A Double Helping of Hummingbird Surprise

“Come quick!” yelled my friend Gretchen from the screened porch of her Northern Minnesota cabin. She was sitting at the table watching the sunrise over the lake the second morning of a girlfriends’ three-day retreat. I ran from the kitchen where I was making our first pot of coffee. What could be more important than that?

What met me besides Gretchen’s astonished expression and the early morning sun shining through the poplar leaves was a hummingbird, its long needle-pointed beak was sticking through the screen about two feet from my face.

For just a moment, a split second, it was still, as if thinking about its escape. For a moment, just a split second, I thought about a rescue. Then, just like that, in characteristic tough, independent hummer style, it pulled free and was off in its perky, jerky flight pattern, wings buzzing as fast as 80 times a second, to reassert itself at the red feeder bulb where it had left off.

It was an accident of nature waiting to happen. According to Gretchen, who was watching the event unfold, the victim was lapping sweet sugar water from the feeder when another hummer in true aggressive hummer fashion dove in to claim its territory. The first hummer, making a swift lift off and wrong turn, ended up impaled in the screen.

Being a quick thinker, the ruby- throated little fellow assessed the situation, stayed calm, and pulled back. Call its reaction instinct, but I swear I could see the tiny wheels turning. At first I thought a less thoughtful, more nutty bird than a hummingbird might have needed assistance. A quick inventory of birds in general, however, didn’t bring to mind a single, nutty bird except maybe the cuckoo who gets a bum rap because it talks funny and shoots back and forth out of a hole on the end of stick. Birds are, as a class, pretty much on the ball.

We explored the idea of class (birds are Aves), genus (hummingbirds are Stellula) and species (the Minnesota variety are ruby throated) in depth on another morning around a different table. The topic at hand was why blue jays don’t mate with robins, why loons don’t mate with swans, why cardinals don’t mate with wrens while cocker spaniels mate with German shepards, poodles mate with beagles, and Irish setters mate with just about anything around. If dogs mate with dogs, why don’t birds mate with birds?

We squared off into different camps. The confused and the knowing. No matter how the armchair biologists among us explained taxonomy, it still confused me. This led to why dogs don’t mate with cats, horses with elk, goats with sheep and so on. A Siamese will mate with a Manx and a collie will mate with a St. Bernard, but dogs and cats won’t mate with each other because. . .well, dogs just don’t mate with cats, but. . . wait a minute, why not? We know they don’t mate because they have different characteristics, and we’ve classified them as species because they don’t interbreed, but the bottom line question was how do they know they don’t interbreed?

But they do know, and hummers, counted with those in the know, don’t mate with blue jays. In fact, they rarely mate with hummers that aren’t of the same species of which there are about 112 in North America. Minnesota hosts only one species, the ruby -throated.

Intrigued by the hummers and engrossed in the hummer phenomena, another friend, Mary and I pumped Gretchen for information throughout that northern retreat. She not only gave us a crash course in hummingbird facts, she invited us to her house where she said hummer watching is a spectator sport.

What she described to us could not compare to what met us the following week when we walked up the sidewalk to her country home. The perennial garden she had planted when her daughter graduated four years ago had become a gorgeous, bejeweled jungle. As if the lush thick mass of purple cone flowers, black eyed susans, daisies, hostas, and liatris growing on each side of the walk were not enough, on the white wrap-around porch of her yellow two-story farm house, we could see the many hummingbird feeders in between mounds of cascading deep, pink wave petunias. The perfect spot for a bird whose name translated from Portuguese means "flower-kisser."

As we got closer, we began to see what looked like a city scene out of “Star Wars,” the nature edition. They zipped and darted like they were on unicycles in their up down, forward/reverse, sideways motion. They paused and perused in triple time. They flew in and out of the porch pillars and hanging petunias. We were so close, we could see the tongues, as long as the beaks but half as wide, shooting in and out, lapping at the nectar. Placing our fingers in just the right place by a feeder, we could become makeshift perches. We were captive.

Gretchen’s Hummingbird Spa had modest beginnings about five years ago when she put up her first feeder. Over the years, however, the number of feeders and hummingbirds have increased dramatically; no doubt because hummers can remember a food source and keep coming back year after year with their increasing families. No doubt because Gretchen is diligent in filling and maintaining her feeders.

According to Gretchen, the secret of her hummingbird success is simple, and the first part is cheap. Keep the feeders full of the right ratio of water to sugar (four to one). Contrary to popular belief, hold the dye! The red food coloring is not only not necessary, it might be harmful to the birds.

The second part of successful hummer feeding and the real cost of maintaining the feeding station is in man (or in this case, woman) hours. The routine starts in May when the Hummingbirds return from Mexico. If the feeders aren’t out, Gretchen will hear the hummers tapping on the porch windows telling her to get busy! At the peak of hummer season Gretchen may go through a gallon of sugar water every couple days to fill the ten feeders.

