(Because Julie….. they’re too darn beauty-ful!   – promoted by Christian Avard)

I’ve told most of this story before over on ‘Kos, but I have a follow-up at the end with more photos

I will note once again that these photos are all smaller versions of the photos.  Clicking on them gets you to my web site, which gives you details about the camera (all of these were taken with a Pentax K20d), the lens (a Sigma 50-500mm zoom lens, but some used a 1.4x teleconverter) and other settings (film speed, aperture, etc.).  

These photos started on July 9th, with this photo of the mother hummingbird on her nest:

On July 29th, I went back to check the nest again:

Then, a week later, on August 4th, I found out that the babies had hatched, so I checked in again.  I got these photos:

Notice how small the babies are.  Tiny little beaks, rest of face and body not even visible.  The next photos I have of them are only eight days later.  We’ll get to those in a moment.  

Fast forward to August 12th.  I knew the babies would be bigger, but I didn’t realized they’d be this much bigger.  These ones are nearly adult sized, in only eight days.  Here are the babies by themselves:

Notice the spotted necks on these birds.  That’s one of the markers of a juvenile.  Full adult ruby-throated hummingbirds either have a bare neck (females) or bright red (males).  Juveniles can have these spotted necks.  

Here are two more photos, these of the momma feeding her baby:

On August 13th, I returned again to discover that one of the babies had fledged.  That left the one lone hummingbird, still being fed by its mom:

I didn’t make it over on the 14th, but I did manage to swing by on the 15th.  

I missed the last baby leaving the nest by about an hour.  

But they were still hanging out.  I managed to get these photos (and the one in the intro) of them feeding near the house.  I think the first three are of the mother and the last is of one of the babies.  It’s possible that I’m mistaking the mother for one of the babies, but I think that’s a full adult there.

So that’s it.  A nest from laying to hatching to flying off into the distance.  

I will close with a few more photos of a hummingbird from my own yard.  I’m sure this is a ruby-throated hummingbird, but I’m still not used to seeing one with such a dark neck, so it throws me off a bit.  This one popped up while I moving the lawn mower and just landed above me, so I grabbed what I could:

As usual, feel free to treat this as an open photography and/or birding thread and, most of all, enjoy the photos.

If you want weekly (or daily) e-mail alerts when I’ve put new photos on my web site, you can do so via this link.  

Other relevant Ruby-Throated Hummingbird Links:

• Wikipedia;
• Cornell Lab of Ornithology;
• Hummingbirds.net;
• My Hummingbird Gallery

( – promoted by odum)

Never roll out a new product in August they say, but Bush is rolling out new rules for intelligence gathering. Got to get this stuff established on the books before January 2009. We are really going to be left with a different country after Bush is done with it. Traded away so easily, quietly in August as we lament Russia crushing freedom in Georgia and watch the Olympics. If elected Obama will have much to undo or McCain if elected will have much to work with.

More Federal Intelligence Changes Planned:

Quietly unveiled late last month, the proposal is part of a flurry of domestic intelligence changes issued and planned by the Bush administration in its waning months. They include a recent executive order that guides the reorganization of federal spy agencies and a pending Justice Department overhaul of FBI procedures for gathering intelligence and investigating terrorism cases within U.S. borders.

Taken together, critics in Congress and elsewhere say, the moves are intended to lock in policies for Bush’s successor and to enshrine controversial post-Sept. 11 approaches that some say have fed the greatest expansion of executive authority since the Watergate era.

Under the Justice Department proposal for state and local police, published for public comment July 31, law enforcement agencies would be allowed to target groups as well as individuals, and to launch a criminal intelligence investigation based on the suspicion that a target is engaged in terrorism or providing material support to terrorists. They also could share results with a constellation of federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and others in many cases.

Criminal intelligence data starts with sources as basic as public records and the Internet, but also includes law enforcement databases, confidential and undercover sources, and active surveillance.

“If police officers no longer see themselves as engaged in protecting their communities from criminals and instead as domestic intelligence agents working on behalf of the CIA, they will be encouraged to collect more information,”  Michael German (an FBI agent for 16 years )policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said “It turns police officers into spies on behalf of the federal government.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/…

Matthew Manning, 22, of Northfield, pleaded not guilty to the charge that while dressed as Santa Claus, he threw a cream pie in Douglas' face as the Governor marched in the July 4 parade in Montpelier.

Right after the Great Independence Day Pie Attack there was plenty of disagreement around here about whether he should have done it. Now, Matthew Manning is facing only disorderly conduct charges.

 Read the rest of the story in the Times Argus.

We just passed a little benchmark at GMD: 1,000,000 page views, according to our site meter (which was actually installed a month and a half after the blog launched, so its actually a bit more).

And another, perhaps more significant benchmark passed recently as well. In the last two mentions of GMD in the Vermont press (here and here), you’ll notice that the blog is now mentioned without explanation. No more “liberal blog Green Mountain Daily” or the Democratic oriented website, Green Mountain Daily” or somesuch. Just “Green Mountain Daily,” ’cause they figure people just know what it is, I guess. Cool.

On another note (since this is tagged as an “open thread” and therefore requires no thematic consistency), someone was telling me last week that I’ve been too hard on Seven Days’ Shay Totten of late. So to balance things out, let me first repeat a couple of things I’ve said in recent weeks – one, that he should be applauded for doing more than anyone else in recent months for (finally) raising the profile of the Vermont Yankee issue among folks in the northern part of the state and two, for continuing to do yeoman’s work birddogging the vendetta currently being waged by Jim Douglas and his ANR against all the operations in the Intervale (an issue rife with all kinds of political nastiness that the other reporters really should be picking up on as well).

But to that, let me add that I heartily concur with his taste in novelists, as he recently highlighted my personal favorite in his column. Although I can say first hand that the only people who consider Philip Dick to be their personal favorite are deeply screwed up people (uh-oh… did I just wreck the compliment?).