Hummer in the Summer

Let's all pause to wish the ruby-throated hummingbird good luck for the long flight ahead

"The daily hummingbird assaults existence with improbability."—Ursula K. Le Guin, 2013. Photo by jitkagold/Shutterstock.

THE MORE I LEARN about hummingbirds, the more they seem like an animal a four-year-old made up.

Their nest is the size of a walnut. They eat half their weight in sugar every day. They can hover, fly backwards, and fly upside down, but they can’t walk. They come in all the jewel tones.

Only one species of hummingbird lives east of the Great Plains, the ruby-throated hummingbird (archilochus colubris). Each spring they migrate north in search of the flower nectar and insect protein that will sustain their turbo-charged metabolisms throughout a summer of breeding and brooding.

With a long beak and an even longer tongue, this ruby throat is perfectly engineered to drink nectar from coral honeysuckle. She flicks her tongue 13 times a second! Hummers are attracted to shades of red, but they will drink from flowers of all colors. Photo by Joshua J. Cotten on Unsplash

This has been a good summer for spotting ruby throats in my Western Mass neighborhood where pollinator-friendly plants increasingly fill the yards and berms. At my house I’ve been enjoying some of my first hummer close-ups thanks to the coral honeysuckle we planted on a trellis beneath our kitchen windows a few years ago. Finally filling out, the vine has bloomed all summer with hundreds of trumpet-shaped pink flowers. Working at the kitchen sink I’ll catch that airy little hum—part bumblebee, part drone, part fairy princess—and look up. Sometimes the hummer just flies in place and stares right back at me.

Here’s Emily Dickinson on hummingbirds (poem 1489):

A Route of Evanescence,

With a revolving Wheel –

A Resonance of Emerald

A Rush of Cochineal –

And every Blossom on the Bush

Adjusts its tumbled Head –

The Mail from Tunis – probably,

An easy Morning’s Ride –

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RUBY-THROATS are readying themselves now for their long solo migration south. Many males have already taken off, while the females and juveniles will take wing over the next few weeks. In their final days of the season here, hummers will visit up to 2,000 flowers a day trying to bulk up. At night, they enter a critical state of rest called torpor, where their body temperatures drop and their heart rates and metabolism slow. Some homeowners become alarmed when they find a hummer hanging upside down from a feeder. But it’s all good. It’s just torpor.

A ruby throat will pick the same migratory route north and south each year. It’s an advantage, certainly, to anticipate the best food sources and hiding places ahead. Banded birds have been logged in at the same place on the same day each year. Photo by jeffreyw © 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

It’s hard to fathom the perils of this journey. Most ruby throats are heading for Mexico and Central America. Some will fly over land. Others will follow the coastline. A few brave souls will head straight over the Gulf of Mexico—a 20-hour nonstop flight. Increasingly, ruby throats are expanding their range north, as far as South Carolina, as winters warm. It’s no wonder they might choose to quit while they’re ahead. So many hazards await them on their travels: hurricanes, predators, windows, starvation, and sheer exhaustion.

Here are some humdinger migration facts:

·   Ruby throats weigh about a nickel at the start of migration and a dime by the end.

·    Their hearts beat 1,200 times a minute when they’re in flight.

·    They flap their wings 53 times a second and have been clocked at 30 M.P.H.

·    They only cover about 25 miles a day because they need to stop and refuel every ten minutes.

Each year the residents of Rockport and Fulton, Texas, near Corpus Christi on the Gulf of Mexico, welcome thousands of their exhausted friends with a hummerbird festival and hundreds of backyard feeders full of sugar water.

Hummingbirds are notoriously territorial, as anyone with a feeder can attest. They will employ all their jiu-jitsu skills to dazzle and dissuade a competitor. Photo by jeffreyw © 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

RUBY-THROATS are sexually dimorphic. That is, males and females look different. Both have shimmering emerald green backs and gray-white chests. Males have forked tails, while females’ tails are rounded with white tips. In the right light, males flash a ruby throat that looks almost like a sequin choker. One slight head tilt, though, and his throat becomes matte black. It’s the powerful illusion of iridescence versus colored pigment.

Males and females can be distinguished by the male’s flamboyant “gorget” (pronounced GOR-jit). His throat only alights when the sun hits it the right way. Photo by ant.tab and Paul Daneses (c) 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

This bit of unrestrained glitz is central to their courtship. With four color cones (compared to our three), hummers see the world very psychedelically. When a female flies into a male’s territory, he’ll puff up his throat and toss his head to try to draw optimal sunlight. He’ll hover in front of her. He’ll fly up high and then plunge at high speed in a U-shaped bit of daring-do called a pendulum display. If she accepts him, he’ll join her on a branch where mating will only take a few seconds. Afterwards, he might take off and zoom right back, knocking her unceremoniously off her perch. Hummingbird males are deadbeat dads, ready to move on to new mates.

