I look out the back door and I can’t believe how much beauty surrounds me. This morning I was struck by the semi-wild bottlebrush tree growing behind my bird garden. Its beautiful red bristles are tipped with gold:
The hummingbirds love it:
In my tiny rose garden, our orange rose blazes. I love spring!
“Cool it, guys! There’s plenty for everybody!”
Yes, I do talk to my birds, and often exhort the hummers to play nice with one another and stop fighting over the feeders. These fierce little jewels always ignore my advice. I recently read a discussion on a hummingbird mailing list that goes a long way toward explaining this aspect of hum-behavior.
According to Lanny Chambers, a hummingbird expert whose excellent website, Hummingbirds.net, is packed with photos and information on hummingbirds, hummers fight because:
…they treat feeders essentially the same as flowers. A good patch of wildflowers in the middle of nowhere will provoke chases and battles, as one bird tries to defend the territory against all intruders. So, the real question is, "why are hummingbirds so territorial?"
The answer for adult males in spring is easy: the birds with the best territories attract the most females, and get the most sex. Hens want strong genes for their chicks, and they know where to find them: the nastiest, meanest, most evil-tempered studs will be successfully holding down the most desirable food resources.
Outside of that scenario, each flower contains a tiny amount of nectar, replenished slowly over time. A hummer doesn't want another bird to get the nectar first, since it will have to wait until the flower produces more, so the resource is jealously guarded. I don't think a hummingbird has any concept of unlimited supply, so they defend feeders for the same reason.
There are some occasions on which hummingbirds will share food. I myself have observed this, most often at the end of the day or during a cold snap. A couple of years ago two young male Costa’s hummingbirds uneasily co-guarded my patio feeder, as I described here. But this behavior is very rare.
Nancy L. Newfield of Louisiana, author and hummingbird expert, believes the hummingbirds’ perception of the rarity of nectar is “the crux of the whole matter.Every drop of nectar is regarded as the last drop of food on Earth. They defend their food source because their very life depends on food.”
Adds Sheri L. Williamson, another expert, who is author of the indispensable Peterson’s Field Guide to Hummingbirds of North America, “It’s all about that limited resource and walking (well, hovering) a very fine line between survival and starvation.”
In a previous post I talked about the many beautiful hummingbirds that visited the house I lived in before I moved to the Tucson foothills. Of the hundreds of hummers who came to my yard, three stood out as special.
“RUFIE”
Rufie was a young female Rufous who showed up in my yard at Thanksgiving one year, weeks after the last migrants had moved through. She seemed to like my yard—perhaps she thought she had reached Mexico—and she stayed through the winter, even though we had a long freeze that made me fear for her life. I got up before the sun for several days to put out fresh nectar for her.
When she returned the following year and the next, I got in touch with a local ornithologist and bird bander, Bill Calder, who came over to trap and band Rufie. He told me that most likely she was the same one I had seen the previous two years, because it was so unusual for a Rufous to overwinter in Tucson. He said that she might have migrated thousands of miles from wherever she spent the summer. The following year, Rufie returned and Bill confirmed that the band was the one he had placed on her. She came one more year, and then I never saw her again.
“The Ghost”
This hummingbird showed up one day in the spring. When I first saw it I couldn’t believe my eyes. It looked like a hummingbird ghost. I called the Audubon Rare Bird line, and two hours later a man showed up from Phoenix to photograph it. It was not an albino, by the way, but “leucistic,” because it did have pigment in its eyes, beak, and feet. It stayed for about a week, then continued on its migration. It never returned to my yard, but I wasn’t surprised because birds with defects in coloring often have other defects as well.
“Olivier”
My favorite of all the hummingbirds I’ve ever known, Olivier was a bold and beautiful broad-billed male who lived year-round in my yard for three or four years. He showed very little fear of humans, and projected an attitude that caused a friend of mine to name him after the famous actor.
When I first moved back to Tucson more than twenty years ago, I knew almost nothing about hummingbirds. I didn’t know, for example, that they spend a great deal of time just perching, in between trips to flowers or the nectar feeder. I didn’t know that they eat a lot of insects (you have probably seen them doing this, even if you didn’t know that’s what it was—they hover in mid-air, making jerky movements as they snag microscopic bugs). I didn’t know that many of them migrate long distances—more than 2,000 miles—and over barriers as formidable as the Gulf of Mexico. And I had no idea that I would have so many species of hummers right in my own backyard.
As I wrote in the previous post on learning Arizona birds, I didn’t know one bird from another when I first arrived here. But hours in the backyard with binoculars and hummingbird books taught me to identify the six or seven species that eventually came to my tiny yard.
Male Costa’s hummingbird
These included Anna’s, the most common; Broad-billed, the second most; and Costa’s, Rufous, Broad-tailed, and Black-chinned.
I never did get very good at identifying female hummers, most of whom tend to look a lot alike, but I did get to know all the males. On this page are a few pictures of “my” hummers from those early years. In my next post I’ll introduce the three most memorable hummers to visit my yard.
