My babies are gone.

On Thursday morning, I checked the nest, and only one little hummingbird looked back at me.  I looked around on the deck and in the shrubs to make certain that one of them wasn’t shuddering helplessly on the ground.  I climbed the ladder, and the remaining one flew away, landing on my patio.  The BFF approached it cautiously, and, when I realized that it wasn’t going to fly away, I carefully picked it up, as the Veterinarian taught me, and placed it back in the nest.

Holding the tiny bird in my hand and feeling its incredible heart rate (at 1,200 beats per minute, it’s more like a vibration than a pulse), it didn’t seem like it was ready to leave.  But when I came home from work, 12 hours later, it was gone.

I can live with it.  Through small miracles, a lot that wasn’t ok a month ago seems easier all of a sudden.

I touched the little nest.  It’s soft and spongy, like a thin wall of Nerf foam.  If you can enlarge the top photo, you’ll see the filaments of spider web used to attach the nest to the branch.  How amazing is that?  And it’s not even 1-1/2″ high.  How do they do that?  Fairy tales can come true.

I wonder if the mother will lay one last clutch of eggs before autumn.  There’s time.  It only took a month for these to hatch and leave.  I’ll watch all spring, too, and maybe, just maybe, they’ll return.

In one month, my vision of life has changed by reflecting on these birds.  I wonder what else I’m not seeing.  Of all the people on Earth, who am I to complain?  Life is more than good (mostly).  Soli Deo Gloria!