sweet little ruby-crowned kinglet

3.12.24 ~ North Carolina Botanical Garden

On this botanical garden visit we were totally captivated by a new life bird. We couldn’t get over how tiny it was! How could any songbird possibly be smaller than a chickadee? I couldn’t stop taking pictures.

Ruby-crowned Kinglet, #88

A tiny bird seemingly overflowing with energy, the Ruby-crowned Kinglet forages almost frantically through lower branches of shrubs and trees. Its habit of constantly flicking its wings is a key identification clue. Smaller than a warbler or chickadee, this plain green-gray bird has a white eye ring and a white bar on the wing. Alas, the male’s brilliant ruby crown patch usually stays hidden—your best chance to see it is to find an excited male singing in spring or summer.
~ All About Birds website

Of course there were other things to notice on that beautifully sunny day.

the frog egg embryos are looking more and more like tadpoles
snails presumably climbing a rock
(we didn’t actually see them move)
Alabama snow-wreath (rare)
eastern redbud

Nature gives to every time and season some beauties of its own; and from morning to night, as from the cradle to the grave, is but a succession of changes so gentle and easy, that we can scarcely mark their progress.
~ Charles Dickens
(Nicholas Nickleby)

red-shouldered hawk
(might be the same one we saw five days earlier)
‘finch’s golden’ deciduous holly
wild columbine (aka eastern red columbine)

We enjoyed seeing all the redbud trees, promising spring, with their vibrant blossoms appearing to accent the gray landscape well before any leaves come out. So many delightful changes are in the offing. It will be fun noticing as many of them as possible!

what happens next

Piping Plover by Mike Morel/USFWS
piping plover by Mike Morel, Puerto Rico

The details don’t matter – they belong to all of us – and loss, after all, is mostly a story about what happens next. What’s next for me, it seems, is the story of realizing that if there are answers at all, they might not be found in the broadest expanses. I find myself mostly lowering my habitual gaze-out-to-sea and settling down to rummage in these greenish-brown, often stinking, bug-infested wrack lines, the likes of which I must have skirted or stepped over thousands of times in my younger-me rush to get to the water. Sometimes I notice what lies tangled within them: the moon snail with its grotesque foot, trash turned into sea glass, driftwood, egg cases, jellyfish. And sometimes I notice what’s gone. Not just my grandiose quest, but also the vanished tangible.
~ Barbara Hurd
(Walking the Wrack Line: On Tidal Shifts & What Remains)