yesterday afternoon, we discovered this little gal bouncing against the inside of our kitchen skylight like an oversized bumblebee. this, of course, was an emergency. we are the kind of household that escorts stray spiders, wasps, and mayflies out the front door so that they may continue their sundry quests for self-fulfillment. a trapped hummingbird represented a next-level crisis that required all hands on deck, and involved a stool, a ladder, a ball jar, a catch-and-release trout net, a tennis racket, a bread board, and, eventually, my husband’s big hands, which plucked the hummingbird gently from its perch, when it had finally settled in precarious exhaustion on a tiny lip of window sill. She posed for about five minutes in the STILL blog studio we  set up on our front step, blinking tiredly, and then lifted her head, glanced around, and thrummed off into the trees. we can report that operation hummingbird ended in complete success.

female ruby-throated hummingbird

saint paul, minnesota