Some new hummingbird pics

Had these sitting around since the beginning of summer, taken on the 10th, 13th and 15th of June. The location is at my house in Poulsbo Washington.

Rufous Hummingbirds vigorously defend food sources, so this is a rare occurance. Note the fluid in the feeder is clear, artificial colors don't do hummers any good.

Patiently observing

Rapid wingbeats

Male on favorite Eucalyptus perch

Gorget catching the sun as he lands

Balancing on the feeder

Gorget on male Rufous

Hovering before landing to make sure the area is clear

A little rainy

The first new post in a while. Added significant commentary as taken from my paper.

I've broken up the paper that I wrote for the class by date and added portions of it to the appropriate pictures. Much of what was in the paper was taken directly from my field notes. The papers and books referenced throughout are below:

DuBois, Dawes. A. “Observations at a Rufous Hummingbird’s Nest.” The Auk. Oct 1938. Vol.55, Iss. 4; pg. 629

DuBois, Dawes. A. “An Experiment with a Rufous Hummingbird.” The Condor. Oct, 1923. Pg 157

Montgomerie, Robert. D. Catherine A. Redsell. “A Nesting Hummingbird Feeding Solely on Arthropods.” The Condor, 82: The Cooper Ornithological Society 1980.

Sprot G.D. “Notes on the Courtship of the Rufous Hummingbird.” The Condor. Jan 1927. Vol 39.

Tekiela, Stan. Birds of Washington. Adventure Publications Inc. Cambridge, MN. 2001.

Welcome to my Rufous Hummingbird Project Photo Blog

These pictures were taken from April 21 to May 26 on Sehome Hill beside the Western Washington University campus in Bellingham. This was part of a paper/project assignment in my Ornithology 463 class.
If you want to watch the nest's occupants change over time, scroll to the bottom of this page and work your way up (otherwise it will be chronologically backwards).
Click on a picture to view it in more detail.
All pictures taken with a Konica Minolta Z1.

May 26, nobody home. Both chicks have successfully fledged and left the nest.

May 22^nd marks the end of my experiment, the nest is empty. I checked around the area for any sign of the chicks or mother but none could be found and I must assume that the fledglings were successful and left the nest. There is no visible damage to the nest so a large predator such as a crow or squirrel would not be suspected. I feel fortunate to have been able to watch the development of both chicks to completion. Indeed, only 20-50% of hummingbird eggs ever make it to fledgling stage, much less both at once, so I guess the good mothering of the Hummingbird is to thank for my experience. The nest in Dubois’ observational study was unfortunately abandoned 11 days after hatching.

Close examination of the nest after the fledglings left allowed me to analyze its construction. The rim was composed of moss and lichen bound with spider web, and the interior cushioning was provided by cotton from the nearby cottonwood trees. The nest did certainly expand with the nestlings, and the top rim was beginning to sag down when I examined it. The rim was about 3.5cm on the inside diameter and 2 cm deep.

May 20, coloration is the same as that of the mother.

May 20, their last day in the nest. They actually look like hummingbirds now.

May 20^th holds a surprise for me; I approached to photograph the now very adult-appearing chicks, when they both chirp and leap from the nest and glide to a nearby snowberry bush. I was not expecting such a reaction especially given their mother’s behavior in the past of simply sitting silently on the nest. I located the smaller of the two chicks on the ground clinging to a twig, horizontally, with its head against another twig, and its neck bent in an awkward angle. The bird did not in any way look capable of flying back to the nest by itself, so I gently worked my fingers underneath it and pulled it from the twig. Amazingly, it makes no attempt to escape or struggle. In my hand the incredible heart rate makes it feel like something humming with electricity. I carefully place it back into the nest and it appears unharmed by the whole incident. The larger sibling is another story, I cannot locate it in the bush for about 20 minutes, and fearing that I might step on it, I stand back to see if it might be able to make its own way back to the nest. After a few minutes, the chick in the bush begins producing a surprisingly loud chirp every 10 seconds. I do not know if it means to call its mother, and even if it did attract her attention, I do not see how she could help it back to the nest. So I decided not to leave it up to chance and located the chick via its chirps and carefully returned it to the nest, with only a mild struggle. In less than 1 minute, both chicks have settled back into the nest as they were when I arrived. The mother returns soon and feeds them as normal, so I believe that no permanent damage was done. The incident does, however, prove that they have some limited flight capability at this point, and being the 20^th day after hatching, the chicks are close to being ready to leave the nest. (Tekiela 2001) Also on the 20^th I observe for the first time that the chicks are preening themselves. The mother has been observed preening many times while perched on nearby branches or on the nest. This is yet another adult function at which the chicks must be proficient before they are ready for life on their own.

