By RICK BORCHELT
Courtesy of Dave Weth
I was working in my garden on Hallowe’en 2010, consigning spent pepper and tomato plants to the compost pile and seeding winter lettuce and chard in the space they left behind. There was still quite a bit in bloom: old-fashioned red cannas, pineapple sage, cypress vine in the mornings, before it turned warm during the day. One of those perfect October days we sometimes get here in the D.C. suburbs.
I had taken down and cleaned my hummingbird feeder a few weeks earlier; the big push of southbound ruby-throated hummingbirds (Archilochus colubris, our only breeding hummingbird in the eastern U.S.) had come and gone.
Imagine my surprise, then, when a very plain but very vocal hummingbird showed up, scolding me for blocking access to the garden. I retired to the porch steps to watch as it worked over the flowers, figuring it would tank up on nectar to fuel its migration south, and eventually over the Gulf of Mexico, to join its fellow ruby-throats in the tropics.
Next morning, though, the bird was back. And kept coming back. A week. Two weeks. I got out the hummingbird feeder and restocked it with sugar water, and the little avian sprite visited avidly. All this time, it kept up a near constant chatter, so unlike what I expect from our summer hummingbirds.
Thanksgiving neared, and I managed to snag a few decent photos of the hummer to send around to colleagues in the local birding community. The response was almost immediate: While my photos weren’t definitive, the late date and vocalizations suggested this was decidedly not a ruby-throated hummingbird.
It turns out that Maryland hosts a number of other hummingbird species, even in the winter. Who knew?
Many of these appear to be birds that nest in the Rockies, and they mostly migrate up and down that mountain range. Sometimes, though, a few of those western hummingbirds overshoot their mountain migratory route and keep going. There’s not much to stop them as they fly east until they hit the Atlantic — and that drops them right here in Maryland.
While some continue to follow the coast south, a surprising number decide to stick it out here through the depths of winter. Even then, Maryland must seem a balmy respite from the chills in the high reaches of the Rockies.
Courtesy of Michelle Lynn Reynolds
Every year, a few ruby-throats hang on here for the winter, to be sure. But we now know they are usually outnumbered by visiting species. Of the wandering hummingbirds we’re most likely to see in our area during the cold months, most belong to the genus Selasphorus. Rufous hummingbird (Selasphorus rufus) tops the list with many more local winter sightings than any other species, but Allen’s (Selasphorus sasin) and Calliope (Selasphorus calliope) hummingbirds also make the roster from time to time. Another winter hummingbird we occasionally see here is a closer relative of the ruby-throat, the black-chinned hummingbird (Archilochus alexandri). This aberrant migration pattern was probably happening long before anyone started hanging up feeders to tide hummingbirds over during the dearth of flowers. Their winter diet likely consisted mostly of insects and their eggs, with occasional visits to drink carbohydrate-rich sap welling from holes that sapsuckers and other woodpeckers drill.
While the original purpose of hummingbird feeders was to provide winter sustenance for the birds when no nectar is available, the feeders also draw the birds closer, making it easy for us to spot them.
So I hung my feeder in a sheltered spot, bringing it in after dark so the sugar water wouldn’t freeze solid, and rehanging it at first light. My hummingbird visitor arrived every morning at sunrise.
Courtesy of Rick Borchelt
Eventually, Bruce Peterjohn, who was head of the Bird Banding Laboratory at Patuxent Wildlife Research Center at the time, heard about my College Park visitor and came to identify it. ID required trapping the small bird in a cage that he hung over the feeder — it took just a few minutes for the bird to fly in. Bruce grabbed it deftly and quickly ascertained (based mostly on the pattern of white on the hummer’s tail when spread) that it was a first-year female rufous hummingbird. While he had it in hand, Bruce fitted the bird with a tiny leg band with a unique code so it could be identified if it were trapped later at another location.
Unfazed by the trapping experience, the rufous hung around in the yard, alternately tapping the feeder and snapping up tiny fruit flies that gathered around rotting apples and bananas I’d hung up in the trees as fly bait.
Christmas came. We had a 6-inch snowfall that my visitor shrugged off as she went about her business. We had a couple of cold snaps; I fixed up a lightbulb to hang next to the feeder to keep it from freezing.
But at sunrise on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, no hummingbird showed up, and that was the last I saw of my visitor. Mid-January is about the time when western hummingbirds overwintering in the tropics start to get restless to move back north toward their summer range in the Rockies. Likely my visitor was seized with the same wanderlust.
Every year since, in eternal optimism, I’ve kept my hummingbird feeder up past Thanksgiving, cleaned and filled with fresh sugar water, in the hopes of snagging another winter hummer. Maybe 2024 will be the year!
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Have questions for Rick about the world of nature in and around the Maryland suburbs or suggestions for future columns? Drop him a note at rborchelt@gmail.com.
