Death Comes to the Hummingbird

I never watch National Geographic type shows where it is likely that there will be one of nature's predators taking out some adorable unsuspecting creature. I know that's what happens, but it is just something that I would rather not have stuck in my mind.

I live in the heart of Los Angeles. There is a little bit of nature around here, the occasional possum, squirrels in the tree outside of my bedroom window, even the odd Raccoon rambling through the area late at night. There are lots of birds of course, and my favorite terrace companions, are the hummingbirds, that go from my terrace to each of my neighbors', either sipping nectar from feeders, or flowers, or just lighting on some thin branch defending territory. 

I can tell you this for certain, I never expected to have one of those ugly National Geographic moments happen as it did just a little while ago, just before dark. And it has jarred me, even as I know that daily, all around me, all forms of creatures, animal and human have some version of "here today, gone tomorrow". Actually, in this case, it was more like "here on second; gone the next". 

I was sitting in the cooling afternoon edge of the gloam writing. The feeder is maybe three feet from me, and just a few minutes before, one of the hummingbirds had been sitting on a branch of my Fica considering a fill up before evening. They are territorial, these humminbirds and there is a kind of ritual. They encounter each other like Air Force bombers from World War II, buzzing each other, and then going to various other of the terraces to wait. 

I have plants on the edge between me and my next door neighbor's terrace. Suddenly from one of his plants on which the birds alight, maybe twenty five feet away from me, I heard a level of hummingbird vocalization that didn't seem right. It sounded as if there was some kind of fight, but on the floor of his terrace. I jumped up. I couldn't see anything, but the bird, and now I realized it was only one, was shrieking. I was about to try to take my plants off and try to climb to the terrace (the building is from the fifties and it was possible) when I saw my neighbor was home and I yelled "Jeff!" He came out after my second call, and saw the bird entangled in some dead branches on the floor. I thought, "Well, that's all he need to do, carefully, as they are so fragile" untangle it. But then he noticed that there was a spider literally on the head of the bird, and though he tried to extricate it, within, what, maybe 30 seconds, the bird was dead. It just went limp. 

And then there was the plastic bag for the bird, and the spider. 

Spiders, I read a little while ago, can be predators of hummingbirds. Today, there was a big enough spider on my neighbor's terrace that "took out" one little marvel of nature. 

https://www.hummingbird-guide.com/hummingbird-predators.html

You know, even as I am writing this, and yes, I know it was just a bird, I am getting upset. 

I was today taking notes for a podcast that I am planning for this Saturday, on "Peace", you know, the grandiose kind, "Peace in the World" and the more personal kind, "Peace of soul", or something along those lines. One of the things that I wrote in my notes was that I can't necessarily define peace for myself (plenty of definitions from dictionaries and theologies exist of course) but I can talk of moments of peace. The first one I wrote down was watching the hummingbirds on my terrace.

In a flash, that experience of what usually is a peaceful moment, was incinerated. 

I noticed that on the terrace way across, a small leaf like creature, another hummingbird, was sitting on my neighbor's ficus. It wasn't quite dark yet, so it could potentially have come before the night would require it to hibernate. But it just sat there on the leaf or branch, as if it knew what had happened.

Death Came to the Hummingbird. I hate it. 

And of course, such a moment raises the bigger picture of our transient lives. I really didn't want to think about that today. Oh, well.