It felt like a unicorn magically appeared when a hummingbird showed up to build her nest. 

I had been thinking it was time to put my hummingbird feeders out because I could hear so many of them flying overhead when sitting on the back porch drinking my morning tea. It wasn’t until a few days later that I realized it wasn’t a bunch of hummers, but was instead a single female Anna’s Hummingbird busily flying back and forth building a nest.

I have a deep fondness for hummingbirds. 

My mother adored them, filling her yard with feeders and adorning her sacred indoor spaces with images and figurines of them. I can’t count the number of random internet hummingbird photos, often emblazoned with some inspirational quote, that my mother forwarded to me through her Facebook and Pinterest accounts over the years. I even got a large tattoo of a hummingbird on my back in honor of my mother’s deep love of these mystical creatures. 

For many cultures around the world hummingbirds are seen as bringers of joy, luck and comfort. They represent appreciation, independence, freedom and optimism. Although I’ve always loved these unique birds, they’ve taken on a more profound meaning for me since my mother’s death a few years ago. Sightings of a hummingbird are now accompanied by a fluttering sensation on my skin, as though they are little messengers sent to me by my mother’s spirit. 

I named this mama hummer “Stella” and spent countless hours in awe of the miracle that was unfolding before my eyes on my back porch. I felt profound honor and gratitude to have been chosen as a safe place for Stella to perform the sacred act of bringing new lives into the world. 

I scoured the internet for information about hummingbirds. From random fun-facts to the chronology of their gestation, I couldn’t get enough details. Glenn endured countless interruptions of his latest Netflix series by me poking him on the arm and declaring “did you know that hummingbirds…”    

We had an old cheap video camera in the basement that I convinced Glenn to install outside so I could monitor the nest 24/7 without disturbing Stella. I shared the link to watch the camera with a handful of friends and family, and before long had a small community of virtual super-fans watching Stella alongside me. I loved getting excited text messages from friends about what they were seeing on the “nest cam.” 

It is hard to describe the intensity of this experience. 

Between COVID-19 and leaving my job, my universe has calmed and shrunk in so many ways. Like a scene in a movie that starts with a large busy landscape shot and ends in closeup of a focused detail, that is how I’ve been experiencing my world lately. As such, I found myself hyper-focused on the minutia of what was happening in a tiny 3-inch by 3-inch space on my back porch. 

I became deeply attuned to Stella’s patterns and body language. I could deduce what was happening in my back yard based on the sound of her calls (that dang blue scrub-jay was back again!) and could predict the rhythm of when she would leave and return to the nest almost to the second. I knew exactly which tree branches were her favorite for surveying versus those she preferred for sunbathing and preening. When sitting in my back yard she’d often come hover near my head to say hello, or fly down from her nest to watch me making dinner through the kitchen window.

Had this happened a year ago when the world was busy and my work all-consuming, I’m not sure I would have been in the right mental and emotional state to be truly present for this experience. It would have been interesting to watch, for sure, but I wouldn’t have been impacted in such an intimate and indelible manner.

Stella’s appearance brought such light and joy into my world and coincided with other things bringing a sense of optimism including having many friends and family getting vaccinated and the notion that traveling again was on the horizon. She gave me comfort and an appreciation for the small things in life.

For the rest of my life I’ll hold dear the memories of the 5+ weeks she called my back porch home.

Below you’ll find a compilation video I made of the experience that goes all the way through to the first flights of the babies, Harriet and Mortimer. In addition I’ve also included below some photos and a few of the fun-facts I learned about these amazing little wee beasties!

• Hummingbirds are the only birds that can fly forward, backwards, sideways and even hover. 
• They are propelled by wings that beat between 50 to 200 times per second! (How is that even possible?)  
• In flight, their heart clocks 1,200 beat per minute. (Again, say what!?!?)
• While resting, the average hummingbird takes about 150 breaths per minute. (In the nighttime scenes in the video linked above you can see Stella’s fast breathing.)
• They require about 4,000 calories per hour — that would be about 150,000 calories per day for a human equivalent. 
• They get protein from insects, many snatched midair, and energy from plant nectar. 
• Nectar gathering is aided by their thin bills and long grooved tongues that do about 13 licks of nectar per second. 
• Their super long tongues retract and coil inside of their heads around their skulls and eyes like one of those retractable dog leashes. (Seriously, look up images of that shit!) 
• They have a great memory – remembering every flower and feeder they’ve been to and how long it will take a flower to refill with nectar. 
• Proportionally speaking, they have the largest brains compared to their size of any wild birds. 
• A group of hummingbirds is called a “bouquet”…a sweet name for birds that are actually quite quarrelsome and territorial squabblers. 
• If they are able to survive their first year, they will typically live 3 to 5 more years filled with frenetic activity. 
• They can fly an average of 25-30 miles per hour, and can dive at speeds of up to 50 miles per hour. 
• Predators include other birds like hawks, as well as cats, spiders, snakes, frogs and even the preying mantis (those meanies!) 
• Male hummingbirds don’t help out beyond fertilizing the eggs of as many willing females as they can find. 
• Female hummingbirds don’t want the male hanging around the nest anyhow because their brightly colored plumage can attract predators.
• It takes about 5-7 days to construct a nest. 
• Their nests are velvety compact cups with spongy floors made by weaving together twigs, plant fibers, leaves, animal hair. 
• They use spiderweb silk as threads to bind their nests together, anchor them to the foundation and enable the nest to stretch as the babies grow. 
• Anna’s hummingbirds (Stella’s species) decorate the outside of their nests with lichen and other materials to create camouflage. 
• Hummingbird eggs are about the size of navy beans and looked to me like bloated tic-tac mints.
• Most females lay two eggs, which they incubate for 15-18 days. 
• Although the eggs are laid on different days, the babies generally hatch on the same day because the female delays incubating the first egg until the second is laid. 
• Baby hummingbirds are roughly the size of a penny when born. Two of them can comfortably fit inside a plastic cap of a soda bottle.
• Baby hummingbirds fledge (leave the nest) 18-28 days after hatching. (This is a big range when you are human nervously anticipating their first flight. I was a stressed, distracted non-functional mess for 6 days!)
• Neither they, or the mother, typically return to the nest once they leave. 
• The mother hummingbird with spend about a week with the fledglings teaching them how to find food before she’ll chase them off. 
• I read in a couple places that the juvenile hummers will often hang out together for about a year before going their separate ways. 
• Female hummingbirds will typically lay eggs and raise young twice, sometimes more, during the breeding season. 
• Some of the biggest threats facing hummingbirds are habitat loss due to urbanization, cats and climate change.

(I gleaned these factoids from various sources on the inter-webs.)