People come to the island called Finkst with cameras and cares but they leave with pictures and smiles. Not many folks live there, but those who do are fine care takers.

Finkst is small and nearly cradled by the bay shores of big island Mintomen.

There is plenty to love about Finkst. Trails. Pretty views. Flowers. Peace. Butterflies and Hummingbirds aplenty. Camping. Caves. Rock climbing. Beaches. Swimming. Enormous trees. Harmless spiders that eat tree nuts that fall into iridescent webs which glow in the dark.

It’s an amazing place. And no one forgets the scents.

Trails cover the whole island. One cuts right across the center from nearly north to south. Others zig zag throughout the various regions of the island and some have camping places. There are several level plains, a few canyons, rolling hills, and miles of beach. It has a nice harbor too.

Flowers and other plants make it a lush paradise of brilliant colors.

There are unique trails because of the flowers. So many amazing plants are there.

Bridal trail is at the edge of a plain and has a cluster of plants whose white powdered leaves glow just enough that people have mistaken them for a bridal party with girls in white dresses. You have to see it. By day there’s not even a hint of the soft spectacle it will make by nightfall.

There are several trails designed to be traveled at night because they can be negotiated by the combination of starlight, glowing mosses at trail side and scents. You can get scent maps at the harbor.

The island has a pretty sound to it also. Some parts, there is the soft gurgle of streams. Some, the sound of the breeze that makes you want to just sit and take in the delicate music of nature. There isn’t a place like Finkst! If it were not real, I doubt it could be imagined. Pictures can not do it justice. Neither will recordings. The place simply has to be experienced.

There are seasons on Finkst, and each has it’s own special array of natural treasures. Flowers never stop blooming though. They may be different from one season to the next, but always there are glorious blooms! That means year around work for the likes of Honey Beak and the other humming birds who tirelessly fly among the blossoms doing their work.

They all have names. Hers isn’t actually “Honey Beak”, but that’s what her name means in bird talk so that’s what we shall call her.

This island is as much a heaven for these quiet and beautiful workers upon whom the flowers depend as for the visitors.

Honey Beak loves her job. She has boundless apatite for nectar and must eat all day long or run out of energy.

Eat, eat, eat! She can never get too much. She hovers over to a flower and sizes it up, taking in the joyous smell and imagining its tastiness. Then into it’s long trumpet bloom goes her beak where she finds a little nectar to eat before moving on to another. She doesn’t realize that doing her job makes the flowers happy too. Very happy. It’s a good partnership.

Flowers feed her, and she distributes pollen. For her, it’s like sugar dust. It’s just part of the lovely experience of eating out of the beautiful flowers, all of them. With her beak plunged deep in a flower she is surrounded in the the perfume of it. Her eyes see the petals close up, glistening like gems. She smiles. Then she backs out, hovers, and finds another.

Her friends do the same with similar enthusiasm. The air may be sweltering hot by summer or chilled during winter, but because they work so hard they need to constantly eat and they can have all that they want!

Honey Beak is also a very curious bird. She watches the hikers come and go. Instead of eating out of the flowers, they stick their noses near them and breath in but never even lick them. Except for the Nasturtiums and a few others that Honey Beak and her friends leave for butterflies and bees, people don’t eat the flowers. Considering how big each person is that is a good thing because there wouldn’t be enough for the birds if people ate the flowers.

Honey Beak observed that the flowers made the people happy. Some times they pick them. Girls put them in their hair. Boys carry them away in little bouquettes. Maybe they eat them later.

Honey Beak began to wonder. If they did eat them later, then where do they do it? She didn’t know where the visitors came from, just that they were there. For fun, she followed some of them, eating along the way. She watched to see what visitors might do with the flowers they took. She wanted to know.

The hikers don’t always go straight back to where ever they came from. They follow the trails and some of the trails have nothing for a hummingbird to eat except bugs. A little bird could get pretty hungry if she took time out of the work day for such play.

Honey was curious though. She decided that if the people could survive those stretches of trail that didn’t provide much to eat, maybe so could she. She decided to try. She would follow them.

