Second of three parts
By Anders and Beverly Gyllenhaal
One of the most intriguing traits of the male Ruby-throated Hummingbird is the shimmering red patch that covers its throat and changes its shades of color — sometimes disappearing entirely — depending on the angle you happen to be watching this iridescent bird.
The small piece of plumage is called a gorget, a term borrowed from the armor that knights wore to protect themselves in battle. It’s a fitting reference especially this time of year because the hummingbirds do a great imitation of miniature medieval combatants: they’re constantly dueling over the treasure of their kingdoms, the sweet nectar they live on.
We spent hours watching Ruby-throated Hummingbirds in Western Massachusetts each summer as they gear up for their upcoming migrations. That means they’re loading up on fuel for their flights and clashing with one another all day long. Our first post in this series focused mostly on the females among them, and this one is on the males.
The birds are famous for their infighting, which is attributed to the fact that nectar both from flowers and backyard feeders can be hard to come by. So once the birds find a source, they protect it as a matter of life and death.
Here’s one of our favorite videos from an earlier visit that, slowed down in places to catch the action, shows what it’s like in the hummingbird competition.
One recent day, the birds were especially active following a stretch of rain that left the nectar from the fields and flowers harder to find. So I set up my camera for most of the afternoon to catch the drama. Time and again, the birds would chase each other away from the feeder, sometimes circling one another like boxers, sometimes slamming into each other, using their long beaks like javelins.
Check out the introduction of our book, “A Wing and a Prayer: The Race to Save our Vanishing Bird,” posted here thanks to Simon and Schuster. It’s part adventure story, part detective tale about the people working to reverse the loss of a third of North America’s bird species.
When they get agitated enough, the bird’s tiny wings — beating up to 80 times a second — will buzz loud enough to startle you. At times, they’ll go into warning mode, flying in great circles that clearly are meant to frighten off their peers. It’s enough to even get us humans to back away.
Here’s a gallery of the action from that day:
Like many birds, the males get the better deal when it comes to plumage. The female Ruby-throated have elegant green and white feathers that are beautiful in their own right. But the males are adorned with the deeper green plumage against white chests and their orangish red gorgets that look like part of a tuxedo for a night on the town.
The mysteries of hummingbirds have been taken apart by researchers trying to understand how these birds produce such extraordinary colors. It turns out that what we see as orangish-red plumage on the bird’s throat, for instance, is the result of the refraction of light coming off the hummingbird’s multiple layers of feathers. This is true of many birds, but hummingbirds have taken the ability to twist and turn light to a singular level.
Can’t get enough of hummingbirds? Here are some of our most popular posts from around the hemisphere: How Ecuador’s massive hummingbird population defies the imagination; how Costa Rica’s hummingbirds come in every conceivable shape and hue; and here’s another dispatch from Massachusetts on the species summer antics.
Their feathers have evolved to pull off this trick with more variety than any other wildlife species. Researchers from Yale University, publishing in the journal Communication Biology, found the world’s 360 species of hummingbirds create more colors than all the rest of the globe’s 11,000 birds combined. (An excellent article on all of this can be found in the LivingBird magazine from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.)
The male birds aren’t doing this only for beauty’s sake. Their dramatic colors are the key to attracting females, the experts remind us. They’ve been so successful that when humans went to work naming these birds, they turned to phrases from precious jewels for more than 50 of the birds, from the rubies and emeralds to sapphires, topaz and amethysts.
We’ll wrap up this post with a gallery of hummingbirds from a trip to Ecuador, where this small country that straddles the Andes and the Amazon has more species than anywhere else on earth. Here are just a few of our favorites that illustrate the remarkable diversity of color, beaks, tails and gorgets, starting with the Sapphire-vented Puffleg and the Andean Emerald.
We’re rerunning this series of posts, which were originally published a year ago, to coincide with one of the most active seasons for hummingbirds in many parts of the U.S. as they begin their migration. The final installment coming next week takes up some of the many great questions about hummingbirds that readers asked in response to these stories.
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