Give a Gift
Close up of the ruby-throated hummingbird.
Image credit: PAUL DANESE/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
“Summer starts when the hummers come back.” That was the wisdom my grandfather imparted as he hauled the hummingbird feeders from the basement each spring. It’s a ritual for many of us—digging out the hummingbird feeders, filling them with nectar, and waiting for the birds to appear. East of the Mississippi River, the one that we wait for is the ruby-throated hummingbird (Archilochus colubris)—a tiny burst of glittery, iridescent green with a gorget of shimmering red that looks almost black as the bird’s throat catches different angles of sunlight. It never took long for the hummingbirds to find the feeders; sometimes, we spotted them sipping nectar just minutes after the feeders were hung.
Males are the first to arrive. They stake out a territory and defend it with aerial jousts, chasing their rivals and stabbing at them with their long bills. It may be another week or two before the local flowers start to bloom, so hummingbirds have come up with a unique solution: they arrive at about the same time as the yellow-bellied sapsuckers. Sap-suckers tap rows of holes in trees, releasing sweet sap, which the hummingbirds use as a substitute for flower nectar. As a bonus, the sap captures insects, another main food source for the hummers. Food and a drink, courtesy of the sapsuckers.
Hummingbirds have another strange behavior that helps them survive cold nights. A humming-bird’s heart beats about 250 times per minute at rest and more than 1,200 times per minute in flight. It takes a lot of energy to sustain numbers like that, and when the temperature drops, the need for energy to keep warm goes up, prompting the birds to survive by going into a mini hibernation called “torpor.” During this rest, their body tempera-ture drops from 105°F to 70°F, and their heart rate and breathing plummet. Most hunker down on a branch to sleep away the night, but an occasional odd bird does this while hanging upside down from a branch—a truly bizarre sight. When the morning temperature rises, the birds wake up and start an-other typical hummer’s day.
Highly energetic: this bird’s heart beats 1,200 times per minute while in flight.
Image credit: PAUL DANESE/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
A female ruby-throated hummingbird feeding from a flower.
Image credit: PAUL DANESE/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
When the females arrive, they look for a territory with just the right mix of shelter, food, and spiders. Each buzzes around checking out the real estate and, if she likes what she sees, she settles on a branch near a male, who begins to dance. He flies up, swoops down with wings humming at 80 beats per second, and flies back up again, making a giant U in the air. At some point, he catches a subtle sig-nal from the hen telling him that she is thinking about staying. His dance turns to a side-to-side flight directly in front of her with his tail spread wide and his gorget catching the sunlight from different angles, making it shimmer between a bright ruby red and a red so deep that it borders on black. When she decides that the time is right, she cocks her tail to the side, inviting the male to mate. Two to three seconds later, the courtship and coupling is over, and the male’s role in raising the family is done.
The hen builds her nest with a base of thistle and dandelion down, sticking it to a branch with spider webs. She builds the sides from bud scales, small plant pieces, and thistle down, all laced to-gether with more spider silk. When the wall is about an inch high, she camouflages the outside with bits of lichen, making it look like a normal lump on a tree branch.
When the nest is done, she lays her first half inch-long egg. A couple of days later, she lays egg number two and begins two weeks of incubation. Apart from a few short food forays during the day, she stays on the eggs, keeping them safe, warm, and hidden.
It takes two weeks for the eggs to hatch, leaving two naked, blind, blue-gray nestlings the size of small jellybeans in the bottom of the nest. Each weighs a whopping 0.02 ounces. Mom feeds them a power diet of plant nectar mixed with bugs, and they completely outgrow their nest in about three weeks. Hummingbirds can’t walk or hop on their tiny feet, so they need to fly when they fledge rather than shuffle through trees like other birds. At this point, they are a little bigger than the hen that raised them, which is important because she will stop feeding them in a few days, and the extra weight will sustain them while they learn to feed themselves.
Male ruby-throated hummingbirds compete for territory before the females arrive on the scene.
Image credit: PAUL DANESE/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
The seasonal migration across the Gulf takes 20 hours and 4 million wing beats for this tiny bird.
Image credit: PAUL DANESE/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
Ruby-throated hummingbirds, and most other hummingbirds, are small, fast, and capable of going places that humans can’t, so there is still a lot that isn’t known about their habits and strategies for daily living.
Putting out a hummingbird feeder perks the attention of these sugar fiends.
Image credit: PAUL DANESE/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
Though ruby-throated hummingbirds are threatened by habitat loss, they have proven to be adaptable thus far.
Image credit: IWOLFARTIST/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
As summer days get shorter, hummingbirds head for the southern shorelines of the Gulf states. They arrive weighing a little less than a nickel, but after gorging themselves, resting, and gorging again, they double their weight to do one more amazing thing: they leave the shoreline and spend the next 20 hours flying nonstop over the Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America) until they reach the tropical shores of Central America. They can’t glide, so each bird will flap its wings more than 4 million times and lose over half of its body weight during the flight. And they will do it again when they fly north in the spring.
Ruby-throated hummingbirds, and most other hummingbirds, are small, fast, and capable of go-ing places that humans can’t, so there is still a lot that isn’t known about their habits and strategies for daily living. Like other birds, they face dangers every day—some obvious, such as merlins and sharp-shinned hawks, and others more subtle, such as praying mantises and large spider webs. Habitat loss is always a concern, but the hummers are hold-ing their own and doing well in the gardens, shrubs, and trees we plant in our yards.
As for me, I dutifully dig out the feeders every spring because, as it did for my grandfather before me, summer starts when the hummers come back.
REFERENCE
Weidensaul, S., T. R. Robinson, R. R. Sargent, M. B. Sargent, and T. J. Zenzal (2020). Ruby-throated Hummingbird (Archilo-chus colubris), version 1.0. In Birds of the World (P. G. Rodewald, Editor). Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.2173/bow.rthhum.01