Where did you come from?

I started this blog because my sister was writing an article about blogging and I wanted to be able to help her with some of the technical details. After the initial startup, my blog languished. I posted test posts. I posted disjointed ramblings. And then a hummingbird decided to make her nest in a bush in my back yard. I had something to write about! I started making daily posts, and my sister would stop by to see the latest pictures. She told her scrapbooking friends, one of whom is a serious birder who, in turn, told her birding friends. I told the people at the Infotec Eagle Nest web site. And people stopped by to see the hummingbirds.

Now that the nest is empty and gone, I haven't had an awful lot to say. (I still need to write a post about the big Where's George Las Vegas gathering!) But I've noticed from my counter statistics that people are finding my blog from queries at various search engines. I get a lot of hits from people who've searched for "hummingbird web cam" or "hummingbird baby pictures" or other hummingbird-related search phrases. Some people have found me by searching for some unusual hummingbird-related phrases like "wind blows hummingbird out of nest" or "what if mother hummingbird won't stay on nest at night" or "hummingbird gestation period." (I mentioned "gestation period" early on in my nest posts, but I should have said "incubation period." I'm glad I'm not the only one who came up with the wrong terminology.)

Then there are the more puzzling phrases. One person recently searched for "super glue bird beaks." What on earth?! Yep, I joked about super gluing the babies to the nest, so Google helpfully pointed that person to my blog. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, maybe they were looking for information about fixing broken beaks -- I understand it's been done with pet birds.

One person actually searched for "What's going on in Amy's head." Oh, my! It's as if that person were looking for me. With such a specific phrase, they must be looking for me. How did they hear about me? Who told them to search for my blog's name? Why did they come here? I'm so curious! (And flattered!)

Speaking of which, it's always a thrill to see that one of my visitors came from an e-mail link. The way my counter software works, I can see the last ten "referrers," the pages that linked to mine. If the referring page is something like mail.google.com or mail.yahoo.com, then that means someone clicked on a link in an e-mail. So who's writing to whom about me? What are they saying? And should I be flattered or paranoid?

Back to the search phrases. The ones that really get me are the ones that have no connection to my blog. Someone once came here after searching for "little boy webcam." That one makes me shudder. I once mentioned that I thought one of the hummingbirds was a little boy, and I talked up the webcam while it was active. That's how they got here, but I hope they didn't find what they were really looking for. More recently, someone looked for "my sister's head has been blown off." I have no idea what they were looking for, but my web page came up as the second selection for that word combination. My sister was a little startled by that one.

So how did you stumble across my blog? I'm glad you got here and I hope you check back, even though my hummingbird babies are grown and gone.