For sheer colorful splendor, no animal beats the tropical hummingbirds. They’re like tiny animated gems, and are adorable. I had the pleasure, as a grad student, of mist-netting some of these in Costa Rica (you have to get them out of the nets quickly, or they die from starvation or dehydration), and of holding their tiny bodies in my loose fist, feeling their hearts drumming a mile a minute.
Reader Bruce Lyon sent a bunch of hummingbird photos, and I’ll put up only a few today:
On my annual family trip to Costa Rica I spent a couple of days at Monteverde, a cloud forest site well known to both biologists and tourists. Cloud forest and the wet montane habitat just downslope of cloud forest have a very high diversity of hummingbirds. The single hummingbird feeder at the place we stayed at attracted seven species, often at the same time. At times up to thirty individual birds were visiting the feeder or were perched very close by waiting for their turn. All of the photos here were taken with a Canon 6D body and a F4 500 Canon lens with a 1/4 X teleconverter.
My daughter Fiona took this photo of a swarm of hummingbirds at the feeder:
The cloud forest viewed from our front porch:
The most common hummingbird species around the feeder was the Green Violet-ear (Colibri thalassinus):
Green Violet-ear coming in for a landing. Hummingbirds have favorite perches so one can prefocus on a favorite perch and get nice shots of landings:
Green Violet-ears are pugnacious and constantly fight and chase each other. Much of the fighting seems to be who gets to use high quality perches closest to a feeder. Here two birds squabble over one of these favored perches. During fights, violet-ears often flare out their ‘violet-ears’—as the individual clinging to the perch is doing—which suggests to me that these plumage patches are likely to serve as social signals that convey information either about motivation to fight or fighting ability:
Violet-ears also use squinting a threat display. Is this the avian version of ‘stink eye’?:
More awesome hummers to come.
Moving southward, reader Pablo Flores sent a video and some photos he took during a recent trip to northern Chile. First the video, from Patagonia:
Here are a couple of Magellanic Woodpeckers [Campephilus magellanicus], first a male (head all red) looking for a grub, then a female (some red around the beak) getting fed. They are in the branches of a lenga beech (Nothofagus pumilio). The Nothofagus genus is interesting from the biogeographic point of view: you can find it in southern South America and in Australasia, and there are fossils of it in Antarctica: a sure sign that it originated when all the southern continents were joined.
Here are a couple of vicuñas (Vicugna vicugna). These are wild relatives of the llama. According to Wikipedia, “The Inca valued vicuñas highly for their wool, and it was against the law for anyone but royalty to wear vicuña garments”.
Whoa! The Green Violet-ear – love it. It’s like something out of a Roger Dean painting!
Indeed, but what sort of shutterspeed do you need to stop them in-flight as above?
Hummingbirds are such interesting little creatures. They are so beautiful but so pugnacious! They actually try to stab each other with their beaks!
I used to photograph the hummies here sitting on their favourite perch – usually the moonflower vines next to the feeder. They could sit there & chase away any interlopers, dive bombing them as they cowered.
I’m so jealous over the hummingbird pictures. When weather is warm I’ve been faithfully putting out new nectar every week in my feeder and … no hummingbirds. For over two years now. I’ve seen them in the yard, so I know they’re around. And I placed the feeder right next to a honeysuckle vine which they used to love (but is now struggling to produce blossoms) — so it’s not the location or height. I buy the ready-made bright red nectar with added vitamins for happy hummingbird health. It can’t be that. Last year I even tried tying some artificial trumpet flowers to the holder. Nada.
I figure they just don’t like me. 🙁
Most birding authorities seem to advise against using food coloring or other additives. The best and safest hummingbird food, they say, is just 1/4 cup of white sugar dissolved in 1 cup of boiling water. Cool it in the fridge before filling the feeder.
Perhaps, but as it is if the hummingbirds don’t come I still have something pretty to look at. But I guess I ought to try it.
Gregory is correct that the sugar water shouldn’t have colouring in it. A pretty red feeder like the one in the photo should do the trick, and make sure it’s not in full sun where the food can quickly get rancid. Otherwise, you’ll have to put less and clean and refill often. Nevertheless, it could be that some of your neighbours are more successful at attracting the hummingbirds.
My neighbors? The bastids! I’ll have to check this spring to see if the rare hummingbirds which do come by my place seem to look suspiciously well-satiated by the avian equivalent of Pepsi Clear.
Steal all, your neighbour’s feeders. Just don’t let them find the stockpile of stolen feeders in your garage or they may think you’re nuts. 🙂
And flip all their toilet rolls while you’re at it?
We live in the north central plains area, and have ruby-throated hummingbirds visiting in the summer. We use nectar also, but they seem to prefer real flowers, including the trumpet honeysuckle (Lonicera sembervirens), as you mentioned, and various Salvia species, esp. S. coccinea (easy to grow from seed), also 4 o-clocks (hawk moths [Sphingidae; usually Hyles lineata in our area] also like these) and Cuphea ignea.
sorry that should have been sempervirens – with a p
Spectacular photos all!
Unfortunately when we went to Moneverde maybe 15 years it was all cloud and little view.
And sub
Great post, hummingbirds are stunning and the woodpecker a headbanger par excellence.
Love the fighting violetears! Those split second interactions are really hard to photograph.
My daughter Fiona took this photo of a swarm of hummingbirds at the feeder:
Unless I’m hallucinating, that’s a swarm of hummingbirds and one bananaquit (at left).
I wonder why they flare out their tails when in flight. Maybe for stability?
I’m guessing that one was an aggressive display.
You are not hallucinating. I figured it was a detail that only bird freaks would notice!
Really, I just wanted to type “bananaquit”.
“Here are a couple of vicuñas (Vicugna vicugna). These are wild relatives of the llama.”
Well yes, that is true, but the pedant (and alpaca breeder) in me feels compelled to point out that there are four camelids in South America, and that the vicuña is (almost certainly) the wild form of the alpaca (Vicugna pacos), while the llama (Lama glama) is the domesticated form of the guanaco (L. guanicoe).
Fantastic pictures.
We have several of the plastic kinds of flamingos in our back yard gardens.
Gorgeous woodpecker. The coal-black with red head is really stunning. Got me wondering why so many woodpeckers all over the world seem to favor red on their heads.
Wonderful photos, thanks.
Who mows the ‘lawn’ in that cloud-forest garden? Is it mainly the vicuñas and geese, or rodents too? – it looks more like a rabbit lawn in the second photo.
Aw! Humming birds are wonderful little things. That one looks so cute and grumpy squinting.
In the complex relationship of Lamas to Vicunas –
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1088918/pdf/PB012575.pdf
May be more recent material of course…