Ever held a hummingbird? I have!

Clean glass just might be more of a threat to birds than cats and cars are. I've caught two exotic birds here this year- first time ever. 

We totally take our bodies for granted, of that I am 100% sure. The sensory perception sensitivities that we are endowed with are so acute it's not even funny, and we walk through our lives not fully appreciating how finely tuned we are to detect the slightest movement in the landscape with our eyes, to sense a tiny tick crawling on our legs even though we can't see it, to hear the slightest sound at night as we lay in bed, or to smell the honeysuckle flowering hundreds of feet away. 

I was working this am and caught a split second movement out of the corner of the corner of my eye. I glanced over and saw nothing, but then it happened again. Finally I saw it- a hummingbird caught in the store against the large plate glass window. 

I opened the doors then got a rake to usher the bird out the doors but the dummy was unusherable, choosing to keep banging against the glass. I reached forward two dozen times before I was able to make contact, ever so gently squeezing enough to capture, not hard enough to break the fragile little thing. 

I was (obviously) able to grab my phone to record an event that I am sure will never ever happen again. My eyes and brain told me that I was holding a live wriggling object, but my hand and arm denied that reality, with muscles telling me that I was holding absolutely nothing. 

Hummingbirds are an engineering masterpiece. They weigh almost nothing so they can perform high speed maneuvers as they dart from blossom to blossom then migrate to Brazil for the winter. How can something that teeny-tiny be so aggressively territorial  yet so delicate and lightweight?

It's just one more example of Mother Nature's engineering of our environment, mysterious, complex, not fully understood, fragile, and worthy of our appreciation.