Spectacular Hummingbirds

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- Hi. Sanford Smith here with Penn State Extension.

Today I'm joined by Doug Wentzel, and Doug works at Shaver's Creek Environmental Center.

Doug's gonna talk to us a little bit about hummingbirds today and find out more about these fascinating creatures.

Doug, what is it about hummingbirds that everybody gets excited about?

- For a nature watcher, hummingbirds are just a gateway species into, I think, inviting wildlife into your backyard.

For us in the Northeast, hummingbirds really is the ruby-throated hummingbird.

- Hummingbirds have some unique characteristics among birds, and one of those, of course, is the way they can hover and kind of go around like a helicopter.

Talk about some of the other ones.

- Yeah, you mentioned the helicopter.

Hummingbirds can hover, you know, and stay in motion, but stay still hovering because they have this sort of figure eight ability to move their shoulder joints to do that.

So that's fascinating to have a hummingbird hover right, you know, at you.

They are really, you know, a bird that half of its diet comes from nectar.

And that to me, I mean, that sort of blows my mind when I think about a bird able to subsist on nectar, but it also means that they're also pollinating those plants, so the columbine and the jewelweed and the beebalm, one of the major pollinators of that.

So it's fascinating to see that connection between plants and a pollinator really are one bird pollinator in the Northeast here.

- Yeah, that's right.

Doug, I've read that there are something like 386 different species of hummingbirds in the world and some of them migrate, or some of them stay where they are.

I know our ruby-throated comes in each year, doesn't it?

- It does, and if you look at the range map for ruby-throated, in South Florida, they're year-round, but for the rest of the East here they are migrants.

The vast majority are going to Central America.

And so those hummingbirds, when they're moving north have a choice, and many of them fly nonstop over the Gulf of Mexico to arrive at the Gulf Shore.

Some of them will hug the coastline, but it's clear that they're moving across the Gulf of Mexico flying nonstop.

And for a bird that only weighs 1/10 of an ounce, what a feat of just migration.

And so our hummingbird season, late April to mid-September.

- Hummingbirds are very small and sometimes it's said that they run out of energy occasionally, or in the evenings they almost hibernate.

What is that all about?

- Another amazing feat that they can do, they can go into torpor at night.

So they can lower their heart rate and they can lower their body temperature to get through a cold night.

And so in the morning then, you know, they're starting to come out of that torpor.

They use their chest muscles and start to sort of shiver and warm up.

But again, what a physiological feat.

Hummingbirds have lots of unique relationships, including yellow-belied sapsuckers.

So for us in April in the central part of the state, sapsuckers are here, hummingbirds are visiting those sapsucker wells.

So that's the one I mentioned, nectar, but in this case also tree sap.

- [Sanford] I've gotta ask this question now.

A lot of people feed hummingbirds.

What's the latest, best practice advice about feeding hummingbirds?

- [Doug] It's gotten so easy to feed hummingbirds, really.

I prefer small feeders dish type, and that's all.

No red dye, no other sweeteners, just your common table sugar.

And the solution is one to four, one part sugar to four parts water.

- Can you tell us a little bit about the hummingbird's nest and the brood size as well?

- Hummingbirds are fascinating in that the female is constructing the nest and she's using plant down fibers from, say, dandelion or a tall anemone.

So she's weaving that into a nest.

She's using spider silk, and she's decorating the outside with lichens.

So they're really hard to find, except if you have hummingbirds in your backyard, with a little bit of patience you can find these tiny, almost like a a large walnut size nest, but very well camouflaged.

And that spider silk allows the nest to expand.

The female's laying, she's doing the nest building, she's doing the incubation, she's raising the young.

The male does not participate in that.

But those two little eggs as they hatch and the young grow, that spider silk allows the nest to expand as the young get bigger.

- Oh, that's fascinating.

The eggs are about the size of a pea, is that right?

- Yeah. - I've only heard that said, I've never seen them.

Doug, tell us a little bit about the relationship between hummingbirds and plants and how that might also influence migration.

- Later in the year, so late summer as we're heading into September, jewelweed is a common plant.

It's an annual, but there's a real strong connection between hummingbird migration and jewelweed, at least from what I've been able to observe.

It seems as though when jewelweed is done blooming, it's almost the exact same time that the hummingbirds are leaving our state.

So jewelweed does really well in low, wet areas, but it can survive in more higher ground.

But there is a strong connection between jewelweed and hummingbirds.

- We talk a lot about hawk watches and we get excited about going and watching the hawks migrate south in the fall and back north in the spring, but I've heard that people can actually see hummingbirds going through those migrations too.

Do they go along the ridges, or how do they see them?

- You can, and it's one of my favorite aspects of September hawk watching.

We think about the broad-winged hawks moving in kettles.

But another joy in addition to those long distance migrants monarch butterflies, hummingbirds are moving down the ridges.

And so hawk watchers locally on Stone Mountain, you can simply sit there and watch and you can count these little, tiny, again small birds zipping past the hawk watch.

And with a little bit of practice you can tell a hummingbird from a bumblebee.

They just look like larger, bigger bill.

But hawk watchers count them all the time and keep records of them.

- Can you tell us any more about conservation measures that people can use to help hummingbirds, to help them maintain their population levels?

- It's great that hummingbirds have been stable populations and even increasing in Pennsylvania.

And I think to keep common birds common a couple of simple things, and one is keep cats indoors.

Especially if you're feeding hummingbirds, cats can sometimes station themselves underneath a feeder.

So keeping cats indoors.

Because hummingbird diet is 50% insect and spiders, you know, limiting the use of insecticide in your backyard and herbicide.

I really try to go organic as much as I can.

And then planting native plants, the columbine, the beebalm, the jewelweed, all great hummingbird plants.

And so you can be a better neighbor to them by just helping them continue to have a great breeding season and to be successful raising the young.

And they make such good neighbors.

- Yeah, well, Doug, I like to add at the end of an interview the opportunity for you to tell us what really jazzes you about this topic and hummingbirds in general.

- Hummingbirds just allow me to connect with my backyard.

I love planting flowers, and if I just think about in the planting of my backyard making sure that I create space for hummingbirds.

Feeding hummingbirds is something that I like to do.

It takes me about 10 minutes a week to maintain clean, healthy feeders.

And it's just a simple act that allows me to connect, again, to the wildlife in my backyard, and hummingbirds just animate my world.

- Yeah. Well, thank you, Doug.

Thank you for joining us today.

And thank you folks for listening.