A couple of times each summer, I find a panicking bird in my greenhouse. Usually it is a hummingbird, terrified and banging against the glass trying to get out. I have a small butterfly net that I use to trap the hummers against the glass, then gently grab the tiny fragile creature and let it loose outside.
Yesterday when I was watering my chili pepper plants I kept hearing a fluttering sound, but I couldn’t see anything or locate where the sound was coming from.
The sound kept repeating, and eventually I was able to find the source. It was, I think, a vireo (the species I couldn’t determine.) It was down in the narrow space in between the glass wall of the greenhouse and the wooden wall of the pepper plant bed. As I tried to grab it, it kept trying to flee from my hand, fluttering from one end of the space to the other. There wasn’t a whole lot of space for my hand to wrap around the bird and several time it escaped from my grasp.
I was finally able to grab the terrified bird. I took it outside the greenhouse and let it lose into the fresh air and freedom of the wilderness, but not before I took a couple of photos with my iPhone. It was amazing that the photos turned out. I couldn’t steady or operate the camera very well with my shaky left hand, and the poor bird wasn’t staying very still for its photo.
You can see my paintings at: davidmarchant2.ca
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