Have you ever seen an albino hummingbird? Fifteen-year-old Marlin Shank took lots of lovely photographs of this rare white ruby-throated hummingbird he saw at a park in Staunton, Virginia. Link to article. Link to photo gallery. -via Buzzfeed

(Image credit: Marlin Shank/Nature Friend Magazine)

Take a look over at Anything and Everything blog: Link [embedded YouTube clip]

Be thankful that you don’t live 50 million years ago, or you’d have to use a baseball bat instead of a shoe to kill this ant:

A winged ant queen fossilized in 49.5-million-year-old Wyoming rock ranks as the first body of a giant ant from the Western Hemisphere, says paleoentomologist Bruce Archibald of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia.

The new species, Titanomyrma lubei, is related to giant ants previously found in German fossils. These long-distance relatives bolster the notion that the climate of the time had hot blips that allowed warmth-loving giant insects to spread from continent to continent, Archibald and a U.S.-Canada team propose online May 4 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Link

Alek Komarnitsky learned that hummingbirds had nested at a local golf course and took several high-resolution photographs. Here are the two babies, almost ready to leave the nest. The housefly on the branch gives you a sense of the scale.

Link via American Digest

Photographer Bence Máté snapped this amazing shot in Costa Rica. He writes:

I was photographing hummingbirds when I heard the sharp, alarming noise of the birds reacting to the presence of a predator. Sixty feet away from me this green-crowned brilliant was fearlessly attacking a small viper. The long shutter speed and shallow depth of field made it difficult to make an image with both animals sharp. This encounter was one of the most interesting ones I had ever seen, and I quickly set up two flashes to increase the light and shutter speed, using one flash fired from the background and another from the camera.

This image was among the winners of the 2010 Nature’s Best Photography Competition. It and other winners will be on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. starting in April.

Link via reddit | Artist’s Website | Exhibit Website

This brightly coloured wearable hummingbird feeder attracts the tiny creatures and provides a bird’s eye view of them as they dine.  The feeder is available for purchase here.

Link – Via Holy Kaw

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Incredible pictures of a hummingbird, from egg to leaving the nest. It is hard to imagine just how small they are from the pictures, so keep in mind the opening of the nest is about the size of a quarter!

Link – via nowthatsnifty

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by ninigoat.

National Geographic reader Sharon Fullingim took this fantastic photo of a praying mantis catching a hummingbird (and believe it or not, this isn’t the first time we’ve featured such a story). Moral of the story? Don’t ever mess with a praying mantis.

From the National Geographic user submitted Daily Dozen (September – Week 1, no direct URL I’m afraid) – Thanks Marilyn!

In 1914, Austrian watchmaker Georg Grabner created the Kolibri — the “Hummingbird” pistol. The smallest autoloading pistol ever made, it fires a .11 caliber bullet. He marketed it as a self-defense firearm for women to carry in their purses. More pictures and history at the link.

Link