Becoming a Birder

I’ve always enjoyed having birds around, and I once took a tour in Costa Rica’s cloud forest that involved looking for birds—especially the vibrant resplendent quetzal. After my maternal grandmother passed away, I felt her presence through any birds that stayed nearby. I missed seeing cardinals when I moved from New Hampshire to Colorado.

But my love for birds truly deepened when a tiny broad-tailed hummingbird chose a low branch of one of our pine trees to build her teacup nest in the summer after we moved to Evergreen. It was during COVID, so we spent a lot of time at home. Watching her protect her eggs and then feed her two hungry chicks was a highlight of our summer. The branch was just above eye level from our deck and was on the same branch as a vacant birdhouse left by our home’s previous owners.

In the world of hummingbirds, the female is on her own to raise her young, so she had her work cut out for her. We named her Petunia. I downloaded the Merlin app and started paying more attention to the birds that call Evergreen home. Petunia’s two babies stayed in the nest for what seemed like a long time, to the point that one of them grew so big it nearly crushed the nest. I decided they were males since they seemed like late bloomers, so we named them Nico (the bigger one) and Tico (the smaller one).

I was thrilled when Petunia returned the next summer to raise two more babies. She had to rebuild the nest since Nico left it unusable, but she quickly built it, laid two eggs, and diligently protected them. Once they hatched, we saw her working hard to keep them fed. The chicks didn’t stay as long this time, so we gave them female names—Nala and Adelaide.