She was staring straight at me. She had come out of nowhere, really, so I wasn’t quite prepared for the encounter. I expected she would join the rest who were busy eating. But apparently her curiousity got the best of her and she had to come check me out. Have you ever been interrogated by four ounces of fluff with a beak? It was a bit intimidating, actually.
I love the irony. I get oodles of Mourning Doves in my back patio. I enjoy them very much, though occasionally I have to break up their backroom brawls. They outweigh a hummingbird by some outrageous proportion, yet they are considerably more skiddish. If I make hardly a movement inside my house they whir away in a panic. And they aren’t particularly good drivers, either. I have more Mourning Dove sillouettes on my windows than anything else (a problem I am in the process of fixing). But those hummingbirds are something else entirely. This morning after I accidentally scared everyone away I decided I might as well do some watering. The hummingbirds had been zooming in and out, so I wondered if they would come back, even with me there. And sure enough, they did! As long as I wasn’t spraying the hose right next to the feeder, they kept right on eating. So, either they hadn’t eaten in three days or they are just plain gutsy.
Based on my encounter with Ms. Ruby, my guess is the latter.
I was away from the feeder a bit, with my back turned to it, when she came. So, she had to come AROUND me, in the opposite direction of the food! I was a bit lost in my own world, watching their shadows on the pavement, when the buzzing (like the light sabers in Star Wars) was suddenly much louder. I looked up and there she was. Right on eye level with me and looking me square in the face. We locked eyes for a few seconds and then off she buzzed. I’m not sure if she went back to the feeder or off to tell her friends about this very strange flower she found. She might be used to staring humans in the face, but I must say it was an experience I don’t often have!
God must have had so much fun making birds. Just in the handful of birds that frequent my backyard there are so many different personalities, some of them, like the Mourning Doves and Hummingbirds, are humorous in their differences. Others just make me smile because I can SO imagine what that bird would be like if he was a person. I LOVE the fact that God created such variety and vibrancy in His birds. An exotic parrot of the Amazon or a little brown sparrow alike would be boring if that’s all we had to see. But no! Our God is exquisitely creative in all He has made, even down to Ms. Ruby herself!
It makes me wonder what it would have been like for Moses, or Job, or even David as they wrote about the wonders of creation. What was it like for Moses to have dictated to him the creation story? Was his spirit able to comprehend even more than he was instructed to write? Did God tell him anything about what it was like creating the birds, and the fish, and the animals? Or Job, who was given countless illustrations of God’s immensity through the pictures of nature? Or David who spoke such beautiful poetry about the universe? How they must have marveled at His creative genius!
While I may (or may not!) wait until heaven to have such an encounter as they did, I celebrate with great joy the creativity of my God and will ever smile at my introduction to Ms. Ruby!