hummingbirds in winter?

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“There are only two ways to live your life,” wrote physicist Albert Einstein. “One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”

If you buy into the latter, then hummingbirds should be high on your list of wonderments.

We all know hummingbirds, the rubythroats, the three-gram pixies. They breeze into our state in early April, really a trickle of adult males early on. Most are just passing through on their way to claim territories farther north. They pause for a day or two to visit Red Buckeyes and our sugar-water feeders. The adult females follow the males, but always keep in mind that both genders have survived an incredible nighttime migration across the Gulf of Mexico. That’s an eight to 18-hour non-stop flight.

Migration essentially ends by mid-May, so if you have hummers visiting your feeders then through July those are your ruby-throats, probably nesting in the trees nearby.

Activity at the feeders picks up in late July and lasts until October. The mothers teach their young ones the importance of feeders. Plus thousands of migrants begin in July to journey southward, back across the gulf to Southern Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, Honduras and other tropical locations. By the end of October they are all gone, a whirling dervish of activity then poof, it is over. Well, that was what we once believed.

But nature is no stranger to change. No one is quite sure when a different species of hummingbird started spending its winters, at least in part, in the Southeast including Tennessee....

For the rest of my article read the November/December issue of The Tennessee Conservationist.

By definition, any hummingbird that shows up at your home between November 15 and March 15 is a "wintering" hummingbird. If this happens, get in touch with me and I will let Mark Armstrong know. 

Thank you, Louise Zepp, the editor of the Tennessee Conservationist.



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