We have enjoyed watching the feisty hummingbirds bicker over our hummingbird feeder. I mean, those guys just cannot get along.
Throughout the summer I have also captured some fun pictures of them out my kitchen window.
This little guy stuck his tongue out at me!
So, after a summer of enjoying their beauty and antics, imagine Merritt's horror when he looked out the bathroom window a couple weeks ago and saw one of our little friends caught in a massive spider web, with the gigantic spider (we grow them big here in NC) lunging at it while it frantically tried to get loose. It was horrific.
I went running out the front door with a broom, and managed to get the spider off the web and into a nearby bush. But the poor little hummingbird was stuck in the tacky, nasty web and he was running out of energy. I grabbed a huge garden rake and carefully swooped the web down with the hummingbird and picked as much web off of it as I could. Did I mention that the boys were watching from the bathroom window, freaking out, and we were supposed to be loading into the car for dive lessons at Duke? Because nothing emergent happens when we have nothing to do.
So this is what I ended up with:
A panting, tired little sticky hummingbird blinking up at me in the palm of my (apparently freakishly huge according to this picture) hand. So I called Brenda and Cheryl, because poor Brenda and Cheryl get all my panicked phone calls [side note: a week later I called for them to glue Ian's chin together...no wonder I only get voice mail when I call them now!].
At this point, I had placed the poor little guy in a planter on the back deck and said a little prayer. We had to leave and I couldn't take him with us. Thankfully, Brenda came over and grabbed him and took him home. See all the spider web junk on his wings? He just couldn't take flight with all that stickiness.
Amazingly, Brenda texted me a little later and said they had managed to clean the web off it with dish soap and a q-tip. A few minutes after that, he flew away!
About a week later, the hummingbirds migrated (probably a smart move, since we have at least 4 of those massive webs around our house now), but we are left with some vivid pictures and one great story!
Can you imagine that spider's story about 'the one who got away'?!?
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