Boise, summer 2026: wildfire smoke rolled in and set up permanent residence, with the air quality index (AQI) headlining the evening news. The silver lining—actually a burnt orange one, if you squinted through the haze—was the sunsets: apocalyptic in the best possible photographic sense, the whole sky rendered in singed shades of “should probably not be breathing this.”

I spent many of those evenings in the backyard with a long shutter speed, resolving that if the sky was going to put on a stellar performance, hummingbirds should get star billing. Some nights I didn’t get a single shot because the other stars, our sun among them, weren’t aligned. But this female black-chinned hummingbird was one of a few that made the A-list, her wings dissolving into streaks of backlit orange — part bird, part flare, part small feathered inferno.

She, for the record, did not bother with an N95. Not that she had even heard of AQI, actually — she just kept up with her standard hummingbird act: hovering, darting, defending “her” feeder like it was an Oscar, entirely unfazed by the fact that the air was doing its best to provide a stinging review. Whether that composure was genuine indifference or the avian equivalent of whistling past a graveyard, I’m not sure. But it made for one hell of a photograph.