Saved a Hummingbird this Morning

With my bare hands.

I was over at a buddy's house for some Saturday morning backgammon, and it's a beautiful day up here, so he had his kitchen door wide open. A couple of games in, we both suddenly notice that there's a hummingbird beating its wings between the blinds and the glass of the window by the door.

My friend got up and pulled the blinds away from the window, and I got in the space between and started trying to gently drive the hummer (which was a rufous, by the way) toward the door with my forearm. That was working pretty good, although it was very much a game of inches, and then the bird lit on one of my fingertips, but my next move was a blunder. I reached for the pocket containing my phone with my free hand--how cool it would be to have a pic of a hummingbird on my fingertip, right?--and with that hesitation, the bird flew back into the house, and got stuck between another set of blinds and window.

My buddy pulled the blinds back again, and I started doing the slow sweep, and it was right about then that my buddy's dog Rogue noticed what we were doing, and stuck his nose into the thick of things. Despite the canine complication, we managed to stay focused on the task at hand, and it was then that I realized we were probably too far from the door for the sweeping strategy to be very effective, so I brought my hands together with my fingers spread slightly apart and managed to lightly contain the hummer in the cage my hands had become. I carried it out and set it down on the porch rail, and it sat there for a second or so before cranking up its wings and flying away.

I only won two games to my buddy's eight victories this morning, but despite that, I'm still feeling pretty good about the way my day is going.