All afternoon I have been watching a pair of hummingbirds play about our porch. They live somewhere nearby, though I haven’t found their nest. They are attracted to our hummingbird feeder, which we keep full of sugar water.
Articles with Birds
Photo by alan braeley on Unsplash
A song sparrow • Photo © Tom Raymo
When animals talk, we should listen
I have a friend who talks to birds. When I accompany him on early-morning walks, he’ll stand beside a pond or weed patch and make little tsk-tsk noises that to my untrained ear don’t sound particularly birdlike. Nevertheless, soon a flitter of warblers and sparrows appears seemingly out of nowhere.
A hunter in Malta • Photo by Frank Vincentz (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Air over Malta a no-fly zone
The island of Malta lies smack in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. Anyone moving east-west or north-south must sooner or later come against its shores.
Photo by Joshua Woroniecki on Unsplash
Human lessons from birds’ vee
Honk time. One of those late fall mornings when the sky turns a Maxfield Parrish blue just before sunrise. One, two, three ragged files of Canada geese skim the treetops above my head, preceded and followed by their honking chorus, a noise of ram’s horns and shouts that would have toppled the walls of Jericho.
John J. Audubon's illustration of the pinnated grouse, of which the heath hen is an extinct subspecies
Noting of species is a human pastime
Most of us have heard of the passenger pigeon, a bird that once darkened the skies of North America in its teeming numbers, and now is no more. The last passenger pigeon, named Martha, died at the Cincinnati Zoo on Sept. 1, 1914.
Photo by Mark Timberlake on Unsplash
Of the poet, scientists, and blackbirds
Eight black crows arrayed in the sparse limbs of a leafless elm, set against a gray winter sky. Their iridescent feathers burned like eight black candles — spooky, mournful, Bergmanesque.
A bone flute from Jiahu • Image by Cangminzho (CC BY-SA 4.0)
A recently found 9,000-year-old flute still plays haunting melodies
My computer has just been playing a 9,000-year-old seven-holed flute, the oldest playable musical instrument ever discovered.
A great blue heron takes to the air • Photo © Tom Raymo
Finding inspiration in a blue heron
If you have ever watched a jumbo jet take off you will know what I mean.
Baltimore oriole • Illustration by Emma Bell Miles (Public Domain)
Folds in the fabric of time
In her autobiography, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Eudora Welty writes: “The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order, a timetable not necessarily — perhaps not possibly — chronological.”
Bahama woodstar • Photo by Mike's Birds (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Lili left hummingbirds down, but not out
Our previous visits to this island have been graced with hummingbirds: Bahama woodstars, no bigger than your thumb, caped in iridescent green, with amethyst faces, white breasts and soda-straw bills.