Bird nests blend in perfectly with their surroundings, and Anna's hummingbirds are no exception. What a surprise to find one in our front yard in early 2011, perched on a Dodonaea bush only a few feet from our "hillevator" track. (We use this convenience very day to traverse the hill between our driveway and house.) The mother bird didn't see us as a threat... possibly because she had been a lifelong drinker of the nectar that my wife Sondra provided and she was used to us being around.
The nest itself is made of spiderwebs, fibrous plant material, moss and lichens.
Inside it is lined with plant down and feathers,
pressed into shape by the mother's breast as she constructed it.
The entire nest is only 2" across.
We discovered the nest just a few days before the eggs (which are size of small jellybeans) hatched. I used the hillevator as a platform and with a Nikkor 300mm lens and a monopod I'd spend an hour observing and photographing, then an hour resting. Every time I got into position the mother bird would come check me out to make sure I wasn't a threat, and she quickly got comfortable with me being nearby.
I did this for the entire 3-week gestation period.
As soon as the babies hatch they're extremely hungry and cold. Mama's either sitting on them, looking for food, or feeding them. That's all she does for 21 days. During that period she made over 1,000 trips with her crop full of insects to feed her hungry chicks every 15 minutes.
And she'd lose a third of her meager body-weight in the process,
never actually eating for the entire three weeks.
Food for the chicks was generally a slurry of spiders and other bugs that she'd liquify in her crop and then "inject" down their throats to make sure they were getting all of it.
It was a cold and rainy March and in this next image the babies are 7 days old... very visibly larger than their incredibly tiny initial phase. They're just about to open their eyes but still couldn't regulate their temperature, so mama covered them whenever she could.
Here they are fully in the second week... eyes open and tightly stuffed into their nest.
They'd always be either sleeping or clamoring for food.
In this next image a "bolus" of bug tartare is clearly visible as she feeds the chicks during their second week. The chicks themselves eat no nectar before fledging because protein is the only way to get them to grow so fast... They grow over 20x in just 21 days!
Hummingbird tongues are very long and translucent. The tongue is divided into two parts by a median cleft and splits underneath their mouth into two pieces that wrap up, behind and over the skull. Essentially they are long straws that have incredible reach and accuracy.
The chicks started flicking their tongues by the 7th day.
By the beginning of the third week, the chicks are almost too large to fit into the nest, so they spend a lot of time sitting on the edge of it waiting for mom. The change dramatically each day and color starts to appear on their wings. (Hummingbird feather color is actually caused by granules of air bubbles in their wings, whose thickness determines the refracted color that we perceive.) Mama usually fed them with her back to me, but by this point she was so comfortable with me that she fed them facing me.
Now in the 19th day, the chicks are very hungry all the time. The nest isn't large enough to support mama and the babies anymore, so she deftly operates an "aerial refueling station" where she feeds them without actually landing. The chicks are almost full-grown by now.
On day 20, the mother dramatically changed her behavior towards the chicks. She would sit on a branch near them and make a new kind of vocalization, obviously exhorting them to fly. The unusual "field marks" display in this image seemed to be another technique she used to get their attention. Plus, she stopped feed them and began pushing the fledglings out of the nest with her beak, alternating with pulling small feathers off them (which had to be painful).
She knew that it was time to fledge and was doing everything she could to get those chicks to fly.
And she would fly around and around the nest....
Of course I was super curious as to how these creatures transition from terrestrial to aerial beings, and also on the 20th day they began to stand on the edge of the nest and flap their wings furiously. Then on the 21st day, this happened... One of them slowly levitated off the nest and, as if in slow motion, furiously flapped and flew to a branch 12" away. It was the exact opposite of what you'd normally consider hummingbird flight to be... almost as if the chick was moving underwater; it took 30 seconds just to fly 1 foot! Here's a shot of that baby coming back in for a landing on the nest after that first flight. What was its sibling thinking seeing that?!
I had expected the chicks to hang around the nest for awhile, but on the morning of the next day the nest was empty.
This line from T.S. Eliot's "The Four Quartets" well-described my feelings...
"What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from."
I had a full-blown case of Empty Nest Syndrome. I was happy to see them fledge, but sad about how abrupt the ending of this incredible experience was. Mother Bird was one of my greatest teachers, exhibiting such selflessness and dedication, allowing me in to her mysterious world, and showing me that patience can provide immense rewards.
Here's an image my wife shot of me making these pictures. Standing in that position for hours a day is brutal and it gave me a new appreciation for the work that wildlife photographers do (and the physical hardship involved doing it).
Thank you for viewing these and I hope you enjoyed this story. If you'd like to see my top 100 favorite images from this series, those are available on my archive site here.
And a full set of 344 of the hummingbird images is available here.
