Coon Wars and Hummingbirds

My wife recently developed an enthusiasm for feeding the local bird population and put up several feeders, two of which hung from lightweight steel poles. There followed a week or two of coon wars, in which raccoons came at night and pulled down the feeders, opened them up, and ate all the bird seed. Here’s a morning-after scene (click for larger images as usual):

She also put up a hummingbird feeder, and it has been a great success. While I was outside taking the above picture, a hummingbird kept flying around me—they make sort of a low buzzing sound, like a really big bug or a really small airplane. So I stood there for a while with the camera poised, and eventually got this lucky shot:

It’s fairly blurry but it may very well be the best I ever do, so I’m posting it. It really was just luck: since the camera has a fairly slow reaction time and the bird is in position and in flight only for an instant, I just pointed the camera at the feeder and snapped the picture as soon as I heard the buzz. This is the only one of a couple of dozen shots where he appeared at all.

The coon wars have been won, by the way: she bolted the poles to the deck of which you can see a corner in the picture.

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