Around early evening the other night, I heard Alex shouting for me from the garage, "Mom, it's a hummingbird moth in the garage!"  Evidently hummingbird moths, unlike most other moths, become sedentary at night, and this particular one had taken up residence on my garage wall for the evening.  Over the last week or so, we had been given a few opportunities to watch this beauty in action on the red clovers in the field next to us.  See my post on that HERE.  But this time we were given a wonderful opportunity to study this magnificent creature really up close!  So many times the Lord has done this, when we take interest in something in particular in His wondrous Creation, He just loves to hand it right to you to enjoy!

This little fellow had no intentions of leaving us, he climbed right into our butterfly pavillion and stayed for the evening.  During the early morning time, we got him out and he sat contently on our fingers (we were too excited to think of taking a photo then!).  We took him outside thinking he would fly right off, but he actually acted like he wanted to stay.  The sun wasn't quite up high in the sky yet, perhaps that's why he was so comfortable.  So I sat him on the marigolds on the back deck and got some fantastic photos!  Please do "full size" these photos!

Can you see the irridescence on the back of the body.

The edges of his wings almost look like they were sprinkled with glitter.

Or how about the little tuft feathers at the bottom of his body?

 I love the cute little beady eyes and cool stout antennas!

Can you see the black proboscis curled up under his chin?

Ok, how could you think that's not cute?!

He looks like he has a little yellow beard. 

 He can hover and fly like a hummingbird, has the body of a moth,

and looks similar in ways to a bumblebee.....

another remarkable Creation.

He stayed here just until the sun got nice and high in the sky and the temperatures were on the rise, and then just as if a switch had been flipped, off he took to the skies to go about his business.  Later in the morning, when we went out to take our nature walk, we got a great video of one (who knows if it was the same little fellow or not) buzzing about happily doing his work! (please ignore my son telling my 2 year old to be quiet in the background, he has no patience when Gabby is being whiney!)

The following is a great web page on the Snowberry Clearwing Humminbird Moth, which gives lots of info plus shows all it's stages of life.  We will be using this next week to complete a nature journal page.

Snowberry Clearwing Hummingbird Moth