Random Surprises

​     You can spend hours upon hours trying to plan out the perfect capture, and truthfully when it comes right down to it, it's those random surprise photos that turn out to be the most amusing. Feeder pictures, those of them hovering over the flowers and some of the more common captures can fill your computer's storage. But it's the surprise captures that are so much more unusual than the rest that really stand out. You can easily identify this young hummingbird as a male, with his little red freckle and a pattern of dark spots across his throat. But another way to identify him as a young bird is by his antics. Young birds don't have the endurance of the adults, so they tend to perch a little more frequently until they develop that endurance. They will get themselves into unusual circumstances, oftentimes entangled in the branches and leaves of flowers. Food comes before fear early in their lives, and over time of battling their way out of some tough predicaments, fear starts to arrange their priorities a little bit differently. They'll start to choose a little more wisely as to which flowers are worth the effort and which ones can get them into big time trouble. 
     This was a pleasant surprise where I had clear focus of the Delphinium flowers, and up from behind them popped a playful young male. 
Photo taken August 4th, 2017. N.E. of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. 

---