Usually, they look like this. Slightly gray above. Slightly yellow below. Nondescript.
If they get really excited though, they can display an orange crown. Or if they just get really wet.
This bird can be found almost anywhere in the U.S. at one time or another. Mostly Alaska and Canada in the summer. Southern states and Mexico in the winter.
Even if we’re 60 miles inland.
We don’t really need two cars. Once in a while we use both at the same time, but we could easily work around that with minimal planning and cooperation.
Then the rains came. The roads flooded. We drove through some puddles. Okay, more than puddles, we drove through some flooded roads. We’ve been doing this for years with the Jeeps we’ve had. No problem. The van is high clearance. No problem.
A couple days later, the two front wheels quit talking to each other. The wheels are not independent of each other; the van has all-wheel drive, so there is a transfer case up there. I noticed the problem while backing out of a parking space with the steering wheel turned. It felt like the pavement was really rough, but it wasn’t that rough. The two front wheels weren’t able to run at different speeds to accommodate the turning radius. So the van has been in time-out at the Ford dealer for the last two weeks. They diagnosed the problem and made repairs to the transfer case in front. After a couple tries, they just replaced the whole thing and that took care of it. We got the van back today. New car warranty. No charge. It’s perfect. And we’re sure glad we had the Mazda to drive while the van was out of service.
The timing is great. We leave on a trip to Arizona in two weeks. For the last five months, the van has been configured as just an empty vehicle to do errands around town. Now we have it back as a blank canvas inside.
We can reconfigure it with all our camping stuff and make sure everything is just right for our road trip.
Standing at the back gate, admiring the leaf litter and compost on the ground of our thicket of native plants, I eventually noticed that little lump on a branch of the Mexican Olive. Not right away, I wasn’t looking for birds, I was admiring decaying vegetation.
I was just working in the yard, so had no camera with me. I did have a cellphone. I don’t know why I had one while I was doing yardwork, but I pulled it out a snapped a photo as best I could. I knew I couldn’t get much resolution, but I zoomed in a little and snapped another.
That came out surprisingly good, so I tried a real close-up.
What the heck! Pretty good for a cellphone snap. Standing motionless on a branch, keeping an eye on me, resting up for his next attack on the nearby nectar feeder.
Buff-bellied Hummingbird. Nonmigratory. A year-round resident from the tip of South Texas all along the Gulf of Mexico to the Yucatan Peninsula.
Those three bushes in our back yard. Every year I send out pictures of them. During the summer, they grow back like this.
Esperanza.
Lantana.
And Texas Firebush.
Sometimes they even look like this.
Every year they get blasted back by sporadic floods and winter cold and they get cut back to practically nothing.
Yet they return.
Except this year. The Esperanza and Firebush are making their return.
The Lantana has succumbed.
It is no more. A missing Amigo.
