Fred and Mme W

Not much hummer action here yet, though I continue to see Fred a few times every day as I work in the garden, including some very quick and murderous attacks on intruders, all over in a second or 2 well before I can deploy the camera. So far this year I've not seen any "pendulum" mating dances, which perhaps does not bode well for the coming more active season. But this quiet is normal, I usually only start to see youngsters when the "Lucifer" crocosmia start flowering. They are almost ready, as are the "Hyperion" daylilies, and I've been spraying the buds with "Deer-be-Gone" in attempt to forestall the deer. Fred seems to have abandoned the perch he was favoring in may, and, as usual as the season advances, is becoming more secretive. However I've spotted a new perch he's sometimes using, in the lower garden area, where he can vigilantly guard several feeders and flower beds. Unfortunately this spot is more hidden than the earlier one, with poor lighting, but here is a recent clip.

To round out this post, I'm re-showing some of the videos of Mme W, a nesting female hummer I followed earlier this year at our winter home in the Bahamas, in more or less chronological order.

I''ll show the rest of the series in my next post. Of course in the woods around me several females are currently going through a very similar sequence of events, though I've not looked for nests this year.