Laura Erickson’s For the Birds

On June 30, 1975, at Fort Custer Recreation Area not far from Kalamazoo, Michigan, on a field trip with my ornithology class, I saw my very first Ruby-throated Hummingbird—Number 74 on my life list. I’d been aware of this species since I was four years old—it had a species account and was even featured on the cover of my treasured Golden Bird Stamps book that my Grandpa gave me.

The book said hummingbirds were tiny, but WHOA—it didn’t say they were as tiny as butterflies! Indeed, some of the first European explorers of the New World thought they were insects.

The illustration in the book shows both a male and female Ruby-throated Hummingbird at the nest, but that’s romantic fantasy–males aren’t involved in nesting at all. Sometimes I even wonder whether male hummingbirds know where baby hummingbirds come from. As with every species, females lay the eggs of course, but hummingbird females also take all the responsibility of choosing the nest site, building the nest, incubating the eggs, and caring for the young, both as nestlings and for 4–7 days after the chicks fledge before they grow independent.

In spring, males usually arrive a few days before females to claim and defend a territory; when the females arrive, the males display to attract them. Males with the best displays and the best territories are selected the most.

If a nest is lost, females can renest, and if their young grow independent early enough in the season, the female may start all over. That of course requires the males to stick around, always at the ready until, up here in Duluth, mid- or late-July. Besides inseminating females, they provide another useful service—they’re so territorial that they drive a lot of other nectar feeders away from the flowers. Females are larger and even more assertive than males, so those who nest near a male’s defended territory can feed quickly with little squabbling, minimizing their time away from the nest. The earlier fall migration of the males is also helpful, ensuring that more nectar will be available for the adult females and young birds until they’re ready to migrate.

This is the system for our migratory Ruby-throat. Another North America species, the Rufous Hummingbird, has one of the longest of migrations of all, some individuals traveling about 3,900 miles every spring and fall between Alaska and Mexico.

Few tropical hummingbirds migrate at all, though they may move seasonally to different elevations depending on food availability, and many do have regular nesting seasons determined by weather and vegetation, but otherwise most elements of their nesting systems are the same, especially as far as the role of females. Some tropical hummingbird males are territorial, but others have “leks”—a term that can refer to the place where males gather to display to females, to the males who are gathered there, or to the behavior of gathering and displaying for females. In these species, many males may not successfully mate with a single female all season, or even for many years, while the most attractive males may mate with many females.

Hummingbirds are not songbirds, but taxonomists assure us that this has nothing to do with the fact that they “don’t know the words.” They and their relatives are morphologically different from songbirds and other species, which Linnaeus and other natural historians recognized centuries ago, and which has been confirmed by modern DNA studies.

The family includes the tiniest warm-blooded animal in the known universe, the Bee Hummingbird of Cuba, which weighs a mere 11 percent of what a Black-capped Chickadee weighs. At the other extreme, the largest hummingbird is the Giant Hummingbird of the Andes, which weighs twice as much as a chickadee and 12 times as much as the Bee Hummingbird. I saw my lifer in December up at the Condor Lodge in Ecuador, though I saw it only briefly and didn’t get a photo.

The hummingbird family name, Trochilidae, comes from the Greek trochilos, referring to small, swift birds, though the ancient Greeks were referring to other species such as plovers—they would have had no clue about hummingbirds, which human history have been entirely limited to the Americas.

With about 375 species, the hummingbird family is the third largest of all the bird families in the world, after Tyrannidae (flycatchers—at least 430 species), and Thraupidae (tanagers—at least 390 species). Interestingly, all three families are limited to the Americas. The flycatchers and tanagers belong to Passeriformes, the order that includes “perching” birds (though many birds outside this family perch). Hummingbirds belong to the order Apodiformes, which comes from the Greek apodiforme, meaning “without feet.” All the birds in this order do, of course, have feet, but they’re too tiny for walking or hopping—when they must use their legs and feet for locomotion, they simply shuffle. Like other birds, hummingbirds do use their legs as pistons for generating thrust when they take off, but because the legs and feet are so very tiny, they provide much less propulsion than other birds, their powerful wingbeats making up for that.

My five-year-old grandson Walter informed me a couple of weeks ago that those wings move in a figure-8 so hummingbirds are the only birds who can fly backwards. He found that out on his favorite TV show, “Wild Kratts.” It’s thrilling to me that he’s finding more role models that just Dee Dee Nana telling him how wonderful the natural world is. When hummingbirds return this spring, he’ll be ready, and much more knowledgeable than I was with my Golden Stamp book.