I think I’ve mentioned that I take my camera with us when we walk the dogs in the morning. It’s a hassle, and most of the time I don’t see anything.

And then … I remember why I bring it.

As we were finishing up yesterday, we were buzzed by a very angry hummingbird. She zipped by us, then into a nearby blue spruce, where she flushed a spotted towhee from the tree. Then she popped back out and darted to the base of the nearest house. We could see her bobbing along next to the wall. But we had no idea what she was doing, because there were no flowers around.

I whipped my trusty camera to my eye, zoomed in as far as I could go, and started shooting. I realized I’d seen this behavior once before, when I was completely baffled.

As soon as I saw her beak open, I knew what she was doing — she was hawking for gnats. We all know that hummingbirds need lots of sugar water every single day. But that race-car metabolism means that they need to replace *all* nutrients at an accelerated rate. So they eat gnats and aphids.

See how her beak is flexed backward just a touch? It’s spring-loaded so that when a gnat touches it, it will snap shut. I just learned that from reading Terry Masear’s fabulous book Fastest Thing On Wings, about rehabbing injured hummingbirds in Los Angeles. It’s also an episode of Nature on PBS called Hummingbirds of Hollywood.

Don’t you just love the iridescence of her feathers? According to the Merlin app, she is a Broad-billed Hummingbird. Those are the most common along the Front Range of Colorado right now. But her tiny size and that tail-flip that she’s doing really makes me want to call her a Calliope. I know that they do that, but I don’t know about other hummingbirds.

You can get a sense of how fast she was darting around in just a few cubic inches in this shot, and the next. And notice that, aside from the second photo, where she might have an insect between her mandibles, the gnats are too small for us to see.

I knew at the time that my camera was not set up at a fast enough shutter speed to freeze her movement. After I had shot these, I glanced down to turn the knob. In that instant, she flew off.

Still, I’m grateful for the shots I got. But I’m also loitering in front of that house a lot now, hoping she comes back for seconds.