On Saturday, at this very spot...

...I almost captured a hummingbird with the camera on my cellphone. It hovered over a purple flower. It buried its busy face in the flower. The petals shook in pleasure. The situation was so blissful. But the hummingbird buzzed off before my camera was ready to retain this image of happiness.

The next day, Sunday, I encountered this revealing passage in Nick Lane's marvelous book Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution:

Not bliss but a moment (among other moments) of total misery was almost retained by my camera. That poor hummingbird I saw on the corner would go cold turkey if it stopped sucking nectar for a couple of hours. Flowers are not your friends; flowers are your heroin.