I woke up (briefly) to my wife yelling, “It’s APRIL 24TH! Why am I looking at hummingbirds IN THE SNOW?”
Wisely answerless, I grunted comfortingly and went back to sleep for another hour. This is getting a little old, however. But when I went to bed last night, it was already snowing. When I finally did get up, the sky was overlaid with a dark gray blanket of cloud, and a couple of inches of heavy wet snow covered everything except the bare ground, which was fortunately too warm for frozen precipitation to stick. Here’s the forecast:
Wind speeds increasing to 30 mph this morning will become gust to 50 mph this afternoon… with local gusts through passes and across summits reaching 60 mph. Winds combined with snow showers above 7500 feet will drop visibilities to near zero at times in blowing snow. Snow accumulations will range up to 6 inches in spots over the peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains…
It’s supposed to be in the 70s in just a couple of days. For now though, my wife, whose winter clothes are all in the storage unit — I’d warned her, too — was not a happy camper. And the hummingbirds were in a tizzy: the tiny little holes on all the feeders were covered with frozen slush. I wanted to sit down with my digital newspaper (my wireless MacBook) and drink some coffee, but all I could think about was hummingbirds dropping dead, so I pulled on my sweatpants and bathrobe and went outside to see what I could do. Using an old paintbrush I sometimes use to dust computer equipment, I brushed or knocked off what snow I could from the hanging plastic feeders and poked ice out of the holes with a little piece of wood.
Now the hummingbirds are gulping down the icy nectar. All is well, except that I have no kindling chopped.
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
When I first read the caption, I imagined you lying behind snowbank with an RPG, waiting for that H-2 to get just a leetle closer.
Imagine my relief! (Of course it goes without saying that you’re a good man either way, John
I don’t even OWN an RPG. I do have three shotguns that I’ve never fired, though.
i have one shotgun, that i’ve never fired. i sort of consider it my health plan.
what i remeber from new mexico is the many breeds of humming birds would fight viciously for the prime feeding spot.
nature is a bitch.
The fighting comes later, when the rufous hummingbirds migrate through.
I’m with ya on the health plan. But my shotguns are all old ones with loooong barrels. I figure if I tried to push the trigger with a stick, I’d mess up my aim and just blow half my face off. This is not an option. :-0