Last week, I was sitting outside watching the boys zoom up and down the street on their bikes and scooters. Rob was practicing banjo in the cooling down evening and I was trying to capture my boys in don't-want-them-to-be blurry photographs. Trying and failing! Rushing rushing back and forth on the sidewalk, we enjoyed their laughter and "look... look at me mommy" antics.
From the corner of my eye, I spotted slow movement. Hmm... my neighbor was making her way up the street with something big and green in her hand. As she got closer, I realized it was a large branch off of her avocado tree. A big branch with a teeny tiny nest. I mean tiny! It turns out a hummingbird momma had abandoned her nest and my neighbor didn't know what to do about the nest. She thought Em and Ro would get a kick out of seeing the wee nest before tossing it in the trash bin.
We kept the nest. The egg you see in the above photo is iddy biddy-- like the size of my pinkie nail maybe at most. We kept it in the hot/warm garage and covered the nest with cotton balls while researching what to do. Sadly, so sadly, the branch fell a few days later and the egg cracked. It was a sad moment... while in all reality, the egg probably would not have hatched, it still upset us-- things like this happen every day and such are the ways of nature, but it happened here, to us, not on the National Geographic channel. Something so little affected us so much.
We try to imagine that the hummingbird momma has made another nest and is sitting on a new pair of eggs... we wish her well.
