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BUTTERFLIES AND

  HUMMING BIIRDS

 

 

Bob stopped the jeep and reached down and turned off the motor. We sat there engulfed in a cloud of orange and black. It was so awe inspiring that neither one of us spoke. We had the top off of the jeep and the windshield was lying down on the hood. We sat there for ten or twelve minutes while this cloud swirled around us and finally disappeared behind us.

Bob and I had gone to our deer lease in the hill country of central Texas for the spring turkey season. It was the first week of April and the wild flowers were in bloom. The deer lease was covered with all kinds of wild flowers and vines in full bloom and we were riding around looking at them.

We had just forded the little creek that we called Crabapple Creek on a jeep road when we saw this cloud of monarch butterflies coming down the road toward us. The road cut through some trees at this point and the road way was only about ten yards wide.

The butterflies reached from close to the ground to about ten feet in the air and from one side of the roadway to the other. There must have been thousands of them. As we sat there, they flew all around and over us. At times they were so thick that we couldn’t see the road in front of the jeep. To me it was a very spiritual moment that I will never forget.

After the monarch butterflies disappeared behind us, Bob started the jeep and we drove back to the cabin. Nether one of us said a word on the ride back. We were both lost in our own thoughts about the experience.

When we got to the cabin, I sat down in the porch swing and Bob went inside. In a few minutes he came back outside. He had a cup of coffee in his hand and he sat down on the swing next to me to drink his coffee.

"Can you believe what we just saw?" He wanted to know.

"Bob, I was there so I can believe it, but anyone that didn’t see it won’t believe it" I answered.

"I’m driving up to the ranch house and calling Pat," his wife, "and tell her about the butterflies. You want to come with me?" Bob said.

"Sure", I said and got into the jeep. When we got to the old ranch house, Bob parked in front by the six-foot high wire fence.

He went into the house where Finn Aggard, the care taker, had his office, to use the phone. Finn and his wife lived in the back of the old house, but the office was always open so we could go in and use the phone anytime we wanted to.

I sat in the jeep and waited for Bob. As I sat there I was watching all the humming birds buzzing around the honeysuckle vines growing on the wire fence. There must be hundreds of them. I was wearing my red hunting cap and one of the humming birds buzzed around my head. I pulled off my cap and laid it in my lap. I didn’t want one of those humming birds sticking his tiny bill into my ear looking for nectar.

The next thing I knew, this little humming bird lit on my red cap that was in my lap. He sat there and we looked at each other, eye ball to eye ball for an instant. Then he was off to the honeysuckle vines again.

When Bob came back to the jeep, I told him about the humming bird landing on my red cap as it lay in my lap. He said, "We’ve got to get some humming bird feeders and hang them on the porch at the cabin so we can watch them." So the next time we went into town, we bought two feeders and hung them on the corners of the roof over the porch.

It only took one day before the humming birds found our feeders and we could sit in the porch swing and watch them. We kept the humming bird feeders full of sugar water all week and we had humming birds around them all day, every day.

The next time we went to the deer lease we found that something else had been feeding on the sugar water. But that’s a whole 'nother story for a different time.

 By Loren Moore

2003

 

 

 

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