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Updated: June 13, 2025
The hummingbird, unlike all others, does not alight upon the nest, but flies into it. She enters it as quick as a flash, but as light as any feather. Two eggs are the complement. They are perfectly white, and so frail that only a woman's fingers may touch them. Incubation lasts about ten days. In a week, the young have flown.
Soft, creamy-hued vegetable cotton, pressed and felted into a certain firmness of consistency, formed the structure, and a close covering of lichens held it in shape and completed its beauty, while giving an apple-branch tone that made it almost invisible. An inch in depth and the same in breadth furnished ample quarters for the twin hummingbird babies whose home it was.
"I don't feel very safe," thought Rebecca, remembering all these unaccustomed mercies as she sat on the front doorsteps, with her tatting shuttle flying in and out of the fine cotton like a hummingbird. "It's just like one of those too beautiful July days that winds up with a thundershower before night!
That this mysterious hummingbird of ocean which, had it but brilliancy of hue, might, from its evanescent liveliness, be almost called its butterfly, yet whose chirrup under the stern is ominous to mariners as to the peasant the death-tick sounding from behind the chimney jamb should have its special haunt at the Encantadas, contributes, in the seaman's mind, not a little to their dreary spell.
When one was sufficiently filled, or sufficiently racked, it would shut its mouth and refuse to open, though mamma touched it gently with her beak. "The world slipped away and I was in fairyland," wrote my old friend the Enthusiast, while watching, in another part of the country that same summer, the nest-building of a hummingbird.
With shame I confess it, I have been bullied even by a hummingbird. This spring, as I was cleansing a pear-tree of its lichens, one of these little zigzagging blurs came purring toward me, couching his long bill like a lance, his throat sparkling with angry fire, to warn me off from a Missouri-currant whose honey he was sipping. And many a time he has driven me out of a flower-bed.
Finally the black worm comes to rest and, clinging by its hind feet, lets itself down and simulates a small dry twig, in which disguise it would deceive the sharpest-eyed enemy. No doubt it passed the night posing as a twig. Among the sylvan denizens that next came upon the stage were a hummingbird, a little red newt, and a wood frog.
I'm glad I don't have to pump food down the throats of my youngsters the way Mrs. Hummingbird has to down hers." Peter looked perplexed. "What do you mean by pumping food down their throats?" he demanded. "Just what I say," retorted Jenny Wren. "Mrs. Hummer sticks her bill right down their throats and then pumps up the food she has already swallowed.
"What is it Jenny Wren has said that you don't believe?" demanded Skimmer the Tree Swallow, as he once more settled himself in his doorway. "She said that Hummer the Hummingbird is a sort of second cousin to Sooty the Chimney Swift," replied Johnny Chuck. "Well, it's so, if you don't believe it," declared Skimmer.
He hummed like a particularly lucky hummingbird while he shaved, and felt like hoppity-skipping down to the grill room, where his healthy appetite might have full play. He found himself a nicely cushioned alcove through whose window he could look out on the clear, brilliant morning with its dazzle of snow, and at the same time luxuriate in the steam heated atmosphere within.
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