Pixiq

Female hummingbirds do their nest building and brooding alone. They’ll typically choose a location with water, insects and nectar available nearby. They may look for a site protected from jays, magpies and other predatory birds, but they often seem unconcerned about humans.

For several years, I spent a lot of time photographing hummingbirds, a passion to which I was introduced by Kathy’s dad, David Thomas, an avid bird photographer. While I was still in photography school, Dave and I would drive all over Southern California to preserves and parks that harbored hummers, and we spent many an hour setting up flash systems on deep-throated flowers, trying to stop a hummingbird’s wings or better yet, both stop them and suggest their motion on the same piece of film. As people learned of my hummingbird obsession, they’d call to tell me about an unusual nest they’d found, and sometimes I’d travel a good distance to photograph it. Today, I guess we’d all just blog about the nests and post our photographs and videos of the hatchlings and fledglings on the Internet. But thirty years ago, we called, drove, photographed, made prints, mailed them out, wrote it up for the newspaper …

Spider webs are the glue that holds hummingbird nests together, enabling them to attach to branches in fields or forests. Webs also secure the nests to some extremely unlikely base structures in the thick of human activity. I’ve seen many nests built in decorative pots on porches, in hanging flower baskets outside kitchen windows and in low bushes right by a busy pedestrian corridor. At the Santa Barbara Natural History Museum, an exhibit on hummingbirds included a nest built on top of an orange still attached to the tree and a nest incorporated into the loop of a knotted rope. The most unusual nest I’ve photographed, and my favorite, was positioned atop a miniature locomotive on the base of a wind chime. The female Anna’s hummingbird did not budge while I photographed her and her unusual home; she just kept staring back at me with a look that said, “What?”

Hummingbirds are lovely and fascinating, but when it comes to nest building, they sometimes seem like they’re not quite bright—or maybe hummingbird moms just have a great sense of humor and style.

When you consider how frequently hummingbirds build their nests on somebody’s patio or porch, you might conclude that the birds are inviting us to watch (and perhaps protect) them. And when a creature that tiny, lovely and delicate puts its trust in you, it is a special honor indeed.

If you’re passionate about a particular wildlife subject, let your friends and colleagues know about it so they can alert you to great photographic opportunities. People love to share a delightful find with others who will appreciate it.