Ruby-crowned Kinglet

You have to be looking pretty carefully to see a bird this small. It was high up in the treetops, bark-colored, a mere flicker of movement now and then that could just as easily have been dead leaves fluttering. It looked like this.

(That’s on full zoom.) Yet my daughters spotted it.

On the way back to the car, each thought the other had spotted it first. But we all marveled to have seen it at all — a female ruby-crowned kinglet. My husband and I saw some the other day for the first time, but only fleetingly, mostly hidden in the brush. “In that whole forest of trees,” Older Daughter reflected, “how amazing is it that we happened to look in the right spot to see her?”

There’s always an element of grace when you go for a walk — small gifts that open your eyes to something new. Tonight as I fall asleep I’ll be thinking of this tiny fragment of life, busy among the branches, making her long trek northward for the summer. Another instance of a species I could have lived my whole life and never known was there if we hadn’t been looking.