The other day I spotted something in the garden that I’d never seen before. It was feeding from a bush covered in flowers that insects seem to love.
Now, I’m no expert when it comes to wildlife. I did have one of those Find 50 Butterflies books when I was a kid though. You know the sort? There was a theme and you got points for spotting each type. That probably dates me! 😂
What I saw was about the size of a large moth or perhaps a small bird. It was hovering in front of the flowers, with its wings beating so fast that I couldn’t really make out the shape of them. Yet the way it was feeding looked just like a hummingbird.
Except I’m in the UK.
As far as I knew, hummingbirds lived somewhere much warmer than here, so I was fairly sure I hadn’t suddenly acquired a tropical bird in my garden.
So, naturally, I went online to try and work out what I’d seen.
It turned out to be a hummingbird hawk-moth. A moth that behaves rather like a hummingbird.
Until I knew what I was looking at, I was trying to make sense of something I had no real frame of reference for. I knew what it looked like, but what I thought I knew about hummingbirds told me that couldn’t possibly be what I was seeing.
And I wonder how often we do something similar in our own lives.
We try to fit it into what we already know. And if it doesn’t fit, we decide it isn’t possible, or that we’ve got something wrong.
When actually, sometimes we simply haven’t encountered that particular thing before.
We don’t have a name for it yet. We don’t have a reference point for it. We haven’t seen it work that way before.
Which perhaps makes curiosity quite useful.
Not immediately deciding that we know what something is, but being willing to look a little closer and find out.
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Kettle on. No rush.
Just between us
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