Rufous Hummingbird

Rufous Hummingbird

Madera Canyon, Arizona
July 2019
Member of the Hummingbird Family
§A Bouquet of Hummingbirds§

★The Longest Migration Route of all North American Hummingbirds★

★The Northernmost Breeding Hummingbird★

~True Bird Fact~ So, about that Migration Route- it's really pretty impressive. They travel nearly 4000 miles from Mexico to Alaska along the pacific coast, and then back down along the Rocky Mountains. And they do this every year, and at such an incredibly small body size. This migration is among the most impressive in the animal kingdom. Tough birds! Also, helpful, since their strange clockwise route makes them significant pollinators across a really large area.

~Additional Hummingbird Fact~ Hummingbirds are fast, but not so fast that they have no predators. Often these are the same animals that eat insects, which despite previous claims on this blog, does not mean that Hummingbirds are bugs. However, a clever defense that many birds employ is building a nest in a tree occupied by a bird of prey. These predatory birds are too slow and big to be interested in the small and zippy hummingbird, but they do eat the things that eat Hummingbirds. Smart!

How Endangered Are They? I was surprised, dear reader, to see Rufous Hummingbirds were on the IUCN as a Near Threatened Species. After all, there are a lot of them. 19 million, by the IUCN's own estimates. So what is endangering this bird, exactly? Well, it's actually that exacting and specific migration route. See, if something goes wrong at any of those spots, it impacts the hummingbird. Largely we're talking about climate change here, and the spring flowers blooming too early for hummingbirds to feed off of them. But also they are going to be impacted by the large insect die-offs that result from increased use of pesticides in agriculture. Population numbers have been estimated to have dropped by 60% since 1970.