Hummingbird Shadows and a Confused Seagull
Friday, June 13th, 2008Aren’t hummingbird shadows on the ground a hoot? At first you think they come from something just floating in the air, like the cottonwood cotton that’s starting to drift like snow in the Valley now and give my allergic friends the fits. Then you realize they don’t just drift with the wind, but pause and dart.
I saw that happening as Emma and I were walking on the ditch east of the RGNC this afternoon. I never did see that particular hummingbird. Saw plenty more.
So, how did that story get started that hummingbirds never, and possibly can’t, stop and perch? Somebody mentioned that to me in the last month or so, and I thought about it right off the bat today, as we walked through the leafy tree corridor to the ditch entrance. A hummingbird lit on a branch right over the trail, although it didn’t linger long.
On the surface the belief makes sense: clearly the little bastards have to move around a lot in order to eat vast amounts to keep their furious little metabolisms blazing. And if you spend any time actually watching them, you see fairly quickly that, regardless, it ain’t true. You see them take time outs all the time: on feeders, on tree limbs, on bushes, on wires.
I guess this once again shows we tend not to see what we don’t expect to.
Also, driving the short block from Candy to Veranda to park, I saw a big white bird flying over the RGNC fields. It looked too big and not quite right to be a white pigeon - rock dove - such as you see flying around here a fair amount. I thought maybe it might be a cattle egret, which I have seen in that area, albeit it seems a bit late in the season. It went away to the north.
As we walked north along the ditch it (I’m presuming it was the same big, white bird, since we don’t get them here all that often) flew back over heading south. This time I thought fairly sure it was a gull. It was almost entirely white, with maybe a bit of black at tail and wing tips. This was surprising: we get gulls here, which most people don’t know, so that it startles hell out of ‘em when they do happen to spot the birds. Or make people think they’re crazy, as several have remarked to me.