Original Art Stories - Xueling Zou

April 20 2021, the first egg was discover in the nest :). Time flies so fast, we moved in August 2008 and have been living in the same house for over twelve years now. After we moved in, I picked up a DVD from the local library about a hummingbird's story and learned that the hummingbird mother is always a single mother from the onset of pregnancy. Then I started planting some plants to attract hummingbirds. In spring of the 4th year we happily discovered a hummingbird mother had built a nest and raised her babies on a tree branch outside our window. I took so much footage, even caught one of the first flights of her babies. For the next couple of years I watched the hummingbird mothers successfully raising babies from spring to early summer, including the final training before the babies became independent. April 22 2021, the second egg was laid in the nest. For the next several years they weren't able to finish their motherhood experience unfortunately; one year the win...

Some people believe that there is no winter in California. Even if it is not as cold as it is on the East Coast, we have less activities during our winter time. There are a couple months of cold raining days, a couple of frosty days, and the temperature can drop down to about 30 F degrees. I was quite lucky to have this opportunity to watch and learn more about how a hummingbird mom raised her little family during May in previous years. After coming back at the end of April last year, I had no idea what happened but only saw an empty hummingbird nest. Was the mom successful raising her babies? Hummingbird mom is the most independent mother I think. She searches for a safe area, builds a nest, hatches her eggs (usually two), feeds, raises and trains her babies all by herself after pregnancy. Finally she has to push the grown-up babies out of the home area at the end of raising them. It didn't rain enough last winter. Not all the autumn leaves fell off the trees and we cou...

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...