Hummingbird Moth Found in Hillsborough

We were watching some movies on Netflix over the weekend. It is the first time that I have had access to Netflix in years, since I suspended my account some years ago. And since it was uncomfortably hot and muggy this weekend, we thought we might beat the brutal weather by watching some movies, although she was not thrilled with some of my picks, and I was also less than thrilled with some of her.

But then, we got distracted by something. She spotted it first, and asked if the thing outside was a hummingbird. I did not hear her at first, but once she repeated, I tried to get up and approach slowly and carefully, just in case my movements might scare it away. Despite window curtains, some birds have been able to see me approach and did fly away.

That was not a problem this time. And rather quickly, I figured out perhaps why that might be: because this was not a hummingbird. I saw the two antenna on the top of it's head, and recognized it as something else entirely. It was actually a Hummingbird Moth, an insect that mimics numerous characteristics of the hummingbird, but which is actually, as the name implied, a moth. I had read about them some time ago, and had wanted to see one in person ever since. On this weekend, I finally did.  It was smaller even then the hummingbirds that I encountered in the past, and hummingbirds are some of the smallest birds around. There is even a short video of it, as well as numerous pictures, but keep in mind that this thing was very fast-moving (although nowhere near as fast as some actual hummingbirds that I have seen before), so some of these came out especially blurry.

Apologies about the brevity of the video clip, but the storage on my phone is quite limited:

Perhaps the clearest shot of the Hummingbird Moth that I managed to capture. Here, you can see the blur of the wings, which moved very fast. Also, you can see the orange-brown color at the center of it's body. And finally, if you look closely enough, you can kind of make out the stripes towards the bottom of it's body, where a hummingbird's tale would be. With my naked eye, I could see these things a bit clearer, as well as the two small antenna that marked it as not the hummingbird that we initially both assumed it to be. 

The Hummingbird Moth looks a bit like a blur, and more conventionally like an insect in this one. The fast-moving wings would account for the blurry quality in this pic, I think.

The Hummingbird Moth can be seen a bit more clearly, just a bit lower than the center of this particular photograph.

Here is another fairly decent picture where the Hummingbird Moth can be seen in mid-flight, a little up and to the right of the center of the photograph. 

This was pretty cool!