Featured Ponderings

Day 16: Flight Test

September 9, 2016

For three weeks this past spring, I had the thrill of watching a mother Anna’s hummingbird as she laid a pair of eggs just outside my front door, and then incubated and tended the tiny pair until they fledged. We had seen her hovering about for several days, watching us carefully. On Mother’s Day, she finally alighted on her nest, which had been under construction right in plain sight the whole time, but we had not seen it. Much to the consternation and growing annoyance of my family, I spent a good part of each day for the next few weeks crouched in our tram, hidden beneath a green blanket, with my cell phone and a borrowed selfie-stick duct-taped to the side of the tram. My comings and goings during that time induced no more than blinking in the mother and baby hummers. On Day 16, however, throughout the morning and afternoon, I noticed a distinct difference…
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…more fidgeting, and following of my movements. I had been assuming that they were used to my near-constant presence. But on this day, when I moved my camera in to take the daily photo, the two babies looked right at me, then flew out of the nest in unison, and perched on nearby twigs, where they stayed for the next several hours. Apparently, there had been surreptitious flight training going on.

I now believe that there is a possibility that with the ability to fly comes a sort of “cognitive awakening”, and the self-preservation instinct kicks in…it makes sense that while the possibility exists that you can be snatched from the nest and gobbled up, and there is nothing you can do about it, it is better not to be too aware. By design, we are not aware that we are balled up inside an eggshell, or a womb, and not cognitive of the birth process. There seems to be some miraculous intervention that keeps us unaware, or at least helps the conscious mind forget such things.

I kept checking back until well after dark, to see if they had returned to the nest, but they did not. Mamma stayed close by, chattering noisily. I was not sure if she was scolding me, or coaching the offspring. She continued to feed them in place…a picnic! The next morning, they were still out there, buzzing around, and by that evening, the circle of exploration had widened. The babies were easy to spot, still sporting downy white chests. I read everything I could find late into the night, obsessively worrying that I had scared them away prematurely. I wanted to believe they were ready to go, and were just waiting for me to see them off. All did seem well, and I wished them Godspeed. I kept looking at the empty nest, and feeling a little sad…but the bushtits and chickadees swooped down en masse to chirp to me “Don’t cry!” Nature is truly amazing, and I will always be grateful for the gift of those three weeks.
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This is a modified version of a post to FaceBook on June 9, 2016

You can find the chronology of the hummingbird observations, from the discovery of the eggs until the day before flight, on iNaturalist.org, as observer “susan59” from Des Moines, WA, as well as my other plant and animal observations.

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