Original Art Stories - Xueling Zou

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...