Three images of hummingbirds are perched on the bookshelf above the desk in my office. The first one announces a show by Norma Bessouet from Argentina in Arden Gallery on Boston’s fashionable Newbury Street. I saw the show in late November. Many of her paintings are dominated by oversized hummingbirds mesmerized by a bald woman with bare breasts. The painting on the announcement, entitled “Selvaggia y uccello,” shows a hummingbird the size of a chicken. Of course, a bird of this size could not hover.

The second one is a postcard from the recently opened MIT Museum Store in the Student Center on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge. It shows a ruby-throated hummingbird photographed by Gerald Merchant. The photograph was made with strobe light invented by Harold Edgerton, an MIT celebrity, so that the movements of the hummingbird’s wings appear completely arrested. In fact, the poor bird looks stuffed because we are used to seeing its wings ablaze.

The third one is my own photograph taken at a construction site in London last November. It shows the insignia of Bovis Construction Ltd., one of the largest construction management firms in the United Kingdom, which has endowed my chair-to-be at the University of Reading. Bovis’ trademark is a hummingbird. I am not sure why this particular trademark was selected, but I am quite fond of it. There is something paradoxical in the superimposition of construction activity and these delicate creatures. Perhaps this explains my nascent interest in hummingbirds.