One thing I said I would do when we booked this trip was get really good pictures of hummingbirds. The last couple of times we’d been here, there was a hummingbird feeder in the forest, and you could just sit nearby and watch.
So after breakfast, armed with my camera, a 300mm lens, tripod, and my cable release, I trucked into the woods onto find … it had really fallen into disrepair. I think I understand why the Five Leaf rating was dropped.
It’s something we’ve come to notice as we hobble about the premises. The veneer has worn through. We don’t know what’s happened in the intervening decade, but the place has slipped. It’s not as nice as it was. Corners have been cut, amenities dropped just enough to still charge for but aren’t as fulsome. Signage has rotted in the forest, some of the paths closed for what appears to be a long time, the benches where the hummingbird feeders had been were so overgrown I wondered the last time anyone had come through.
It’s a bit sad, to be honest. I think, with time, we’ll forget about the state we’re currently witnessing and try to remember it as it was. But I’m already questioning whether I’ll want to come back again.
Anyway, hummingbirds.
They weren’t in the forest. They’re around the bushes in the large garden space between the main house and the cabins. I’d tried to get one of them yesterday for a while, but he’d been rather uncooperative, so waited to today so I could set up shop.
Two hours.
Two bloody hours trying to get that dumb bird to hover next to a flower for 1/200th of a second. The problem was that the flowers on this bush were very small, so I might have a second (not kidding) to get him in flight. And he was skittish – if I got too close, he’d disappear. No, I had to keep a respectful distance. Most of the time, he (and yes, I know it was a male: colourful plumage), would return to a highly uninteresting branch inside the bush and rest.
Perhaps most annoyingly, it wasn’t a particularly interesting hummingbird. Don’t get me wrong, Rufous hummingbirds are still beautiful, but I can see those in my in-laws’ neighbour’s yard. I had been hoping for something more ruby.
All I got was a picture of him resting. And sticking his tongue out at me. The jerk.
After lunch, Alex and I went for a walk around the property. Mere days after we’d moved back to Canada, Avatar came out. The movie features massive trees that glow. Naturally, someone adorned one of the massive trees with some lights (currently non-functional) to make it look like it was from Pandora.
We stopped in the main building in an attempt to have a drink. Alex very badly wanted an elderflower beverage, and tried to explain it to the bartender, but either there was something lost in translation (though the guy spoke excellent English), or he was hung up on a menu and not willing to, y’know, bartend. Either way, she didn’t get what she wanted.
We returned to deal with the barely-drying clothes, then headed off for dinner.
With a bit of finagling, and some pleading, we managed to get a night walk through the forest. The “primary” guide was already occupied with a private tour (aren’t they all private?), so they had to get us a second one. I was initially worried about that, but we would soon be relieved to find that our guide was well-versed. This time, Choo Choo came with us.
We started, as we always do, on the property, just seeing what could be seen. Crickets hid in the grass, their eyes reflecting our flashlights. There were a few fireflies, but not as many as the last time. In the “frog house”, we found a masked tree frog and its partner, hanging out in the branches above the pond.
The first real discovery was a coral snake up by the chapel. Choo Choo had spotted the movement, and the second the lights hit it, I knew what it was. They’re hard to miss. And venomous. We kept a respectful distance, but gazed as it slowly disappeared into the thick moss.
In the forest, we found more snakes and bugs, heard things crashing through branches. We slowed and sped up, our guide doing a pretty serviceable job of finding things.
And then we found the Tarantula Hawk. It’s not a bird, it’s a flying wasp. And the second most painful sting in the world. Choo Choo identified it before anyone else. She’s seen more than enough shows to also tell us to steer a very wide circle around it. None of us wanted to find out what a 4.0 on the Schmidt Pain Scale feels like.
Not far after, we found a pond, around which was our old friend, the red-eyed tree frog.
When we exited the forest, we found that someone with one of the biology stations had set up a massive sheet. There were two lights: one one side, a standard white light, the other, an ultraviolet light. And it was covered in flight insects, mostly moths. Big ones.
Alex took many steps away from it while Choo Choo and I got up close. These were amazing things to see, as many of them didn’t come out until night. An American woman started naming them all off rather quickly, identifying herself as a lepidoperist from the Field Museum in Chicago. She rather mistakenly wore a long skirt out instead of pants, and ended up with moths flying up underneath.
After another cycle of laundry, Alex and I went back up to the main building to watch a movie. The theatre is still intact, though now the projector shows things from an Xbox instead of a DVD player.
We watched one of my favourite movies: Amélie. Tomorrow, it’ll be Alex’s turn.