Close up and personal

Hummingbirds are some of my favorite creatures. No bigger than a ping-pong ball and no heavier than a nickel, they are fearless at confronting beings hundreds of times greater in size. I’ve put up a feeder by my window in order to watch their aerial antics, but the tiny fliers always seem too quick and too far away to get a really good look.

Photographer Chris Morgan has captured the iridescent plumage of this teensy terror in all its glory. Each intricate feather is smaller than a caraway seed but packs a colorful punch!

Hidden treasure

Photographer Linden Gledhill isn’t content to capture butterflies and moths in all their glory. He aims his lens at the microscopic scales of their wings. The results are breathtaking.

Here’s Hypolimnas dexithea, or the Madagascar diadem.

This is Papilio lormieri, the Central Emperor Swallowtail.

Here is Precis rhadama, or the Brush-footed Butterfly.

And last, but not least—Argema mittrei, the Comet Moth.

Find more of Linden Gledhill’s astounding microscopic photography here.

And look for hidden beauty around you today!

Bird brains

Bully hummingbird photo by Dan True

A few summers ago I installed a hummingbird feeder out by my front door, and from the day it showed up, it’s been a busy spot indeed. Just like at the playground and the workplace, however, there’s a bully who wants to run the whole show. Whenever other hummers come to sip at the feeder, this tiny tyrant swoops in out of nowhere and threatens to poke out their eyes with his needle-sharp beak.

The other hummingbirds aren’t letting him get away with this obnoxious behavior, thankfully. They’ve worked out a system to outsmart him.

First, one of them moves in as a decoy, and while he is busy chasing that one away, another one visits the feeder and sips like there’s no tomorrow. Then the others switch places until they’ve all had a turn. It doesn’t work every time, but it is successful enough that at the end of the day all the hummingbirds get a drink of sweet, sweet nectar.

It’s group cooperation at its finest, and it just goes to show that there’s always a way to get the best of a bully, if you try hard enough.