Ready for Departure
USA: My House 2015
When the hummingbirds flew from the nest last year, we missed them. We have several windows that look out on the garden area by the front door and each time we passed we’d check on them. We didn’t use the front door for nearly two months as we waited with the mother bird for her eggs to hatch. Finally they did hatch and we could see the tiny beaks pointed upward when the mother left to find food. Then the day came when they left the nest; it wasn’t a pretty sight. Both babies flew into the window and fell to the ground stunned. But within seconds they revived and flew off toward the olive tree and out of our lives forever.
Hummingbirds sometimes return to their nests. We hoped ‘our’ hummingbird would return. After all she had chosen a perfect place for her nest safe from wind and rain. In early January, my husband spotted the mother sitting in the nest again. She’d remembered!
These are her babies. They just flew away, but we didn’t see them learn to fly.
Perch with a View
Once again we must suffer through empty nest syndrome.
When I photographed the birds I had to set my ISO on 3200 and even then I couldn’t get a good exposure. On the day I shot these, the mother bird was gone and I opened the door and braced myself against the door jamb as my shutter speed was only 1/125. Too slow for a lens “racked out”.