Nick was in his front yard when he spotted something on the ground near the tracks of his model train system: a baby hummingbird the size of a bottle cap that had fallen from its nest. The stakes were immediate and small and enormous all at once, because a bird that tiny on the ground in a busy yard does not last long. He picked up the phone, called the Pasadena Humane Society, and made a decision that surprised even him: he shut down the entire railroad until the saga was over.
A one-foot-at-a-time rescue
The Pasadena Humane Society walked Nick through what to do and, just as critically, what not to do. He skipped the common instinct to offer sugar water, because he had been told it could be dangerous for a bird that young. Instead, he placed plain water in a bottle cap and focused on the real problem: shelter. He found where the actual nest was but could not reach it safely, so he built a temporary nest on his own and set the baby inside it.
The mother hummingbird kept returning to feed her chick, which was the best possible sign. But when Nick moved the baby just a few feet off the ground, the mother lost track of her and stopped coming. So Nick adjusted. He moved the nest up one foot at a time, letting the mother relearn the location at each new height, until the makeshift nest sat at the top of a pole, seven feet off the ground, safely above the animals passing through the yard below. The mother found it again and kept showing up every day.
Nick spent essentially the whole week on his porch. Every morning he checked, and every morning the baby was still there. He kept his distance, watching without interfering. By days five and six, the chick had started flapping her wings in short, testing bursts.
The morning she left
After nearly a full week, she took off on her own and disappeared up into the trees.
Nick had not expected the emotional weight of it. ‘I didn’t know how invested I was going to get in it emotionally,’ he said afterward. ‘It was overwhelming. I didn’t expect it to feel as emotionally powerful as it did.’
The grounding detail that stays with anyone who follows this story is the bottle cap: two of them, one holding water, one briefly holding the smallest bird most people will ever see up close.
The bottle cap near the tracks
A bottle cap sitting beside a miniature railroad bridge, with a few drops of water in it and nothing else around it.
Once Nick was sure she had made it safely up into the trees, he turned his attention back to his model trains and resumed operations.
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