Humming Birds | Nature Adventure

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Biology

Hummingbirds are native only to North and South America. They are the smallest known birds, varying in size from species to species, but still only 9.1 inches long (or 23 cm) for the biggest of them all!

Having such a tiny body pushes everything to the extreme. Hummingbird hearts beat around 1,260 beats per minute; and they can flap their little wings as quickly as 80 times a second! They have such fast metabolisms that they need to consume huge amounts of sugar just to survive. Each flower they visit is like a fuel-up for the next few seconds of flight. Despite this, they can make incredible migrations. Around 15 species migrate annually, traveling across states and even passing country borders every year!

Despite being best known for their love of nectar, hummingbirds do actually eat insects. This helps round out their diet, as nectar alone doesn't contain all the nutrients they need to survive! Their prey of choice is extremely small, too. They have been known to eat aphids, gnats, fruit flies and mosquitos. Even a spider from time to time helps to keep them healthy!

Hummingbirds come in many sizes and colors, often beautiful jewel-tones like ruby and emerald, but they also come with a variety of beak shapes! These unique adaptations help specialize them for drinking nectar from certain plants, ensuring that they are the only ones able to get their fuel from that plant. This avoids competition with other species, where another type of hummingbird, bat, or other small animal could normally get to their nectar first.

Ecological Importance

Hummingbirds are just like bees and other insects; they are pollinators, spreading a plant's genetic material from flower to flower when they stop to drink nectar. But flowers don't want their pollen landing on any old plant, they want it to go to another flower of their species. This is how plants reproduce. So how can a flower ensure that their pollen goes to the right place when they are relying on these little birds?

Plants and hummingbirds have evolved a co-evolutionary association; this means that as a specific plant gets longer, smaller, broader, or brighter in color, the hummingbird species that has the most success feeding from that plant will also grow to have more specific adaptations to help with getting nectar from it. This might mean a different beak shape, a longer beak length, and larger or smaller body sizes!

You might notice that most flowers visited by hummingbirds are red, orange, white, or purple. This is another evolutionary advantage on the plant's part, since hummingbirds seem drawn to these particular colors.

Because hummingbirds are so specialized to feeding from their specific flowers, or are simply drinking from so many flowers in a single day, they are key pollinators for many plants that would simply die out if not for these birds. We humans can attempt to mimic what the hummingbirds do in our labs and greenhouses, but we are terrible at it in the natural environment. Hummingbirds help keep plant life outside vibrant and diverse, and they eat some of our most annoying insects (like mosquitos) as well!

Did you know?

As part of their courtship rituals, the male Anna's hummingbird flies as high as 115 feet (35 meters) into the sky before doing a spectacular dive, hitting speeds as fast as 89 mph (27 m/s)! This is the fastest known decent preformed by any vertebrate species, twice the speed of a peregrine falcon!

They do this not only to show off their impressive strength and speed, but because at the very bottom of the dive, right in front of the female hummingbird they are attempting to impress, they fan out their tail feathers to produce a short, very loud whistle. Other species of hummingbird can make this noise, too. It's caused by the outer tail feathers vibrating at a specific rate when flying or diving. If the birds are missing these feathers, they can no longer make this noise; and even if the tail feathers are taken off the bird and placed into a wind chamber, they will still produce a whistle sound!

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