Hummingbird up close!

I can't skip over the eye candy that some of you frequent this blog for. Don't want to bore my loyal followers [all three of you ;-)] with a Photoshop tutorial that you might never use, so here's a break in the lesson plan to whet your appetite.

I saw this little tiny nest near the woodshed at our cottage on Galiano Island. The egg in it was about the size of a Jelly Belly (i.e., no more than 1/2" long). So I knew it must probably be a hummingbird's nest. And sure enough, when I went out to look the next evening, there was mama hummingbird, sitting on her jelly bean egg. She let me get pretty close for a few snaps, including with flash. I was amazed. She must really have wanted to protect that wee one, or else she was just so scared of me, like a deer in the headlights, that she didn't know what to do. I felt badly, because she did eventually fly off. But I was comforted by the fact that she was back on the nest a little while later, so I didn't frighten her away from caring for her unborn baby. And the thunderstorm we had the next day didn't knock the nest down or the egg out (thank God), though I wasn't able to stick around long enough to see whether mama would come back to the nest again. But if she could withstand the flashes from my camera, I'm sure lightning was no big deal to her.