Traveling to see our incredible world and its wild places offers an essential feeling of expansiveness and awe, but few things in nature bring me greater joy than discovering unseen wonders close to home; little treasures that were always there, unnoticed until I learned to see them. Just when I begin to imagine that I have fully appreciated the depth of beauty in even the most familiar surroundings, life presents me with little reminders that I have only barely scratched the surface.
One of those little - literally - reminders came today as I was sitting at my desk, which is positioned below a transom window on the east side of our home. When I look out over the top of my monitor I see only trees and sky. This morning as I paused to think about an email I was drafting, a blur of motion caught my attention. I initially thought I was witnessing yet another hummingbird battle, always fun to watch, but a routine occurrence. Hummingbirds are tiny but fierce, and they aggressively defend their food sources, including the feeders outside my office. Let’s be clear: they fight pretty much all the time. Hummingbird disputes are not noteworthy, but then I noticed that one of the combatants was not a hummingbird. Instead it was a tufted titmouse, and I wondered, why is a hummingbird going after a titmouse with such intensity? Bird battles don’t last long, so I soon had my answer.
The agile and feisty hummer drove the titmouse off in short order and perched, victorious, on a maple branch. As I looked closer, however, I quickly realized it was not a just a branch, but a nest - a tiny, exquisite nest, meticulously crafted with plant material all held together with strands of spider silk, shingled on the outside with bits of sea foam green lichen plucked painstakingly from nearby tree trunks.
The view from my window, hummingbird nest circled in red. Don’t worry if you can’t see it - it is only the size of a golfball, and designed to be invisible. It was right in front of my face for a least a week before I noticed.
How long has she been there, happily unnoticed? I can’t know for sure, but I do know that her delicate little nest required at least a week of tireless effort to build. She would have been buzzing back and forth right in front of my face for days before I slowed down enough to notice her. Another of those little reminders: there are hidden treasures everywhere.
As I watched her carefully maintaining her golfball-sized shelter, adjusting a tiny twig here, tucking spiderweb there, before settling into its thimble-size cavity, I felt a welling up of emotion, like the intense warmth of gratitude one gets from an unexpected and unusually thoughtful gift, the sudden overwhelming thankfulness that is not really about the gift itself, but rather from that moment of deep connection in which you feel truly known by another person. How did you know just what I wanted, exactly what my heart desired? When I didn’t even really know it myself?
I hadn’t known it, but in that ordinary moment writing an email, what my heart really desired was extraordinary moment of beauty, and when I took time to look, I found one right outside my window. Nature, along with a few special people, knows who I really am, and when I need a reminder of how incredible and precious this busy and often bewildering life is, nesting hummingbirds right outside my window prove once again that all I have to do is take a moment to look. What a gift.
Greg
P.S. - Wow! Months have flown by since my last post. I have been writing all the while - I’ve just been writing elsewhere. Martha and I launched a new website for our business, so I am now balancing two blogs. The content on the business site is, inevitably, more about work than nature, but I find those lines can be surprisingly blurry. Check it out, if you’re interested: retexo.com/blog
Adding a bit of spider web to her thimble-sized nest.