Original Art Stories - Xueling Zou

First, I check my last year's photos, of course there was no way that I could tell if it was the same hummingbird mother.  But I realized that it was exactly the same date- May 20th that I took first a couple photos of the baby birds last year.  What an interesting coincidence! So, I watched them more carefully, found out many differences between those two mother birds. This year's would rest on the potato tree, and spend a lot of time cleaning her feathers.  I didn't think that she fed her babies as frequent as the last one did.  Even the babies behaviors were quite different too.  Like mother, like children! They started to clean their feathers in such a crowed nest, one already flipped its wings, and would stand on the edge of the nest more often.  The most funny thing I saw that the baby birds pushed their poos out of the nest, squirting into the air.  Last year, the baby birds only sat in the nest, sleeping or waiting for being fed, the mother'...

The weather was unusual this year, the temperature jumped up and down, one week like winter with heater on, the next week felt like summer. We didn't even feel the spring! I had been wondering for a while if the hummingbird mother was coming back to the same nest or nearby to build a new nest to raise baby birds again. It was still too cold for them after April, then I gave up on the idea. Our neighbor has very large potato tree (Solanum erianthum) which blooms with blue flowers all year round. I had noticed that there was a hummingbird hanging on a dead brunch there cleaning its feathers above our fence. I checked the leftover nest from last year, I thought even if the hummingbird comes back, it might not use the same old one... It was perfect weather during the Mother's day weekend. Sunday morning, I saw a hummingbird fly by outside our window. Immediately, I spotted that she was feeding babies at exactly the same nest, but newly rebuilt, and more solid than t...