The title derives from the old phrase: in a trice, the briefest of moments — the only unit of time applicable to hummingbirds. This female Rufous Hummingbird, drab only by comparison to the burnished copper of her male counterpart, was caught mid-visit to an agapanthus blossom, her wings at a position in their cycle that the eye alone cannot isolate. The image was made in the garden that in warm months becomes a reliable intersection of agapanthus in bloom and hummingbirds in number — a confluence that makes observation possible but never slows the subjects down. Everything a hummingbird does — from beak to nectar, the hover, the reversal — happens at this speed, which is why a single resolved frame always feels like something caught rather than something composed.