May 18, siblings in the nest. Starting to look like their mother.

May 17, close up of the nest. The mother no longer sits on the nest during the day, only at night.

May 17, the nest can barely contain them, eyes finally open, feathers no longer just bristles.

On May 17^th the chicks have again grown a great deal, their beaks now appear to be very close to full adult length, and their eyes are open. I again try to measure the temperature of the nest, but the larger chick defends the nest by rapidly beating at my hand with its wing. Worried that this might damage the young birds’ wing, I do not attempt to measure the temperature again.

May 11, mother on her favorite perch again.

May 11, mother watching over young.

May 11^th marks a significant change in nesting behavior for the mother Rufous Hummingbird. Both chicks are much larger than on my previous visit, and they exhibit pinfeathers on their head and back. Both still appear to have their eyes closed, and one is slightly larger than the other, this size difference is observed for the remainder of the experiment. Their beaks have lengthened considerably, but this does not seem to make feeding any more difficult than normal. The mother returns to the nest periodically to feed the chicks for about 15-45 seconds at a time, but never do I witness her actually sit on the nest. This attests to the fact that they must now be fully capable of maintaining their own body temperature, except, perhaps, at night.

May 11, they are starting to actually look like birds now, or porcupines. Beaks narrowing and lengthening, hairy down giving way to feather roots. Still blind though.

May 6, chicks starting to fill the nest.

May 6^th brings a tense interaction between the mother rufous and a hapless chipmunk. A sudden cacophony of chattering and squeaks instantly brought my attention to a Douglas fir about 3 feet behind the nest. The hummingbird was hovering over and chattering at a chipmunk that had ventured too close to the nest, this furious attack sent the chipmunk about 30 feet up the fir, where it sat on a branch and no longer seemed to care about the diving hummingbird, which had followed it up the tree. The hummer eventually returns to her nest, I am impressed with her ferocity in defending the nest, especially considering that many birds will readily abandon nests. The chipmunk, however, does not seem to get the message and descends the tree again, and is attacked a second time. The chipmunk runs across the trail, hummer in tow, and dashes into the snowberry bushes where it cowers for some time after the hummer has left. The mother rufous returns to her nest and sits on it for almost an hour, leading me to wonder if she felt threatened and so became extra protective.

May 6, silhouette of mother on branch.

May 6, closeup of mother Rufous on perch.

May 4, mother feeding hatchlings.

May 4, both hatchlings growing quickly, beaks delta shaped and fine downy feathers emerging on back.

May 1, mother feeding the hatchlings.

May 1, mother sitting on the hatchlings.

May 1, the second egg has hatched (5pm), the orange thing is just a Douglas Fir needle.

May 1, good profile shot of the mother, taking a short break from feeding the newly hatched chick.

May 1, when I arrived at the nest, one hatchling had emerged (3pm).

