Hummers

I like to think that I am a skilled hunter. With my Nikon and a tripod and lots of patience, I sit on my open porch facing the jewel weeds so loved by hummingbirds. I sit rock still. I have yet to take the picture of a hummer that will satisfy me after 20 years of trying.⁠

This year both the local males find me suspect. Perhaps each, in his hummer infancy, was traumatized by a bald man or by a man with a camera. In any case, whereas in past years hummers would let me get up fairly close and even give me a passing friendly buzz or two late in the summer, these two take off as soon as they see me, as if they’d seen a ghost.

One, today, mounts up high, maybe 30 feet in the air. He sits there motionless, as it seems on an airy throne, his lightning wings having broken the barrier of visibility. So he seems to sit suspended — no not suspended — but rather as though the very air had been transformed, thickened to the point where it could support him without any effort on his part. I cannot see him clearly, but he has taken me into account, I am sure from his high vantage. Then he spies his inveterate and mortal enemy, the other local male hummer: his Moby Hummer, his Red Baron. Only by luck can my eye catch up with him, to see him in full dogfight mode, drawing a bead on his antagonist in rushed retreat as the two flash into the trees.