No, that’s not snow falling, but the hummer who winter over manage to handle the snow as well as the cold rain and low temperatures. There are several hummers who spend a great deal of their time just hanging out in a Japanese maple, foraging for insects and grabbing the occasional sip of artificial nectar from our feeder.
I no longer think of hummingbirds as fragile or weak—they fight each other, they brave the elements. The one above is between sips; he looks somehow resolute and stead in his tiny form in his tiny bit of the world.
Photographed with a lens I am testing. Now that I’m retired, I have a limited budget for lenses, and I do not have a telephoto lens with autofocus. I bought an older Sigma 500m f/4.5 lens to try it out. It arrived dirty and ragged; I had to do a pretty serious clean-up on it (it was advertised as ‘excellent’; the least the selling company could have done (MPB, if you are curious) was clean it before sending it to me. Sigh.
It seems like it will meet my needs until such time as I can invest in a newer and more full-featured lens. My biggest worry was that it is an adapted lens (it was made for Canon DSLR cameras), but a rare treat: the adapter works well and the lens focuses very well—I think it’s going to be a keeper.
(The manual focus lens I already have, a Canon EF 500mm f/4.5 that was made for the 1980 Olympics, is sharper, but I’m reasonably crafty with my image processing and I can overcome some of the shortcomings of the Sigma lens. Having autofocus AND a sharp lens is out of my current budget.)