Nature In the Early Evening

Being a nature-lover, I sometimes notice some unusual stuff in the world of nature. For example, a few years ago I saw a possum overhead, walking along a wire, just like squirrels often do. I had no idea possums had the ability to do such a thing, but there he was; performing a high wire act.

A few days ago my winged friend, the hummingbird that has frequented my feeder, came to my kitchen window about 6 in the evening while I was in the process of eating a couple of microwave mini burritos. As it happened, I was not looking outside. Instead, I heard the tiny bird bounced off the pane. He had probably just sipped out of the hummingbird feeder I had hanging a few steps away. Anyway, I turned and there she was, hovering by the window. That was two days ago and I have not seen her since. She is past due to migrate south. She has probably hung around a week or so longer than usual because I have provided food. If I did not know better, I would think that she had knocked on the window in a gesture of thanks and goodbye before heading south. But animals aren’t generally familiar with the concept of saying thank you or goodbye, so in reality what probably happened was that she saw her reflection in the window glass and mistaken it for another hummingbird, and being territorial, was trying to chase it off. It’s actually a fairly common phenomenon. But if I want, I can think that she was bidding me a farewell, right?

A half hour after the hummingbird visit, I stepped outside and noticed a rather large number of dragonflies whirling around overhead. They were probably green darners swarming during migration. Dragonflies migrate just like a number of bird species but I have rarely seen dragonflies swarming in migration. It was evening twilight so they were probably looking for a place to stay the night. There were perhaps a few dozen in the swarm I saw. Supposedly there can be swarms of many thousand. That would be kind of cool to see and kind of scary also.