My Poor Hummingbirds…

Last year, a HUGE highlight of my summer was the baby hummingbirds that I discovered in a nest just a couple of feet outside my dining room window:

But I only noticed them after they were this big, and we were on vacation when they learned to fly and they were gone by the time we got home… I was so disappointed to have missed so much!

So this year, I was ecstatic when I discovered that Mama (or was it one of her babies?) had built a new nest, right on top of the old one!

I was a little worried as it’s been unseasonably cold here–it’s still only in the 70s and it was nearly mid-June, and we have had some huge storms–we’re even running the heater on occasion still–bizarre!! I did some research, and was thinking the babies should have hatched by now. Every day I would talk to the Mama, and we were all very careful not to overly frighten her. I waited until she left the nest to take this of her “babies”:

But on Emily’s last day of school, when I was already a bit melancholy over the fact that yet another year had slipped by so very quickly, I discovered that the nest had been destroyed. In the morning Mama was fine and greeted me with her usual suspicious look as I opened the curtains, and then I went to pick Emily up from school and run a quick errand. When I got back, I was going to take another photo (I’ve been trying to document them every other day), but instead I saw the top portion of the nest on the ground and the middle half flipped to the side, and not a trace of Mama or her eggs. Emily and I (but especially I) were brokenhearted. I’d had such grand visions of seeing newly hatched babies, and watching them grown, and even watching them learn to fly this summer. I was SO excited! Plus I have read that they often nest in the same location for three or four years in a row. But I am afraid that this will have scared her off, eliminating any chance of her returning next year… I don’t know if it was squirrels or the vicious crows that are always hovering–oh, how I detest them… Anyhow, here’s what’s left now of her carefully created little nest:

I feel so bad for her, and for us, too!! I am hoping against hope that they will return next spring…