Wednesday, August 2, 2017

Hummingbirds Up Close

We absolutely adore hummingbirds, and are fascinated by their aerial acrobatics. It is difficult to imagine how an organism like this could exist. They are amazing. By the way, Drew put tape over the holes of the feeder so the hummer would have to go to the one that the camera was focused on. Genius!

The female is so stunning, and visits the feeder first, followed by a disheveled male who could use a bit of grooming. Watch the nectar in the feeder move as the hummer's tongue disturbs it while drinking.

This is our 400th post on Maine Nature Diary, on Blogger!

2 comments:

Shepherdess55 said...

Laurie and Drew,

I enjoyed watching the hummingbird videos. In the second one, when the male is done drinking, you can see him flicking out his tongue almost as if he's licking his lips.

Earlier this summer a hummingbird trapped itself in our garage. No matter which doors I opened or closed, it couldn't find its way out. It eventually worked itself to exhaustion and fell to the floor. I scooped it up and tried to get it to eat from the hanging feeder. It was too exhausted to hang on. So I filled an eye dropper with nectar and placed it over the bird's beak. It drained the eye dropper lickety-split and a couple more too. Fascinating to see that thread like tongue lap up the nectar. I held it for a few more moments while it digested some of the nectar so it would have energy to fly to its roost for the night.

It you haven't seen it, PBS Nature has an awesome program on hummingbirds.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/super-hummingbirds-about/14472/

Laurie Haines said...

Neat story! Laurie