Bird with attitude

Have you ever wondered where hummingbirds would be without spiders? Me neither, until recently. My five-year-old daughter is captivated by “bugs,” and spiders are her favorite. It turns out that hummingbirds feel the same way.

How often have you been amazed at how tiny, yet how busy hummingbirds are? You don’t know the half of it. What they do is really quite impossible.

And can you ever reach a point where you can take for granted the incredible beauty of a hummingbird, especially a male hummingbird’s throat feathers when the sun strikes them just right?

In the Inland Northwest we have a hummingbird — the rufous hummingbird — that demands attention and inspires all sorts of questions, despite its small size compared to other birds. It is our most colorful, our most aggressive, our noisiest and our least fearful hummingbird. It does, in fact, have attitude!

It is the hummingbird at the feeder spending most of its time trying to drive away all the other hummingbirds. It is the hummingbird dive-bombing other, larger birds that happen into its territory. It is the hummingbird, especially should you be wearing something bright red, that will, without hesitation, fly right up and give you a close going over.

It is, in fact, the hummingbird that has on many occasions, while I was changing a feeder, or even just walking near one, flown right up and almost into my face, as if to make a rather belligerent point (its finger, if it had one, would be far too small, after all, to shake in my face). Believe me, it’s not easy to stand your ground in the face of such an attitude!

Despite the attitude, rufous hummingbirds are quite appealing birds to be around in many ways. It helps that they are themselves rather brightly colored when seen in the sun. They really stand out from other hummingbirds around the feeder.

Rufous hummingbirds, in fact, get their name from the rusty-red feathers that predominate on the males and accent the green of the females. Females are actually very distinctive compared to the females of our other two hummingbird species, the calliope and the black-chinned, which can be a challenge to identify.

The males, however, really stand out. Usually the only green they show is a small patch on each shoulder. This alone differentiates them from the green-backed calliope and black-chinned males. Their really outstanding feature, though, is the patch of feathers covering their throat.

Males of most hummingbird species have a distinctive, colored patch of throat feathers. In some species this is carried to the extreme and is called a “gorget.” In these species, the feathers can be erected so as to catch the sun and reflect colors so brightly that they actually flash. The gorget is essentially lacking in the black-chinned and is reduced to streaks in the calliope.

The male rufous is not at all frugal with its gorget, however. Its neck is covered in a sheet of these specialized feathers that glisten and glow in the sun, giving the bird a jewel-like appearance. They produce such a flash that they are used aggressively as male rufous hummers defend their territories.

They may also be used to attract females, although males rely heavily on some stunning aerial displays for that purpose. To us birders, they are a source of aesthetic pleasure.

To scientists, these feathers are a wonder of biology and physics combined. Most feathers appear a certain color due to pigments that reflect only that color, and the feathers will look that color in low as well as bright light.

Gorget feathers in most light appear a dull brown due to granules in the feather cells that contain the brown pigment melanin. Cells in these feathers, however, have an extra outer transparent layer and the granules contain microscopic air bubbles.

When light hits a gorget cell at just the right angle, it creates a mirror effect with refracted light being reflected outward. As with a rainbow, refraction separates the light into bands of its separate colors.

In the case of the rufous hummer’s gorget, light is refracted into bands of scarlet (seen when light hits the feathers straight on), coppery-orange (adjacent to the scarlet, where the feathers are tipped sideways just a bit), and lemon-yellow (at the outer edge of the refracted light, where the feathers are tipped the most).

We simply see the flash if the bird is flying, or the rich, jewel-like red if we are fortunate enough to catch one sitting in the sun. But if the gorget is in the shade, all you’ll see is a dull brown patch where once there were jewels. This effect can give the illusion of a battery powered bow tie that’s being turned on and off.

What else is amazing about rufous hummingbirds? There are whole chapters on the subject. Name a topic in bird biology and there is some astounding trivia to be recited.

“ Territoriality and nesting: Rufous hummingbird females defend their nesting territories, even from larger birds, alone, build their nests alone, and spend over a month incubating and feeding the young (usually two) alone. The males expend so much energy in defending breeding territories and attracting females for mating that they lose 20 percent of their body weight (and are thus too tired to help with the young, I’d guess), and tend to have shorter life spans than females.

