Plant the Flowers — Hummingbirds from Neskowin to Sellwood

Neskowin is a tiny village on the Oregon coast that has quietly turned itself into a bird sanctuary. The locals plant with intention — gardens full of flowers chosen to feed the travelers — and the birds have noticed. Songbirds fill the hedges, and the hummingbirds come in numbers: the year-round Anna’s, and in season, the fiery little Rufous. Walk the lanes with a camera and you’re never far from the hum of wings.

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This is a female Rufous — and I’ll confess she taught me something. The male Rufous wears an iridescent gorget that flashes so brilliantly scarlet I first took these birds for Ruby-throated Hummingbirds — the famous one from back East that, it turns out, doesn’t occur in Oregon at all. The female is subtler: green-backed, warm rufous along the flanks, a freckled throat. But don’t let the quieter dress fool you — the Rufous is the firecracker of the family, and the females defend their flower patches with the same fire the males bring to a feeder. And every one of them has earned the attitude: for its size, the Rufous makes one of the longest migrations of any bird on Earth, close to four thousand miles between Mexico and Alaska. The gardens of Neskowin are fueling stations on that enormous journey. This one paused just long enough to give me a perfect side profile.

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And here’s the resident — a male Anna’s Hummingbird, caught doing his stretches like a tiny gymnast, tail feathers fanned wide. That tail deserves a closer look. In the Anna’s famous courtship display, the male climbs high into the sky and dives at full speed — and at the bottom of the dive, his outer tail feathers vibrate and produce a loud, sharp chirp. The sound doesn’t come from his voice at all. He sings with his tail. The feathers spread out in this photo aren’t just for steering — they’re a musical instrument, and this is the musician warming up.

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And it isn’t only the coast that plants for the birds. Back home in Portland, at Willamette Park, I found this male Anna’s working a spray of pink blossoms — most likely red-flowering currant, the great native nectar source of the Northwest spring. The hummingbirds time their whole season around its bloom; where the currant flowers, the Anna’s follows. And the male Anna’s wears the family crown — an iridescent rose-pink gorget covering not just the throat but his entire head, flashing like a jewel whenever the light finds the right angle. Coast village or city park, the lesson is the same: plant the flowers, and the jewels arrive.

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Sometimes the light gives you a gift. This male Anna’s threw his wings fully open just as the sun got behind them — and the feathers turned translucent, like panes of stained glass, every shaft drawn in silhouette. Those are the hardest-working wings in the bird world: beating around fifty times a second, swiveling at the shoulder in a figure-eight that lets him hover, back up, even fly upside down. All that machinery, frozen for one luminous instant into a fan of light.

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I call this hummingbird yoga — and it’s a photographer’s confession as much as a caption. In flight, those wings blur into invisibility at some fifty beats a second; no shutter speed in the world shows you a wing like this. The stretch is the only time the machinery holds still. So you learn to wait for the yoga: the slow, luxurious extension, every primary feather fanned and lit. It’s the one moment a hummingbird lets you see how it’s built.

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And then there’s her — the female Anna’s, dressed to vanish. No rose-pink crown, no flash: soft green and gray that melts into the leaves. The camouflage is strategy, because she does everything alone — builds the nest, sits the eggs, raises the young — and a mother who can’t be seen is a nest that can’t be found. Watch closely and you’ll notice she’s often not visiting flowers at all: hummingbirds hunt insects and spiders for protein, especially the females when they’re breeding and feeding nestlings. They’ll even raid spiderwebs for both the spider and the silk — the silk becomes the elastic binding of their tiny, stretchy nests.

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Here’s one caught in the act — and what you can’t see is the best part. A hummingbird doesn’t sip. Its tongue is a pump: forked at the tip, darting into the flower up to twenty times a second, the tips unfurling and trapping nectar on every stroke. That quick dip of the bill you see at a flower is actually dozens of strokes of the fastest drinking apparatus in the bird world. The currant gets its pollinator, the Anna’s gets his fuel, and the whole exchange happens faster than the eye can follow.

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One last lesson, from an Anna’s perched on dead blackberry canes in the fall: hummingbird color isn’t paint. It’s structure. Microscopic platelets in the feathers split the light like a prism, so what color you see depends entirely on the angle of the light — the same feathers reading velvet black, bronze-green, or blazing pink from one heartbeat to the next. Photographers learn this the hard way, chasing a gorget that keeps switching itself off. The bird never changes. The light does. And on a dead brown cane in November, when the light finally lands right, it’s like someone struck a match.

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And when the light does land right — this. The same male Anna’s machinery with the switch flipped fully on: crown and gorget blazing rose-magenta at once, every scale lit, a jewel on a bare twig. I set him against soft clouds to let the color do the talking. This is the frame every hummingbird photographer waits for, and it lasts about a second.

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And here’s the other half of the magic trick — the sharpest photograph in this whole collection, nearly 67 megapixels of feather detail. Same species, same famous crown — but facing away from the sun, that rose-magenta reads as velvet black. Wings raised over his back on a thorny bramble cane, every barb and thorn razor-sharp against the blue. Side by side with the photo above, you’re looking at the entire secret of hummingbird color: it was never paint. It’s light, waiting for an angle.

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And I’ll close the portraits with this one, because every so often a photograph stops being a bird picture and becomes something else. A female Anna’s, wings lifted together against the light — and the moment I saw the frame I thought: a little angel. Some of you saw an angel in my clouds over the Willamette Valley not long ago. I seem to keep finding them. Maybe that’s just what happens when you spend enough mornings looking up.

One More, From the Woods by the River

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I found her in the woods along the Willamette, in the protected strip of forest near the dog park — a quiet stretch of bank that also holds woodpeckers, owls and songbirds, simply because it has been left alone.

What I love most here is the light, and I can take no credit for it. There is no direct sun in this frame. Everything landing on her has already been through the canopy — filtered, softened, warmed by the leaves before it ever reached the branch. It is the kind of light you cannot ask for and cannot manufacture. You can only be standing there when the forest hands it to you.

She is elegant, and she is nearly invisible. The male gets the rose-magenta crown that stops traffic; she gets green and gray and soft white, and against moss and lichen she all but disappears. That is not modesty, it is survival — she will raise a brood entirely alone, and a nesting female who cannot be seen is a nesting female who lives.

And I think she is working. Female hummingbirds build with plant down and spider silk, then shingle the outside of the cup with flakes of lichen — the very lichen on this branch — until the finished nest looks like nothing but a knot on a limb. The spider silk is the clever part: it binds the whole thing together and lets the nest stretch as the chicks grow. She is fuller-bodied here than usual, which in a female hummingbird generally means she is carrying eggs and close to laying. (Birds don’t get pregnant — the term is gravid — but the look is unmistakable, and it means the same thing: a nest is coming.)

A bird the weight of a nickel, gathering spider silk in a strip of woods inside a city, to build something the width of a walnut. That is the whole argument for leaving a little forest standing. 🌿