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 the few who 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.