first day of fall; hi-res hummer posing and feeding; cape honeysuckle

Because of work, bad weather etc I've not been at the sanctuary for a week - but I suspect I've not missed much. Probably all my hummers are gone, but I'll see tomorrow. Meanwhile, here's a brief video I shot showing sunset on the first day of fall. Note that now it's setting over land - in fact very near Old Field Point where it set exactly on the last evening of summer (see my last post). It will set over western Long Island for the next 6 months.

 A few months ago I "upgraded" my computer to the new MacBook - the 12 inch Retina model. While the screen is a bit bigger than my "old" 11 inch MacAir, and many other details are better (especially the super-sharp Retina screen), it has big problems even though it was rated as the best laptop ever. Several of the keys don't work well (they changed the keyboard technology and have not yet worked through the bugs). And though the new version of Imovie is in some ways better, I need to learn a lot of new stuff. The bottom line here though is that I've been frustrated that when I upload video to Youtube for this blog, they were showing up at lower resolution than using the old Mac (740P instead of 1040P). Well I finally discovered why, and here's a clip uploaded at the proper resolution. It's from 10 days ago and shows a  young hummer perching on a stalk of bog sage and feeding at the sugary flowers of rosebud sage (4X slo mo):

Finally here's a hummerless clip of my Cape Honeysuckle, Tecomaria capensis, which is finally blooming after remaining mute all summer. In the Bahamas it's a hummingbird favorite but here, after a winter indoors, it only gets going as the hummers leave.