In late summer, you can see up to 40 hummingbirds at one time, and if the theory is correct that there are three to four times the hummers in the vicinity than what you see at your feeders then Gretchen’s numbers reach almost swarm proportions. The feeding frenzy periods are at dusk and dawn when the warning squeaks of the territorial birds and the hum of the flapping wings create a summer ruckus.

Other important maintenance involves tasks like “burping” which keeps the feeding area full of liquid by tipping the feeders to one side so it “burps” up air bubbles. At the end of the season, she keeps at least one feeder full for a week after the last sighting just to make sure any stragglers get a good full belly migration sendoff.

Gretchen grew up with a hummingbird feeder in the back yard of her parent’s city home in St. Cloud, so the pocket-watch-sized bird was no stranger. Now, however, it’s Gretchen’s porch that provides hours of entertainment and bird watching on a grand-mini scale. She has seen ruby throats, in the thunder of compressed intent, go chest to chest

and heard the mad click of beaks in hummingbird battle. She has seen the feisty little birds take on and drive away orioles. She has watched the wild U dance of the mating male. She has rescued a stunned hummingbird that hit the window, shooing away the cat and providing a warm palm gurney as a place to rest. Eye to eye they looked at each other until the hummer got its breath back then shot away.

Through our hummingbird education, it seems the biggest thing we learned is it’s the little things that are the big things. Migration, feeding habits, egg size, heartbeats per minute are fascinating, but it’s a hummer sitting on a finger, tapping on the window, figuring out how to free itself from a screened-in porch that makes you feel like you’re the lucky recipient of a hummer surprise and keeps you coming back for more.

Hummingbirds use their feet only to perch and must fly to move even a few feet.

They migrate as far as 2,000 miles to Mexico at speeds of 25-30 mph if there isn’t a tail wind (up to 50 miles an hour during an escape and 63-80 mph in a courtship dive).
The Ruby Throated weighs in at about 3 grams (the same as 3 paper clips or 1/8 of an ounce) and is about 3 – 3 1/2 inches long.
On cold nights the birds lower their temperature from around 108F to 30F to conserve energy.
Hummingbirds can’t walk. They use their feet only to perch and must fly to move even a few feet. The only other birds that can’t walk are loons, grebes, kingfishers, and swifts. The ruby neck and throat are called the gorget.
The 500-mile flight across the Gulf of Mexico would take about 18 1/2 hours, a long flight for a bird that doesn’t migrate at night like most birds.
The changing length of daylight hours and the availability of insects trigger migration.
Hummingbirds have about 8x binocular vision and can see your feeder from about 3/4 of a mile.
Hummingbirds eat about every 10 minutes and may consume nearly 2/3 of their body weight in a single day.
They double their weight before migration (so they weigh about six paperclips).
They consume about 10 calories a day.
The biggest hummingbird on record is the Giant Hummingbird of South America – 20 grams. The smallest hummingbird is the Bee Hummingbird of Cuba – 2.2 grams.
Hummingbird’s average life is about 3 - 5 years. Most die in the first year, but the longest recorded is 12 years old.
They will bathe on a cupped leaf.
Their heartbeat can be as low as 250 beats/ minute at rest and 1220 while flying.
They breathe 250 breathes a minute at rest.
They can go into a state of torpor on cold nights by lowering their temperature from about 105 to 108F to 30F to conserve energy. They become lifeless, but the next day, they can raise metabolism and body temp back up within minutes.
They build a new nest every year, but may return to the same spot and build on top of the old nest.
The nests are the size of a walnut shell—1/2 a gram. They are covered with moss and sometimes shingled with lichen, lined in plant down, and held together with spider webs. They can stretch to accommodate the growing babies.
There are usually one or two eggs – less than 1/2 inch long— that look like small jellybeans.
Babies are about an inch long and double their weight each day for several days.
Males don’t help with nesting or raising babies.
The majority of the approximately 320 species are found in the tropics.

If you can’t arrange a hummingbird viewing, see Ruby Throats in action at

http://hummingbirds.net/images/figure8.mov

http://hummingbirds.net/images/femaleruby.mov

http://hummingbirds.net/images/maleruby.mov

Resources:

The Hummingbird Web Site- http://www.portalproductions.com/h/

Hummingbirds.net - www.hummingbirds.net

The Hummer Bird/Study Group –

http://www.hummingbirdsplus.org/MissionHistory.html

About.com -- http://birding.about.com/od/taxonomy/a/birdnames.htm

The Capitalization of Bird Names -- http://elibrary.unm.edu/sora/Auk/v100n04/p1003-p1004.pdf

The Ruby Throat -- http://www.rubythroat.org/GlossaryMain.html

Gretchen Laasko --