Tag: Anna’s hummingbird

mlem

A female Anna's hummingbird perches on a bougainvillea branch in our backyard in Scottsdale, Arizona on May 12, 2019. Original: _DSC2176.ARW

A long thin beak necessitates a long thin tongue. We had a ton of bougainvillea when we moved in years ago but had it ripped out as it was a nightmare to maintain. The local wildlife misses it as our backyard is rather sparse now but this is not entirely a bad thing with Bear around. I do miss gardening from our time in Portland but I don’t have the bandwidth for it here. Something to look forward to in retirement though I’ll need some lessons as I have no idea how to grow things in an area where everything stabs you.

📷: Sony A6500 | Sony 100-400mm | Sony 1.4X
🗓️: May 12, 2019

Backyard Beauty

A female Anna's hummingbird looks at me while perching on a bougainvillea branch in front of pale verde trees in our backyard in Scottsdale, Arizona in May 2019

Though I haven’t spent much time photographing them we do get a variety of birds to our small backyard. Our house is on a slope with a narrow common area below the back of the house with some trees and cacti and grasses, although it isn’t easy to get back there it does provide a nice backdrop. This spring a verdin couple nested in a buckhorn cholla below the house and if I angled my lens just so against the metal bars of the fence I could photograph the entrance. As I watched them a female Anna’s hummingbird occasionally flew into the bougainvillea I was sitting next to, eventually I pulled the camera away from its precise setup and took some handheld shots of her. The dark patch on her neck will glow a bright red if the sun hits it from the right angle.