All around the world, people are being told to stay indoors for their own safety, and the safety of others.
Lockdowns and quarantines are essential in order to slow the spread of the virus and save lives, but it’s fair to say that a lot of people have also been suffering with loneliness and sadness from being stuck inside without the ability to see their friends and families.
That’s why we all need a little bit of brightness and joy in our lives to liven up each day, and sometimes, positivity can be found in an unlikely place.
Like a lot of other people out there, Angela Elsey was starting to suffer from the side effects of quarantine. The San Jose, California woman usually works as a ‘cuddler’ with Good Samaritan hospital.
She and several other volunteers spend their days at the neo-natal intensive care unit, interacting and cuddling up with preemie babies, providing them with much-needed human contact to help the babies grow and develop.
Since she was unable to see her friends and snuggle up with the preemies as she usually does, Angela was starting to feel a little lonely, when she suddenly noticed a hummingbird nest right outside her kitchen window!
This little miracle of nature gave Angela something special to look forward to each day, as she was able to peek outside and watch as the little eggs in the nest finally hatched, revealing some super cute chicks.
She then watched the babies gradually grow, seeing how their mama feeds them and taking photos and videos to share with her friends and family online.
Angela even shared the clips with her fellow cuddlers to give them a “tiny baby fix”:
We were all missing the preemies—and a lot of the cuddlers wrote to say how much they enjoyed seeing the hummingbird babies. One woman wrote, ‘Can we come to your house to cuddle your baby birds?’ and it was hard to resist the temptation!
This wonderful video shows the mother hummingbird feeding the hatchlings, which were only a few weeks old at the time.
The birds seem pretty big in the zoomed-in video, but the nest is actually super tiny, with an opening the size of a quarter, as hummingbirds are some of the smallest in the world.
There are two little babies in the nest, and Angela even named them!
I named the babies after the characters Anne Elliot and Frederick Wentworth in the Jane Austen novel Persuasion.
It’s a super cute clip as we see the little ones with their beaks open wide, waiting to get some tasty food from their mama, who feeds each one in turn.
Meanwhile, Angela says she’s really benefited from being able to watch the hatchlings grow.
She says that watching the birds was a way for her to escape from the situation:
Watching them was a break from worrying about the current situation, since they were oblivious to the pandemic raging around them. And it was such a joy to see those little eggs, then those tiny babies and watch them grow.
Enjoy the lovely video for yourself in the player below.
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