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    Hummingbird Gifts are the #1 gift item in America. 

Your loved ones will enjoy watching mama hummers build nests, have babies and

return year after year, bringing with them their young who are now adults. 

 

Hummingbirds captured my attention by way of a female golden eagle in Texas.  One April morning, I sat in a small  blind atop a house-sized flat boulder down in the Panhandle's Palo Duro Canyon.  My cameras were poised, awaiting action in an eagle’s cliff nest.  Mesquite, cholla cactus, yucca, and juniper grew in the canyon.  A hundred yards to my right was the edge of a stand of tall red cedar covering several acres on lush ground watered by small springs oozing from the canyon’s walls.  Behind me a quarter of a mile, sunshine sparkled a ribbon of rippling water meandering along the canyon’s grassy floor.   

 

Off and on I had spent twenty years in the Palo Duro Canyon.  Eight of those I lived in the ranch headquarters house of the 16,000-acre spread that included much of the canyon.  Throughout that time I saw only two hummingbirds; one was perched on our chicken lot fence, the second briefly hummed around the head of a female golden eagle I was raising.  Both sightings I dismissed as stray migrants that might have been blown off course by unusual weather.  I did some necessary research, bought and mounted a feeder and filled it with fresh liquid every few days.  After several weeks, I was gifted with visiting hummers.  My life had just taken a drastic change.

Many more beautiful photos are included in Dan's book Hummingbirds of North America
See the "Books" section to order. 
Here is a 4 minute video which is included with a 21 minute long video if you order the DVD listed below.

   In 1877, Colonel Charles Goodnight established the first ranch in the Palo Duro.  The middle segment has been transformed from Goodnight ranch land into a state park, with the colonel's first dugout preserved there, amid paving, tourist facilities, and concession stands.  Seven miles above the park, is the rugged heart of Palo Duro Canyon, lays the sixteen thousand acre Currie Ranch.  Here only eighteen miles southeast of Amarillo, time and progress have paused.  With terrain too formidable for modern roads, this land has escaped that pressure.  The estate remains as it was in 2000 B.C.  The canyon is hushed enough for the red wolf to pad silently through cedar-forested game trails; remote enough for deer to browse in peace; and tranquil enough for the eagle to live and to nest. 

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   As a former weatherman for an Amarillo television station, I produced and narrated a weekly wildlife show called "True Nature". Here are a few of the many photos, I took with raised binoculars to the chocolate brown bird and the speeding eagle's wings harping in the wind.

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