Original Art Stories - Xueling Zou

It wasn't a smooth day for sure. Sunny and 65 degrees, perfect for painting outdoors today. I was a little bit behind to start such a lovely day. Trusted Google maps, thought that it could help me to get the location quicker, though I knew the place. Who knew Google maps had directed me to the highway, really not necessary, and added 5 miles more to my trip. After arrived, I tried to find a parking spot, couldn't believe that it took me a while to park my car in the normally tranquil parking lot in the morning. Then I tried to find the local public bathroom which was locked, and most of the restaurants were not opened yet. I dragged my painting stuff across the road, suddenly I fell in middle of the street, hard to get up because I fell in an unusual position. Luckily there was not many cars at that moment. Two ladies came and asked me kindly if I was OK. One was a shopper, the other one worked for a just opened shop along side the road. I thanked them and told them that I a...

I just want to share my landscape paintings of snow in watercolor, hope the beauty of snow brings you fond memories...

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...

Nature is really full of mysteries. After finding the first abandoned nest, I thought that the mother hummingbird was inexperienced. But who knew this tiny bird could be so smart, to raise babies as a single mother, she started building a second nest nearby. I had no idea how or if this mother hummingbird moved her two coffee bean size eggs to that second home, after she experienced that the first location did not work out for them. I missed the beginning of the eggs being hatched. But now, I could see baby hummingbirds only slept and ate, and grow fast each day. One baby was bigger than the other one, I think it is a male from the eye expression. The other one looked like a girl. The mother hummingbird always fed him first. They had their own priority I believe. The half walnut size nest was getting so crowded, sometimes the two babies laid on top each other. Taking care of two babies as a single mother was not an easy job, I could see the mother hummingbird was getting sli...

We moved into our new house in August of 2008. These two plum trees grew so fast I had to ask the gardener to trim them twice a year. I didn't ask for trimming the trees because of the hummingbird this spring, They grew a little wild, and the branches started to reach our house, they made some scraping noises on windy days. So, I reminded the gardener to do his duty for us, since our hummingbird never came back to the nest. Our gardener did a very good job trimming the two trees. These two trees could get most of their sunlight around noon. I still saw a hummingbird came back to the tree area. Some day in middle of May, I was in our garden and saw a hummingbird landed on the second tree (not the tree where I originally spotted the nest). I saw in silhouette what seemed like the mother feeding babies. My heart started pounding, and I ran as fast as I could to our upstairs where one our windows faced the tree. Amazingly, I discovered that there were two big and fat hu...

Middle of March, 2012 I am not sure if I believe in a sixth sense or not. At the beginning of this year, I changed a couple of decorations into bird designs, like large candle holder, our table cloth, dish matte, containers, etc. I hadn't borrowed DVDs from our local library for a quite long time. But one day, I grabbed a DVD without reading the details, it was Don Carroll and Noriko Carroll's movie "First Flight: A Mother Hummingbird's Story".  I watched the whole story at home, and gained some basic knowledge about the bird. There are two plum trees in between our house and our neighbor's. They bloom with gorgeous pink flowers every February, then new leaves cover the entire trees quickly. During the middle of March, after these two trees were full of leaves, I saw a humming bird hanging around the right side tree from one of our windows, and I was surprised to realize that she was building a nest . She flew in and out countless times during the day...