Female Black-Chinned Hummingbird
Female Black-Chinned Hummingbird
I'm pretty sure. The males of most hummingbird species are of course incredibly distinctive, but females (and immature males, in many cases) of several species have similar plain brownish coloration with a pattern of dots around the head like this. So I'm declaring it Archilochus alexandri. It may very well be a female ruby throated instead, but those have a much less pronounced collar around the neck like that.
This picture has a bit of a story attached to it, or at least some serendipity. I was strutting around the place with my 35mm macro prime on my camera, with the intention of taking pictures of flowers. It was pure luck that I spotted this hummingbird quite some yards away... With exactly the wrong lens on my camera. What followed was a lightning shrugging off of my backpack and what's probably the fastest tactical lens change I've ever done in my life, mostly by feel and without looking at my camera, so I didn't lose track of the bird. The best I had on me was my RF 100-400. I felt like Forest Gump taking apart his rifle blindfolded, and it's probably more luck that I managed to get the mount more or less the right way up on my first try.
I hastily fired off twelve shots at this bird while fighting the controls on my camera the entire time. Damn, my ISO was still locked to 100 for the first few, and it's capped to 800 without going into submenus. Damn again, ƒ/8 is the best this lens can do. And the thrice damned autofocus, which naturally decided that right now at this exact moment the red flowers were more interesting than the highly visible bird right in the middle of the frame. I produced eleven shots of pure garbage and motion blur and snagged this last one after giving up and more or less blindly wrenching on the manual focus ring in desperation. The point of focus is probably a couple of millimeters behind the bird's eye, and I can't tell if I had the depth of field to get the whole thing in focus or not because 1/125 sec. is apparently the best I could muster for an acceptable exposure — Which isn't nearly fast enough for hummingbirds.
Some other pedestrians came by and scared the bird off right after that, so I didn't have the opportunity to fiddle with it further. We got what we got.
Don't let anybody tell you photography is a boring, stress-free hobby.
Full size here.