The first time, she followed them part way across a grassy plain. It was strange and new to be there. She couldn’t smell the sweet perfume of the flower patches she’d left behind and feared she would starve so that first time, she turned back and went to a familiar place and ate and ate and ate.

But she was still curious. She believed she could make it across that flowerless plain!

The people could do it and they didn’t have to eat the whole time. So she could do it too. She decided to try again.

The next time, she followed a couple of hikers all the way across that plain. She was so gleeful that she had done this big thing that she could not stop smiling in her heart. On the other side of the plain was a familiar flower patch and she went right to work in them. She felt very pleased.

The people got away. They kept going and she lost track of them but now she believed that she could follow others to their homes. She wanted to try. But she needed to know for sure that she could keep up. To test her ability she tried a new challenge.

She saw a shaft of stone towering above the tree canopy on the edge of one of the plains and decided she would fly to the top of it and back for no reason other than to see if she could do it.

She flitted about, darting forward and backward and hovering in place before finally zipping upward along the edge of the rock obelisk where only the scents of stone and sea filled her nostrils. It wasn’t all for nothing though, because she found tasty morsels of gossamer winged bugs along the way and ate them.

When she reached the top, she hovered there. Heat from the stone warmed her tiny feet.

As she was about to descend back to the pantry below, she spied a huge white ship at the edge of the sea. That was new to her. If she’d ever seen a ship, she didn’t know what it was. Maybe she was too close to it to see that it was not the same as a cliff of stones. From here it was all visible. She decided that would be her next destination and then she plunged down into the gardens below into a patch of red and purple flowers she knew. They had never failed to please her and as she feasted on them she thought about the ship.

Honey Beak spent the rest of the day flitting to and fro among tall flowers. She loved that no matter how much she ate, the flowers just made more and she never got too full.

In the back of her mind was the ship. It was farther away than she’d ever flown, but it was not near any of the plains. She might be able to eat her way to it and not suffer even a single pang of hunger.

That might not help her build endurance, but it would be another fun thing to explore.

Honey Beak was thrilled with this new idea. She very much enjoyed her excursions.

The next day began with a downpour of rain which she watched from her perch under a big leaf. She could see some of her friends doing the same. After it stopped falling, she found a puddle of water in another big leaf and treated herself to a bath before flying fresh and clean through the also fresh and clean garden that was her home. One of her favorite parts of rain were the little globes of crystal clear water that hung on the tips of leaves. After the first rays of warm sun had broken through the clouds, the sky went back to blue or green, depending on the season.

Just then, her friend Justine flew past. She was an almost completely white hummingbird, except for the exquisite bands of color adorning her throat and tail.

“The ship!” Honey Beak thought. Justine was the same color and it reminded Honey Beak of her plans for the day. She would work her way through several known clusters of tasty flowers until she came to where she’d never been before. Then she’d make the rest of her plan. It was a start.

Honey Beak – now that you know her maybe we need not be so formal. We can call her Honey – Honey kept thinking of the ship and decided that it must be the place where the visitors lived. So the trails would probably lead her to it. She should follow a trail. That meant that it didn’t matter which way the people were going because if they went one way, they were leaving the ship and if they were going the other way then they were probably going to the ship. So the trick was to go down ward because the ship was all the way down to the ocean.

Honey thought that the sea must be the lowest place in the world because it was all the same height with no valleys or canyons.

She thought it must also be the strangest thing in the world because it has no flowers.

All this thinking made her hungry so she worked extra hard. She thought, “if I work harder and eat more, won’t I use up the extra before it can do me any good?”

But then she remembered how well she’d already explored and that made her confident.

“I’ll fly down the trail and count as I go,” she told herself. “Every time I get to twenty, I’ll stop and eat.”

Why did she never think such things before? This was fun.

The plan worked well. There were a couple of times when the food was so very tasty and the flowers were so beautiful and sweet that she wanted to stay and keep eating. Then she’d tell herself to get going, there is a ship to find!