“ Metabolism: A rufous hummingbird weighs about the same as a penny. It feeds frantically, then must rest — and repeats this cycle 15 times an hour. Its wings will beat 80 times a second while hovering. Its heart will beat 1,000 times a minute while flying. It will drink one and a half times its body weight in nectar each day.

“ Torpor: A rufous hummingbird has fewer feathers than most other birds to dissipate the huge amounts of heat generated by its metabolism and activity. Its body temperature can be higher than 110 degrees Fahrenheit while active. It can drop its body temperature to 50 degrees and go into a state of torpor when nectar supplies are short or the weather is unseasonably cold.

“ Migration: Rufous hummingbirds breed as far north as Alaska and winter in central Mexico — thus some will migrate as far as 2,700 miles one way. Males arrive back here first and leave first — some of this year’s breeders in our area are already back in Mexico now. They migrate singly, thus the young must have a genetic map that directs them. Spring migration tends to follow the Pacific coast, where weather moderates earliest, and fall migration follows the Rocky Mountains, where food supplies persist the longest.

And I could go on and on. The astounding facts of a hummingbird’s life seem endless. And the rufous hummingbird is uniquely different among the hummingbirds.

Oh yes, and what about the spiders? Well, it turns out that spiders are an important back-room player in the incredible world of the hummingbird. While we marvel at the beauty and the science of the male’s gorget, and as we find it hard to believe all the things such a small and delicate bird can do, it turns out that all of this is, quite literally, held together by spiders and their webs.

We tend to think of the hummingbird diet in terms of the nectar that they require to fuel their intense metabolism. And it’s true, hummingbirds burn energy at an astounding rate, thus the need for the pure calories that come from the sugar of plants and feeders. But hummingbirds cannot live on sugar alone.

Hummingbirds require vitamins, minerals, and, most important of all, proteins, just as do all the other birds. Without the calories from sugar you wouldn’t have a hovering, a backward-sideways-upside down flying, a 60 mile-per-hour streaking, an over 2,000-mile migrating, chattering and scolding dynamo we call a hummingbird. But without the structural building blocks from protein, you wouldn’t have the feathers, bones, muscles, and nerves that form the dynamo.

So, where do the vitamins, minerals, and proteins come from? Almost exclusively they come from the bugs my daughter so enjoys. And to a very large degree, they come from spiders, both directly and indirectly.

Hummingbirds eat spiders in all forms. They especially relish spider eggs and young, but they’ll readily take adult spiders if they are not too large. They even take spider prey from a spider’s web. They must be cautious, however, as a few hummingbirds have lost their lives getting caught in the stickiness of the web.

Recall that previously I said that spiders and their webs literally hold together the hummingbird’s world. You could say that spider proteins hold together the hummingbird, but that’s not literal, it’s figurative. Spider webs, however, literally hold together hummingbird nests.

The tiny cups (two inch diameter) that female hummingbirds form are made of small hairs, seed down and moss, held together by the delicate webs stolen from a nearby spider trap. Even the flakes of lichen used to camouflage the outside of the nest are held in place by the stickiness of web strands.

These nests are so sturdy that, at least in the case of the rufous hummingbird, they are often re-used from year to year. Now, that’s what I’d call being held together, literally!

As I said before, I could go on and on about hummingbird trivia. They are such fascinating and astounding birds. The more I learn about them, the harder it is for me to remember that they are, in fact, a bird, and not some totally unique type of creature.

But recently I had an opportunity to hold an injured male rufous hummingbird in my hand. It did indeed have feathers, albeit tiny feathers. Its wings were not transparent fairy wings, but had the same structure and form as all other bird wings. And it’s gorget was not composed of jewels, but feathers that were dull and unimpressive in the artificial light.

This bird was also not as indestructible and all-powerful as they seem in the tasks they perform and the attitude they display. This one had misjudged the inflexibility of a window. Up close, however, as it recovered in a cage next to the robin that had too soon left the nest and the crow that had underestimated the speed of a car, it was apparent that this hummer was indeed just a bird.

It was still a most impressive and a downright astounding creature, but so then are they all, including the robin and the crow, when you take a really good, close look. It’s just that hummingbirds don’t let you take them for granted the way robins and crows do. Rufous hummingbirds have attitude, an “in your face” attitude, literally.