We’ve been lucky to have Ruby-throated Hummingbirds in our yard this summer. When they first arrived, they seemed very curious about every plant and a bit erratic in their flight patterns, making me think they were recent fledges. I spent several happy mornings with my camera watching them sip at the blooms in my flower beds.

It’s always fun trying to photograph hummingbirds. They are tiny and hard to focus on. They dart silently into the yard, nectar at a few flowers, then dart up to a protective perch area to survey their kingdom. 20 minutes later, they repeat the process. So making good images takes a lot of patience and some luck.

Then you get your images into post-processing and find that many of them look alike. Wings up, wings back, wings blurred, purple flower, red flower, etc. But on this particular morning, my little aerial acrobats were putting on a show and giving me lots of fun little moments – like when “Holly” revealed to me that she is in fact “Harry” with her one little red spot on the gorget.

Then it was a competition between the hummers and the bees – would could get to the nectar first? The hummingbirds dive-bombed the bees who were hogging the best blooms. It reminded me of an avian version of Quidditch.

How often do you see a hummer from this angle? He looks like a little speeding bullet!

Or this angle, where I caught him in the middle of a hover-horizontal-zoom maneuver?

Then the hummer found a wasp at the top of a plant. He had to stop and check that out, hovering from many directions to see exactly what was going on with that particular flower…

Look at all the feathers on his tail splayed as he hovers! I think he was wise to leave the wasp alone.

I’ll leave you with a last chuckle – I’ve photographed many birds pooping in-flight before, but I think it was the first time I’d photographed that behavior with a tiny hummingbird. At least he aimed it away from his breakfast nectar! :)