Hummingbirds

The default background image for this theme involves hummingbirds.

Do you like hummingbirds? They are fascinating, aren't they?

When I lived in Berkeley I used to take Sunday hikes up into the parks east of the hills.

Sometimes I went up through Strawberry Canyon, which is the area behind UC Berkeley where the botanical gardens are. In the summer I would sometimes see hummingbirds there doing their "mating dance." I don't really know if it was for mating. But it was really something. They would swoop up and down past each other in deep arcs, descending rapidly from quite high in the air, swooping past each other near the ground, then flying back up quite high. And they made the damnedest noises while doing this.

As a boy I had become familiar with hummingbirds as regular visitors to the fuchsia bushes that grew around our back patio. And though I have seen many glorious photographs of them, I had never caught one "on film" myself until I came up here, and caught this little guy flitting around the bush outside my kitchen window. He (or she) doesn't have much color, but is in the classic pose they take when approaching a flower.

Now I tend to think of birds as electronic entities. They make electronic-sounding noises, especially the smaller ones. There is one that comes around every morning and makes a sound sort of like a digital alarm clock. The concept doesn't destroy the wonder of it, though.