People on the trails smiled to see her hum past them and children made the most delightful sounds.

Feeling stronger, Honey started counting people and would only stop to eat after she’d passed twenty or so.

She got so immersed in the flight that she even forgot to count. She ignored her pangs of hunger and flew all the faster. Then she ate when she was sure she would drop from the sky if she didn’t. That would be embarrassing. A friend of hers did that. He just forgot to eat because he was upset after a storm. He decided that the storm might just have gone somewhere else on the island and hid so it could come out again and scare him so he stayed under a leaf trembling as he hovered.

When he finally talked himself into flying out to eat he was weak and somehow got stuck in a spiders web. The spider came out to see what she’d caught and he couldn’t get away. Before the spider reached him, a visitor pulled him out of the web. Being in the hands of a visitor scared him and suddenly he found the energy to fly away at top speed.

Honey remembered this. Her friend stopped being afraid of storms after that because he was even more afraid of falling into a spider web or being picked up by anyone again.

Honey pulled over to eat among some white lined trumpet flowers of velvety red.

There was a noise nearby. People were talking and laughing and there were the sounds of many footsteps in gravel.

There were many visitors.

Honey was afraid to get stuck in their hair so she flew high above where she could see better. Not far away was a giant white thing the same color as what she had seen from the top of the obelisk. She flew to it. There was an opening that people came out of but she didn’t want to go in it. She had never entered a cave. She was sure there was nothing for her in any cave and she was afraid she’d get stuck if she flew in one because in her mind they were like a spider web tunnel. Not worth it.

She flew close and smelled the ship. It wasn’t like a rock and it certainly wasn’t like a flower. She hovered outside the round windows where she could look inside. There were people. They came to look at her with glee.

Honey was getting weak There was nothing to eat, so she was about to go find a meal when a wonderful scent filled her nostrils. Food!

She followed it not knowing what she would find.

She almost turned back again but then she cleared the deck railing and spied a table piled with beautiful things. There was fruit and it must be the juice from that that she smelled.

Just then her friend Justine whizzed past! She went near the food to a red globe and plunged her beak in to it. Honey flew over and hovered along side Justine and copied what she was doing. There was food in the globe! It smelled good, tasted good, and looked pretty! Honey filled her little belly in very little time. Then she flew off the ship and raced toward home. She was so excited that she flew high above. To her surprise, she was home before it even started to get dark, so she went back to work in the flowers.

As she resumed her normal routine, she thought about the meal she’d had on that big ship. How it tasted, how easy it was, how it looked. She even liked the smell. And it left her beak smelling good too.

By the next morning she could only think of that ship food. So she went back.

Now that she knew what it was like to go there, she saved time and just flew over the tops of the trees down to the ship. She got there so fast that she was surprised. She went right to the food and made herself full. This had never happened from eating flowers. She’d never gotten a full tummy from them. Just pleasant satisfaction.

“I can practice my endurance here as well as at home,” she thought. After all, there was food. She began to explore the ship, flying all over the deck. To her great joy, she found other feeders. She recognized some more of her friends, including Buzzie who was the guy that fell into the spider web.

For the next few days, Honey made the trip to and from the ship, spending more time there each day. She began to feel confident that she could last long enough to follow visitors on the trails and see where they lived, although she was pretty sure she would find out that the ship was that mysterious place. After all, there was food. And there was the cave. She’d only ever seen people go into caves.

While considering all these things, Honey lost track of the time.

She was so focused on exploring and thinking and planning that she did not realize that the ship, which had always stayed in one place before, had gone out to sea.

Honey flew to the edge but there was no harbor. There were no people walking to the cave in the side of the ship. She flew down there and found that it was shut up tight.

Around her was just sea water. No flowers, no trees, no island home. It was the strangest thing!

Honey went to a feeder and ate while she figured out what to do.

She flew anxiously all around the deck to see if maybe her island home was just on the other side. But it wasn’t.

Everything smelled differently and the ship sounded very loud.

