RUSH drum legend Neil Peart has updated the News, Weather And Sports page on his official website with the following:

"In a previous story, Under the Marine Layer, I wrote about watching a hummingbird build her nest in the bougainvillea vines on the wall of our house. She gathered dried grasses and flower petals and wove them into a tiny bowl bound with spider silk. The lining of softest plant down was shaped with her body, which was about the size of my thumb. The nest was an exquisite egg cup, crafted by a meticulous Fabergé. She belonged to a species called Anna’s hummingbird, after a nineteenth-century Italian duchess, so I named her Anna. Once I had spotted that nest, I kept a vigilant, protective eye on it, day after day.

I felt an irresistible connection with Anna, and a strong guardian instinct for her nest, because at the same time as Anna was preparing to lay her eggs in late May, my wife Carrie was seven months pregnant. My anxiety about that enterprise was projected and distilled into Anna’s little nest, filling it with my fears and dark forebodings. Some of those fears were garishly clear in harsh, unyielding memory, while others bred in the shadowy unconscious, in tormented dreams. Tormenta is Spanish for “storm,” and my interior weather was ominous and unsettled, temperature high and barometer low. The gathering storm generated a kind of pathetic fallacy in reverse, manifesting itself in my anxious concern for the wellbeing of Anna and her nest.

That nervous watchfulness soon blossomed into an aching, near-obsessive fretting, and several times a day I would find myself detouring into the backyard, sometimes just for a peek, but other times staying for a while, taking along some reading and writing, or my Macallan on ice at the end of the day. I would sit at the outdoor table across the lawn from the nest—close enough to keep watch, but far enough not to be intrusive. From time to time I raised my binoculars and focused on Anna’s perfect stillness as she sat there, hour after hour, and I wondered what she was thinking. Essentially, and profoundly, she was just doing what she had to do.

Anna settled into her nest and rarely left it, except briefly in late afternoon, when the sun was on the nest—to keep it warm, I guessed. She buzzed around the garden, darting from flower to flower for a quick feed, then perched on a branch above me, in sight of the nest, and groomed herself for a few minutes. While most birds preen themselves with their bills, Anna had to use her feet—she perched on one foot and used the other to comb her feathers, then switched over, because the long needle bill that was so perfectly adapted to sipping floral cocktails was not so adaptable as a grooming accessory. I watched her little string of a tongue flick out a few times, and from the other end, she ejected an impressive jet of liquid.

Then all at once, in a blur, she would be gone again, arrowing back to the nest, almost too fast to see. It was wonderful to study Anna’s flight, to watch her hovering in place while she fed, even flying backwards among the flowered vines. If any other hummingbirds approached within about thirty feet of Anna’s patch of bougainvillea, she would zip out like a fierce bullet and drive them off. No wonder hummingbirds’ hearts can pump at over 1,000 beats per minute, and that they have to eat the equivalent of their own body weight every day to sustain that outpouring of energy.

One afternoon in early June, Anna was away from the nest, perched in a tree above my table and taking a little “me time” in the lowering sun. I fetched my ladder from the garage, leaned it against the wall, and climbed as high as I dared. With one hand holding onto the wall, my other hand reached my camera as high as I could above the nest, then aimed it downward between the leaves (my remote-framing ability practiced by the Action Self-Portrait photos I took on my motorcycle, as seen in many previous stories). When I viewed the resulting image, I was delighted to see two tiny white eggs, each smaller than the tip of my baby finger."

Read more and check out other photos at this location.

As previously reported, on August 12, 2009, Neil and his wife Carrie had a baby girl: Olivia Louise Peart. Click photo to view.