I'm learning... with a great sense of wonder, and appreciation for the inborn sense of what it means for a creature to carry a species related task.  These little hummingbirds emerged from small eggs in a tiny nest... ready to participate as living beings in whatever ways the evolutionary process going back millions of years had prepared them to participate.  Fewer than two weeks ago they were hairless, featherless little gray things with beaks ready to receive food from a little mother who began to do what she was supposed to do as soon as they had hatched...  Now their feathers are coming in.  I stationed my camera on a tripod near the nest again... and hid a dozen feet away where I could watch the nest and control the shutter release.  I am in awe of her.  I am reassured. She wasn't taught how to make the nest, mate with a male, lay her eggs and sit on them until they hatched, but she obviously does what she should do.  I struggle to keep myself from saying "she knows" what she is supposed to do, but it's not a knowing, it's something that was born in her... and now day after day she diligently gathers food (much of it from a hummingbird feeder I hung nearby) enough for herself and for the two chicks, and she flies back to the nest and regurgitates some it into the waiting beaks of the chicks.  What I'm getting at is that if evolution has prepared these little creatures to do what they must do to survive, then it stands to reason that I have in me a lot of inborn "stuff"...stuff that I didn't learn but was there at the time I was born. Awesome.  It's important not to screw it up.

Sorry about the noise.  My neighbor is building something in his garage.  The little Mother hummer seems not to be deterred by it.  She does what she has to do.  I like the way she flew right up to the lens of the camera at the end... as if to say, "What the hell is this contraption?"