Hummingbirds are small birds in the family Trochilidae. They are known for their ability to hover in mid-air by rapidly flapping their wings, 15 to 80 times per second (depending on the size of the bird). Unlike other bird species capable of limited hovering, the hummingbird is alone in its ability to fly deliberately backwards or vertically, and to maintain position for drinking from flower blossoms. They are named for the characteristic hum made by their wings.

Hummingbirds are attracted to many flowering plants—shrimp plants, Heliconia, bromeliads, verbenas, fuchsias, many penstemons—especially those with red flowers. They feed on the nectar of these plants and are important pollinators, especially of deep-throated flowers. Most species of hummingbird also take insects, especially when feeding young.

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L.A. Times - Home & Garden

Hot Property: Julianna Margulies' Santa Monica home for sale at $4.5 million
Sat, 04 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700
Hot Property Whenever I walk into a hospital emergency room, I still look for Nurse Hathaway -- the one who goes the extra mile for her patients, even when someone who looks like George Clooney is distracting her at the moment.
Windsor Square-Hancock Park Historical Society house tour spotlights a 1908 survivor brought back from the brink.
Sat, 04 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700
Architectural photographer Mary E. Nichols and Keith Wood saw good bones beneath the Wilton Place property's shabby facade. AS an architectural photographer and confirmed "house-aholic," Mary E. Nichols has seen many a residential wreck. But the 1908 specimen at 212 S. Wilton Place -- part of an L.A. street listed on the National Register of Historic Places -- was a house of horrors.
Only in Malibu: the $2-million mobile home
Sat, 04 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700
Bluff-side Paradise Cove and Point Dume Club take manufactured-home living to new heights. If you want to live among gas-guzzling, tax-evading, hippie-gypsies running from the law, then Malibu's mobile-home parks are not the places to look (as the Who might otherwise suggest in its hit song "Going Mobile"). Here you will find no country-trekking trailers, but double-wides and manufactured homes placed permanently atop sweeping ocean-side bluffs. In fact, the term "mobile-home park" is rather misleading in this mansion- and estate-packed section of the globe.

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