She flew up to the highest place and looked to see her home. That’s when she noticed the different shape of the waves at one end of the ship. She decided the ship must be moving so if she knew which direction it was going, then she knew to go the other way and find home.

The idea both frightened and excited her.

She ate as much as she could hold. Then before she could talk herself out of it, she flew over the back end of the ship above the ocean.

She almost could not believe she’d done it. Below her was only water.

She flew low, just over the surface, but not for long. Something was down there and she saw it’s murky shape moving toward her. Honey flew hard left just as the surface of the water broke and an enormous thing shot into the air. It’s mouth gaped wide open and she could see down into it just before it clamped shut only to open quickly again and suck her down. Honey bounced off the side the mouth just as it closed again and then she flew almost straight up as the thing fell backward into the water.

She considered returning to the ship. It had nectar and safety

“I hate caves,” she thought, fresh from her escape.

Honey was afraid she would use up all her energy, but falling exhausted into this water would be much worse than plopping into a spider web, so she decided to take it slow and steady, hoping that it would not take too long. She stayed well above the water which was clear enough that she could see shapes of giant creatures in it. Even though it was well below her, she flinched when another one of them shot out of the water, did an arc in the air, and landed on it’s back with a big splash.

She sneezed.

Then she sneezed again. Something hit her head. Looking up she saw a big foot grabbing at her and she had to dodge it.

Why was everything so big out here? Why were there so many things out here? For a big desolate space of nothingness, the sea sure had its share of creatures.

Honey heard another splash below and saw a shadow below her gliding over the water.

It was headed toward a tiny little shadow, which she started to watch with interest but then she felt a tingling sensation up her back as she realized that the little shadow was hers!

She instinctively dropped a couple of feet and weaved to the left then the right after she felt something almost touch her wing tips.

The big shadow veered around and behind her little shadow and then she felt panic as another big shadow showed up.

Honey dropped again so she was closer to the water, thinking that the things down there might frighten away the big menacing hawks but it didn’t work that way.

They swooped down on her again and again, trying to catch her with their beaks and their claw feet. She had one advantage. She could change directions quickly. The big birds could not. And they had to keep moving so they would attack, miss, and circle again. They were clever though. She discovered that she couldn’t dodge them the same way twice.

Then suddenly they were gone. So maybe the things in the water did frighten them.

She kept going and constantly watched the water and the sky for trouble.

A drop of rain splashed on the top of her head. Then another. Then the sky was filled with torrents of it. Honey had never flown in rain. She’d always watched from a dry place. Now she was in the middle of it, mercilessly pelted by the heavy drops. She couldn’t see into the water, so she flew higher. Once she started going higher she just kept going until to her surprise, soon she was higher than the rain clouds and bathed in sunlight!

Off in the distance, she saw the hawks circling, also above the clouds. So she dropped just a little so that she was almost in the mist and hoped they would not notice her.

Now she’d lost her way. She was not sure she was headed in the right direction. She didn’t know where the ship or her island were. Her tummy growled. It was getting hungry.

The clouds thinned out then disappeared completely. That’s when she saw her home in the distance! Not long after, she caught a familiar wiff of island flowers.

When she got closer she saw a big rock, the very obelisk from home. She was thrilled! She had actually flown over the ocean! She descended into the best smelling most beautiful patch of flowers and feasted like a queen! She liked exploring, but the familiar surroundings were never more inviting.

Honey was so pleased that she had done such a wonderful adventure! A few visitors stopped to take pictures of her. She looked like any other pretty hummingbird, and yet she was an explorer, fresh back from adventure.

Finally she was ready for bed. As she rested, she wondered about things.

“ I wonder where that ship goes!” she asked herself.

“I wonder what it’s like there. Hey! Maybe I can fly to the big island Mintomen! But maybe that’s where those Hawks live. Wait, of course I can fly that far. I can see Mintomen. When I left the ship I couldn’t see any island.”

As she nodded off she had already decided on another adventure. Actually, she decided on several adventures. She just had to pick one.