to your sides so only your hand sticks out. Now pretend you're flying backerds. Works better when you can rotate the wrist, doesn't it? Psst...that's how they manage all those aerobatics. They fly with their hands.

The garden this time of year is dominated by juvenile rubythroats who are moving through on migration. It seems most of the adults have already migrated. Juvenile hummingbirds are really fun to watch, because they do funny, cute stuff. They're lazy, and like to see how many cardinalflower blossoms they can reach from the couch without having to fly. Mothers of teens will recognize this behavior.

But there's this thing they've been doing, that I've been trying to capture with my camera for weeks upon weeks. When they're done with a feeding bout, they fly up and for a micro nano split second they pay homage to the bejeweled hummingbird god that hangs just east of the cardinalflower bed.

I finally got some craptastic photos of the behavior. Since it's over almost before it starts, I have to prefocus on the ornament and wait for the bird to approach it. Because I have to shoot through a window which has bird netting over it, autofocus goes wild, focusing on everything but the bird, and most of the time I don't even get the ornament, much less the bird; I get great photos of the lawn behind the scene.

But I did get a few crummy-but-cute shots, and I wanted to share them with you.

Touching its wing

Checking out the other wing

 Flying together

and my favorite, lightly kissing its head.

 

 Knowing hummingbirds as I do, I'm pretty sure this juvenile is licking the ornament to try to figure out what it's all about. These are bad photos, but I'm happy to document the behavior, because I find it so predictable and endearing. It's not just one hummingbird that does it--they all do it.

So hang yourself a hummingbird decoy, and see what magic happens in your garden! This post is for Sue and Phil, with all best wishes on the move to OHIO!! Wahoo!! Smart move, if you ask me. Thanks for the decoy. It works!!

ZICK ALERT: The Rain Crows have a gig coming right up. 

 Blennerhassett Hotel, Parkersburg WV, Friday, Aug. 31, 7 pm.  We'll be in the beautiful Rose Garden if it's nice, in the sumptuous leather lounge if it's not; either way it'll be awesome. We have Matt First of the Sunset Roosters on guitar!! 

Happy Birthday to Me!

 I usually get a post up on Sundays, but I was working on a new talk and I had to get it done. 

It's only supposed to be 20 minutes, and it'll be delivered at the Saturday banquet for the Sedona Hummingbird Festival (Squee!!). I've figured out that I work something like two hours for each minute of the talk. The amount of time and brainpower I expend on these things is ridiculous. If it comes out right, it sounds extemporaneous. Well, it isn't. Snort.

So I was tied to the desk all day, except for an insanely cool evening walk down Dean's Fork, the subject of its own post. Sunday happened to be my birthday, so I decided if I had to sit all day, I would count the blessings that came my way. Each one would be a present.

My first gift was a handful of protoplasm. A couple of days ago, I looked down at a tire rut at a construction site and saw a puddle of tadpole goo where the day before there'd been rainwater. Because it's late July, the only thing they could be is Cope's gray treefrogs.  I touched them and sure enough a few wriggled in a SAVE ME!! kind of way. Oh no. More than a mile from home, and it's going to be a blistering hot day, and there is no natural water I can reach in shorts for at least another mile, unless...

I glanced around the site and saw a gallon of drinking water on a folding table, with a stack of plastic cups. Eureka!

I scooped up the taddies and a good bit of silt and plopped them in a cup, pouring life-giving water over them. Imagine how good that feels to a tadpole on its dying day. Jogged that mile home carrying the cup of taddies, laughing to myself about how that must've looked to the neighbors. Poured it in a plastic jar and added beaucoup rainwater. I gave them a couple of days to rehydrate before releasing them, and they needed it. When they started acting like tadpoles instead of crumpled bent fetuses, I knew they were ready to go.

This was my first birthday gift.

For future reference, they love koi sticks. Nomnomnom.

On this morning, I took the jar down to our fishpond, fed the comets to repletion, then installed the jar on a shelf in the pond.  One by one, the taddies who had survived their ordeal came up for air, saw the great expanse of water and delicious algae, and swam off into the deep. 

This one swam curlicues, dove, wriggled through the algae; its joy on being in proper habitat that wouldn't dry up was palpable. Honestly, I don't know how tadpoles do it, always watching the water levels, praying for rain, facing the imminent prospect of death by baking. Ugh.

There being no puddles left anywhere in the sweltering July heat, our water garden was my best choice. I had to hope the fish would leave them be. Comets aren't very predatory where small swimmers are concerned. As I was monitoring their exodus from the jar, I saw a tiny comet, the first spawn of my four fish, swim by. If he can make it, they can, too. 

