My Hummingbird Friend

I'm going to miss her, the female ruby-throated hummingbird whose territory I live in.

These past few months,she's permitted me to sit in the back yard, in the chair my back likes the best.  She won't use the sugar water feeder we've set up for her when I'm sitting in the yard, but she will work the nearby flowers.  And, she'll fly right into my face (well, maybe a couple of feet away) and chirp at me while hovering, her wings beating at some 50 times a second  (this is not a typo).

I've never tried to get her to feed from my hand.  Our late Wild Birds Unlimited store (it closed Tuesday with the owners retiring after over a year of trying to find a buyer) used to sell these little hummingbird hand feeders.  Her companionship was good enough.

When I heard the buzz of her wings, my breath always caught.

Right now, there are turtleheads (a wildflower that I bought from a wildflower grower in Asheville, North Carolina 10 years ago), a heuchera I let bloom, cuphea,    The cuphea is inches from me and she would feed right from the flowers.  If I dared to take her picture on the cuphea she would leave, insulted.

She's in the upper right - cuphea are the orange flowers

 

That's why I treasure the few pictures I have of her, blurry or not.

If you are unfamiliar with hummingbirds (and, living east of the Mississippi, ruby-throateds are the only ones I can identify firsthand), you'll know this friendship is temporary.  I knew it, though, coming in.

Blurry hummingbird - background tree is a pawpaw

I think she left us Sunday.  Bon voyage, if so.

In the last two weeks, we suddenly seemed to be seeing her a lot more than usual.  Besides visiting the flowers, she would take long, quenching sips of sugar water. And she seemed to be doing a lot of resting on a nearby clothesline, one I haven't used for drying clothes for years but kept up anyway.  

I knew what she is doing.  She was preparing for fall migration.  Unlike most of "our" (well, we just host them; they don't belong to us) feeder birds, who are year round residents (Northern cardinals, house finches, gold finches, chickadees, tufted titmice, white-breasted nuthatches, downy/hairy woodpeckers, blue jays, and red-bellied woodpeckers) and the mourning doves who feed on the seeds other birds shovel out of the feeders, the hummingbirds come here to summer and to breed.  And then, come the early part of September, they are on their way to Florida, Louisiana and, eventually, Mexico.

These little bundles of boundless energy have to gain up to 40% of their weight to enable this miraculous journey.

Now, it's early September.  She didn't come to the feeder or flowers Sunday, at least where we could see her.  Ditto for Monday.

Perhaps she is gone.  Just like that.  No goodbye.

We'll keep the feeder going another week or so, just in case any migrants from further north want to stop by.  Our flowers will also be there to welcome them. 

And, to my blogging friends in Texas I ask, take good care of my friend when she arrives. 

Looking to the future?

I know you will.