Flying jewels': Hummingbirds among world's most beautiful and acrobatic creatures
By GINNY SMITH - The Philadelphia Inquirer Published: Fri, May. 15, 2009 12:22PM
It's easy to imagine those long, opportunity-seeking beaks acting like straws inside the flower tubes. But this, Hilton explains, is yet another myth: Hummers don't suck nectar through their beaks. Their brushy-tipped, gray tongues lap it up.
And feeders, like nesting turf, bring out their territorial nature. Ney at Tyler recalls standing with friends in front of a house in Ohiopyle, Pa., watching hummingbirds scrap over five feeders on the porch.
“It was very entertaining. The birds were zooming around, grabbing sips of sugar water, and jockeying for position,” she says. While they were definitely being aggressive, there was no body checking.
That's been Kimball's experience, too. “It's all for show, a show of strength,” she says.
Males - ahem - seem to do a lot of “showing.” For all their theatrics, they spend most of their time perching on telephone wires, tree branches, and fences. Hummingbird feet are made for this, rather than walking.
In 30 years of observing, Gregg Aprill, who runs Leaming's Run Gardens in Cape May Court House, N.J., has never seen a hummer mating dance. But each year around the end of August, when the males are preparing to lead the journey south for the winter, he witnesses “an aerial circus.”
“Like bats, hummingbirds are amazing in the air,” he says. “They never actually run into anything, but they're moving around and tumbling around in the air. And the speed is ridiculous.”
Aprill recently planted more than 1,100 cranberry impatiens and red salvia seedlings in the “Serpentine Garden,” a snaking swath that attracts hundreds of hummers each summer. (Prime viewing is mid-August to mid-September.)
It's all fun, but for Hilton, it's also about science. “Everyone loves hummers for warm and fuzzy reasons,” he says, “but I try to get people to look at what else we can learn from them.”
Here's a big lesson, and though it sounds silly, it's actually quite profound, as if all of nature is reflected in that ruby throat.
“Hummingbirds are connected to everything else,” Hilton says, “just like everything else is connected to everything else.”