An Unusual Sight In Nature In My Backyard!

 

Yesterday, August 27, 2023, I had one of the instances of being in the right place at the right time to see a very unusual, at least for me, sight while I was in my backyard.  For several years, we have fed birds at our house and have a fairly large flock of ruby-throated hummingbirds ever year.  This  year we have two feeders out for them and regularly need to fill one of them every two days and the other about every three days.  I have known for a while, maybe two weeks, that the young humming birds had fledged based on the sudden increase in numbers on the feeders.  

We have several Rose of Sharon trees around our house which the humming birds love when they are in bloom.  I was standing in the yard yesterday and saw a humming bird feeding on the large Rose of Sharon behind our house.  I knew the bird was either  female or a juvenile but it totally surprised me when it left the flower it was feeding on and flew to within about 3 feet of me and literally fell out of the air into the grass near me.  I knew instantly that it had to be an immature, freshly fledged hatchling, probably on its first day of flight and I was wondering if it would get airborne again.  But, after just a few seconds of lying in the grass, it was in the air again and back on the Rose of Sharon.  I had never seen this happen before although I see unusual events with wildlife at my house fairly frequently.  In February 2021, I opened my back door on an unusually cold night to see a mourning dove just sitting in the dark on my driveway.  That bird managed to fly when I walked close to it and started to bend over and pick it up in what would have been an attempt to get it to survive.  Once recently in what was a driving and freezing rain which turned into an ice storm, I saw, through my family room window,  a mink chase a rabbit around the corner of my house and into my front yard just out of my line of sight where the mink killed the rabbit brought it back across the driveway  headed back to its den.  I have had both red foxes, coyotes, and coons on my property in broad daylight and I have photographs of both deer and wild turkeys on my driveway eating bird seed.  But I had never seen a humming bird literally fall out of the sky at my feet.  This was a highly unusual sighting and well worth seeing.