All the Hummingbirds have headed south by now here in the Wind River Canyon.  As soon as the days get a little shorter, and the nights a little colder, then it is time for the long migration south, but first they need to fatten up for their long flight.  Some people find it very hard to believe that such a small bird like a hummingbird can fly so far a distance.  I had a woman confront me at a Gallery that was displaying my photographs, and she insisted that hummingbirds could not fly all the way down to the mountains of Mexico by themselves.  She was so positive that they got to their southern nesting sites, "....on the backs of geese, you mean you didn't know?"  What she failed to understand was the fact that hummingbirds start to head south the middle of August and all of them are long gone by Labor Day!  Geese don't arrive in the northern Rocky Mountains till fall sets in, long after the hummingbirds are enjoying the warm sunny days in the south; they migrate in opposite directions!  This crazy myth came from old folktales told to children by the Eskimo, and may have originated in England with the tales of the Goldcrest (the smallest bird in England) which was supposed to hitch rides on migrating owls, that would have eaten them anyway.  The Rufous Hummingbirds that nest from southern Alaska to Wyoming fly south over two thousand miles to their favorite winter sites.

In the nineteenth century it became the fashion to put hummingbirds on women's hats and collected like pretty stones, dried and dead under glass.  One London dealer's paperwork shows that 400,000 hummingbird skins were imported by this company alone in just one year!  all from the New World since hummingbirds only live in the Americas.  They would be netted and suffocated, skinned and shipped to Europe for fashion.  How many species of hummingbird are now extinct because they were pretty things?  Now we wonder how this could have happened to something so free; thank goodness people have learned to respect nature, at least a little. 

One of my photographic projects is to try to make "portraits" of my favorite birds, with the hummingbird the subject I most enjoy working with.  It is a major challenge just to get close and have them trust you long enough to get a "classic" portrait.  First you need a blind and a long lens, or better yet a bird that will trust you.  This week's picture is a portrait of a young male hummingbird not long out of the nest, and he is gorgeous.  You don't need to shoot as fast as when they are in mid-flight of course, but a fast shutter speed is usually warranted.  Now, look him in the eye right now; how on earth could you kill such a beautiful wonder?  The most spectacular thing of all?  He is the size of your thumb and is already on his way to the high mountains in Mexico.  

Hummingbird Portrait, Wind River Canyon, Wyoming