May 1^st marked an important day in the progress of my observations. When I arrived, the mother was sitting on the nest, and the first time she left to feed I approached and looked into the nest to see that one of the eggs had hatched. The altricial hatchling was tiny, black in color, completely naked, and its bulging eyes were sealed closed. The mother left for a minute and when she returned I witnessed the first of many feedings. The mother hummer stood on the edge of the nest and leaned down into it to insert her beak into the throat of the hungry hatchling; she then made repeated slight bobs with her neck and throat, regurgitating the nectar/insect mix. Another hummingbird flew near to the nest a few minutes later and the mother rufous went on the defense, hovering near the other bird and chirping incessantly, it left hastily, I doubt that it had any knowledge of the nest. Upon returning from the encounter, she feeds the chick for about 30 seconds. When she leaves again later to feed, I get a good look at her foraging habits. First she hovered around and over a patch of thimbleberry flowers, pausing at a few, then flew to the upper end of the cedar containing her nest where there was a swarm of gnats illuminated by a sunbeam from the canopy. I observed her hovering in and swooping through the swarm of gnats for a few minutes. After returning to the nest, she left again and visited the flowers of the big leaf maple covering much of the area, returned to the thimbleberry flowers and finally back to the nest where she fed the hatchling again. After about 45 minutes, she left again, and I moved closer to the nest hoping to watch the feeding up close, but upon return, she refused to land in the nest and hovered around my head chattering until I retreated to about 8 feet away. The next time that she left I moved up to the nest for more photographs and discovered that during the two hours since I first looked into the nest, the second egg had hatched. The new hatchling only had its head out of the shell, the rest of its body was covered. Later I approach to photograph her feeding the chicks, but she is frightened off of the nest and lands on a nearby branch where she remains until I have backed off for about 1 minute. When returning to the nest after each foray, she almost always follows a pattern that has her hovering about the top of the cedar 15 feet uphill of the nest, then descending to a bare branch at about the height of the nest but 5 feet to the side. After observing the area for about 30 seconds, she will finally return to the nest.

April 28, two white eggs in nest, each about 1.25cm long.

The 28^th marked the first day that I attempted a secondary experiment with a small homemade hummingbird feeder that I constructed from plastic bottles and red paper, filled with the appropriate 1:4 sugar water solution. I placed the feeder on a small concrete structure located about 30 ft from the rufous nest. No hummingbirds were ever observed at the feeder, though I knew they were in the area because I heard them in the canopy quite frequently. This experiment, after being tried three more times on other occasions, never successfully drew any hummingbirds, though I did once place the contraption in my window and observed a male rufous inspect it, but the wind from his wings was sufficient to rustle the paper flower and he flew away.

April 24, mother sitting on nest.

On April 24 I returned to the nest site for more extensive observation. The mother was sitting on her eggs when I arrived, and stayed there for about 20 minutes when she abruptly left but returned just 4 minutes later. I sat for 2 more hours, recording the frequency and length of her forays for (presumably) food. I can only assume that she was leaving to feed, the heavily wooded area made it impossible to follow her for any significant length of time. At this stage, she was only observed to be gone for up to 6 minutes at a time. This seems to be in contrast with the observations of DuBois, who noted that the nesting mother that he observed was gone for up to an hour while eggs were in the nest. This may be due to the warmer climate at his experimental site in July at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Montana. April 28 was much the same, the mother Rufous was on the nest most of the time, leaving when I approached, probably because I wore a red shirt, a color known to be attractive (and thus highly visible) to hummingbirds. For 1.5 hours I recorded her time spent on and off the nest, coming to calculate that she spent about 94% of the time on the nest incubating the eggs.

April 21, good view of nest construction including spiderwebs.

April 21, the mother Rufous sitting on her nest.


I consider myself very fortunate to have wandered past the nest of a mother Rufous (April 20) for the brief time that she was not incubating her eggs, and so I heard the hum of her wings as she inspected a nearby huckleberry bush; had she been sitting on the nest, I never would have discovered it. This brief encounter led me to think about what sort of observations I could make of the mother hummer and her nest over the next month or so that it would take for the young to develop. (Tekiela ) First, I noted some of the general behavior characteristics of the hummingbird as she foraged. She would hover from flower to flower of the huckleberry, chirping each time she made any adjustment to her body position. This results in a sort of random, high pitched series of chirps underlain by the constant thrum of the wings. She only remained at the bush for a moment before alighting on what I thought at the time was just a clump of moss on a cedar branch just above the trail. On closer inspection, the clump of moss was revealed to be a tiny cup nest. Only 3-4 minutes passed before a jogger came by on the trail, and the hummer left the nest. I then approached the nest to peer inside, and discovered two bright white eggs. The nest appeared to be about 3cm across the inside rim, and 1.5cm deep. Each egg was about 1.25cm long, which seemed large considering the size of the mother. I decided that it would be best not to disturb the area any further. Other hummingbirds were heard flying in the canopy, it is fairly easy to distinguish male and female Rufous hummingbirds as the females flight is a hum, but the male flies with more of a ‘zing,’ or whistling hum.