The magic of hummingbirds: What no other bird on earth can do

Part of a series

By Anders and Beverly Gyllenhaal

The moment never ceases to amaze: One minute the hummingbird is flying along at speeds of up to 30 miles an hour. The next it skids to an instant halt in mid-air and hangs there suspended, its tiny translucent wings beating at an astounding 80 times a second to keep it aloft.

Nothing else on Earth can do what this tiny helicopter of a bird can, moving backward and forward, up and down with a metabolism that runs ten times faster than humans. And that’s just the beginning of the magic of the hummingbird, the subject of revealing new studies uncovering its wonders.

Every summer we stay a few weeks in the Berkshire Mountains in western Massachusetts. We spend hours watching the local band of Ruby-throated Hummingbirds, by far the dominant species in the eastern U.S., as they prepare for their migrations south now getting started.

These birds put on a miniature circus with their acrobatics, costumes of shimmering plumage and mid-flight battles that rival any high-wire act you can imagine. And all of that reaches an accelerated pitch as they prepare for the thousands of miles of migration that await them at the summer’s end.

We’re reposting this story to celebrate the migration getting started. This was the first of three parts on hummingbirds that originally ran in 2024. This piece explores the hummingbirds’ astounding acrobats. A second post addresses their combative nature, and a third post answersw questions from the more than 100,000 readers that wrote in during the weeks these stories first ran.

There’s no better time to watch these birds at work in the Eastern U.S. than during the late summer, partly enabled by hummingbird feeders that open a window on their sheer beauty. On many days, their comings and goings around the feeders stretch from dawn to dusk, like a tiny airport without a tower.

This post and its photos are devoted mostly to females, and the second one is focused on males. The two are very different, of course: males are far more aggressive and more colorful with bright red throats that give them their name. Females are slightly larger with understated plumage that’s nonetheless breathtaking when caught in mid-air as these next photos show:

If the sugar water runs out in a hummingbird feeder, birds will let us know with a close buzzing loud enough to startle you. The first time this happened, we couldn’t believe they were sending us a message. But we soon discovered that other bird lovers have had the same experience. My sister Liza and her husband Bill live on the edge of West Stockridge, Mass., surrounded by woods full of hummingbirds. It’s a great place to watch the birds, some days stacking six deep around their feeders.

The feeders are helpful to the birds as they stock up on food. But they also allow us to get a close-up look we wouldn’t otherwise get. When the light is right and the birds are plentiful, I’ll set up my camera on a tripod for hours at a time and try to catch them in action for a look at their mechanics that unfolds too rapidly to see with the naked eye. Here are some of the favorite shots:

Much separates the hummingbird from other species, starting with their miniature size of about three inches long, weighing just 2 to 6 grams, or the heft of a penny. As they sit on a branch for a break, you can literally see their rapid-fire metabolism at work, shaking their tiny bodies as they look this way and that. Their hearts beat as fast as 1,200 times a minute, an overheated engine that demands they eat every ten or 15 minutes — consuming half their body’s weight every day. For a human, that would be like drinking 18 gallons of milk a day.

But it is the hummingbird’s shimmering plumage that stands out and has been the subject of the most recent research. A new study, originally published in the journal Communications Biology and featured in a cover story of the latest Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s magazine LivingBird, found that the world’s hummingbirds are not only the most colorful of all species — but they include more hues and shades than the rest of the globe’s birds combined. (Very much worth reading, you can find the article and its many stunning photos here.)

Most of that rainbow of color is found in the male hummingbirds, which are the topic of our second post in this series. We’ll explore how the bird’s feathers project such an array of shades, why they’re so combative and what the latest research is discovering. You can check out that next post here.