Second present: BUN.

 There's a litter of three young cottontails in the yard who, having grown up in the sanctum sanctorum of Indigo Hill, have no frame of reference for humans as dangerous animals. They barely recognize Chet as a threat, which (let's be frank) he barely is. So these foolish little animals perk their ears attentively but go on chewing clover when I speak to them, kneel down and take iPhone photos of them from barely five feet away. Dumb bunnies. But of course, I adore them. So, Bun. They're all three named Bun.

I have a little family of brown thrashers in the yard! I don't know if any of them are Cletus, Melba or Harper; I think not, because the adults aren't tame at all. But oh, being able to look out and see thrashers doing thrasher things, dust bathing, sunning, hunting bugs or, in the case of one of the parents, grabbing a sunflower seed and pounding the shell off--it's just the best. This is a juvenile. Gift 3.

Seeing the laborious way a thrasher, which doesn't hold seeds in its toes for shelling, has to pound the hull off a seed, I spread sunflower hearts in all their favorite spots. Watching them gobble them down: Gift 4.

Present # 5: Someone dribbled squirrel! He appreciates the sunflower hearts very much. He ooches around on his belly picking them up one by one. I have to say I love my squirrels. They annoy the hell out of me, but they're such fun to watch! So they're paying their way, at least partly.

The sunflower hearts brought in MamaCoon and her three kits! Gift #6: July 24 was first day she's brought them out at noontime.

It's amazing how long those raccoon babies are dependent. The smarter the animal; the more complex and comprehensive its diet, the longer the juvenile dependency period.

It takes a long time to learn to be a raccoon.

Gift 7: the yard robin resents crowding by a ruffian house sparrow, tells him to back off! Just having a robin in the Spa, ahhh. But this combo was too much.

 

#8: speaking of Back Off, a mourning dove warns a squirrel it's too close.  I am big! I will beat you with my wing! Interestingly, a dove would NEVER let a chipmunk get that close. Chipmunks are far more dangerous than squirrels. They're nastya-s little animals. Chipmunks remind me of the killer rabbit in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. 

 Adult male Cooper's hawk makes two passes through the feeder zone. I manage to capture its bill, leg and foot, enough to identify it, as it fetches up in the Japanese maple. Not a great photo, but still gift #9.

This just in!! July 25: I saw the Coop take a pass at some doves just now and scuttled with camera downstairs to shoot it from the bedroom. This is through two panes of glass, at a terrible angle, but OH MY. Talk about a gift, hurled from the Other Side. Thanks DOD!!

On the first shot, I captured the whole hawk. When it turned toward me, I lost my head and focused on its face. Ah well. Too excited to shoot well.

Please note that this hawk is perched in a retired, or as I love to say, recovering bonsai. DOD, you place your gifts so well. He adored my bonsai. 

You beautiful thing!! Please help yourself to mourning doves, and  take a house sparrow as a chaser, willya? You're also most welcome to squirrels, but please not the one who sccoches around on his belleh.

#10: Seeing a gray squirrel use its tail as a hat and parasol.

At this point it's 98 in the shade,  easily 102 in the sun, and I'm so thankful to be inside mostly (not) working on my talk. 

 # 11: a rubythroat investigates the coneflower, seeming to find a sip of nectar in the disc. Not something I see every day, but these midsummer juveniles try everything.

There has to be nectar in this big fat bud. Just has to. I'll wait for it to open. This photo: Gift 12.

I have a variety of wire supports for my tall cardinalflower and Fuchsias, and the hummingbirds adore them. Hummies appreciate thin perches. They can watch for Cooper's hawks from them. It must be nice to be too small and fast to bother with. But you still have to stay vigilant. 

 

This photo: Gift 13.

Meanwhile, fall migrants (yes, I said it; fall begins in July for warblers!) are sifting through the yard. A young yellow-throated warbler on its leisurely path southward. Or westward, or eastward...they do a bit of wandering.  This has to be one of my favorite warblers, Gift #14. Get the picture? Everything out there is a gift. I had intended to put all my birthday gifts in one blogpost, but it's evolved into at least three. And that is a gift in itself.

Happy birthday to me! Now you can see why it takes me so dang long to put together a talk. Or a blogpost. A giant set of Venetian blinds for the studio window would probably go a long way toward increasing efficiency, but ignoring the show going on just outside those windows in late July? Unthinkable! All but a couple of these photos were taken through my studio window, through the crop netting screens that cover them. Gift #14: having such a big, comfortable blind for a house!

Blessed, that's all!