Female ruby throats are on their own to build a nest and raise their young. Once chicks like this one fledge, the mother will often start over, raising a second brood. Photo by Agnieszka Bacal/Shutterstock.

A female ruby throats usually builds her tiny nest on the slender branch of a deciduous tree, sometimes as high as 50 feet off the ground. (Homeowners have also found nests on fence posts, the chains suspending wind chimes, and strings of outdoor Christmas lights.) Her construction materials are bud scales, plant down, and animal fur, all wrapped and secured with spider webs and, if required, pine resin. She then plucks bits of lichen and fashions it all around the outside. The final nest will be no more than two inches wide, well camouflaged, and flexible enough to grow with its occupants.

She lays white eggs the size of breath mints—usually a pair—and spends two weeks incubating them. When they hatch, the chicks are both naked and blind, weighing in at an impossible half a gram. They need protein to grow, so she will regurgitate mosquitos, gnats, fruit flies, spiders—any morsel she can fit in her beak and pre-digest. In two to four weeks, the nestlings are ready to take flight.

How to Love a Hummer

• Plant native flowers.
• Don’t use pesticides, which have widespread negative effects on birds and other pollinators, including eliminating insects that provide hummingbirds with critical protein.
• Keep cats indoors. They’re the number one human-related cause of bird mortality in the U.S., responsible for a shocking 2 billion plus deaths each year.
• Use deterrents on windows that confuse birds. Bird strikes are the second highest human-related cause of avian deaths in the U.S.
• Learn proper care and cleaning for your hummingbird feeders.
• Do you have a garage? if there’s a red handle on the emergency pull cord that hangs from your door, cover it with tin foil. The red color lures hummers into your garage where they get stuck. Too late? Here’s how to coax a hummer out.

THERE ARE A STAGGERING 366 hummingbird species, all native to the Americas. The majority live year-round in the tropics and don’t migrate. The remote Andes Mountains are home to 140 species; the U.S. is home to only 15. Hummingbirds fall into nine clades—that is, groups that descend from a common ancestor—all with poetic names: topazes; hermits; mangoes; coquettes; brilliants; mountaingems; bees; emeralds; and Patagona.

The diversity of Americas' hummingbirds, with all their colors and adaptations, includes, clockwise from top left, the long-tailed sylph; Anna’s Hummingbird; bee hummingbird; and sword-billed hummingbird. Photos by Charles J. Sharp, Becky Matsubara, Charles J. Sharp, and Andy Morffew © 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

All species are carefully matched to native flowers, especially tubular ones, with beaks adapted for an ideal fit. In this symbiotic relationship, the flowers provide nectar and the hummingbirds spread pollen.

With a recent bird count of 36 million, the ruby throat’s population is increasing, putting it in the conservation category “of least concern.” Most of their fellow hummers, unfortunately, are declining, including 28 who are on the endangered or critically endangered list.

Hummingbirds have long been an object of curiosity and wonder, as demonstrated by this British collectible cigarette card from 1924. In the nineteenth century, hummingbird populations were decimated by collectors of taxidermy and by hunters eager to profit from fashion crazes like feather hats. From the George Arents Collection, The New York Public Library. "Ruby-throated humming-bird (Archilochus colubris)." The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1850 - 1959.

BECAUSE OF THEIR FRAGILE skeletons, hummingbird fossils are uncommon. The oldest in the Americas date back only 10,000 years. According to genetic research, though, hummingbirds go back 42 million years—to the time when they broke with their closest relative, the swift. After that, however, the trail gets dodgy. In 2004 a German scientist named Gerald Mayr found two long-forgotten 30-million-year-old fossils in a museum drawer in Stuttgart and recognized that they were hummingbirds. The rub? They were first unearthed in clay deposits in southern Germany.

Scientists still don’t understand how or why hummingbirds relocated from Europe to the Americas. Mayr, with good humor, named his find Eurotrochilus inexpectatus: Unexpected European Hummingbird.

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Hummingbird Marginalia

1. A group of hummingbirds is called a charm. (A group of ravens is an unkindness; sparrows a ubiquity; and eagles a convocation.)

2. To see hummingbirds in all their adaptive glory, watch this free documentary narrated by the inimitable David Attenborough.

3. Tiny Bird: A Hummingbird's Amazing Journey, written by Robert Burleigh and illustrated by the legendary Wendell Minor, follows the dramatic migration of the ruby-throated hummingbird.

4. I weigh approximately 21,168 ruby-throated hummingbirds. If I had a ruby throat’s metabolism, I’d have to eat 100,000 calories a day, or 714 energy bars.

5. Hummingbird feeder costumes.

   

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