A Hummingbird In My Patio the Other Day

Photo Credit: BirdLife International

The other day, while I was looking at my patio, I saw a hummingbird flying around my potted plants. The bird looks hungry, so I decided to purchase from Amazon the following two products.  

Kaytee Hummingbird ElectroNectar Wild Bird Food, Ready to Use, 64 Ounces

Kingsyard Glass Hummingbird Feeder for Outdoors Hanging - 6 Bee Guard Feeding Ports & Built-in Ant Moat, Wild Bird Feeder for Outside Garden Yard Patio 14 Oz, Updated Red

I was surprise to see one because, I thought they all migrate to warmer climates.

Many hummingbirds spend the winter in Central America or Mexico, and migrate north to their breeding grounds in the southern U.S. and western states as early as February, and to areas further north later in the spring. The first arrivals in spring are usually males.

Anyway what do you know about hummingbirds? Here's what I learned from birdlife.org website: 

https://www.birdlife.org/birds/hummingbird/ 

Hummingbird Temporal range: Rupelian 30–0 Ma  PreꞒ Ꞓ O S D C P T J K Pg N
Four hummingbirds from Trinidad and Tobago
Scientific classification
Domain:	Eukaryota
Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Class:	Aves
Clade:	Strisores
Order:	Apodiformes
Family:	Trochilidae Vigors, 1825
Type genus
Trochilus Linnaeus, 1758
Subfamilies
Subfamiles:

Hummingbirds are birds native to the Americas and comprise the biological familyTrochilidae. With about 366 species and 113 genera, they occur from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, but most species are found in Central and South America. About 28 hummingbird species are listed as endangered or critically endangered, with numerous species declining in population.

Hummingbirds have varied specialized characteristics to enable rapid, maneuverable flight, exceptional metabolic capacity, adaptations to high altitude, sensitive visual and communication abilities, and long-distance migration in some species. Among all birds, male hummingbirds have the widest diversity of plumage color, particularly in blues, greens, and purples. 

They are known as hummingbirds because of the humming sound created by their beating wings, which flap at high frequencies audible to other birds and humans. They hover at rapid wing-flapping rates, which vary from around 12 beats per second in the largest species to 80 per second in small hummingbirds.

Hummingbirds have the highest mass-specific metabolic rate of any homeothermicanimal. To conserve energy when food is scarce and at night when not foraging, they can enter torpor, a state similar to hibernation, and slow their metabolic rate to 1/15 of its normal rate. While most hummingbirds do not migrate, the rufous hummingbirdhas one of the longest migrations among birds, traveling twice per year between Alaska and Mexico, a distance of about 3,900 miles (6,300 km).

Hummingbirds split from their sister group, the swifts and treeswifts, around 42 million years ago. The oldest known fossil hummingbird is Eurotrochilus, from the Rupelian Stage of Early Oligocene Europe.( From Wikipedia)

Here are some photos I took with my humming bird feeder with Robin and Batman 

Meanwhile, here's my photo with Glenn and Steve taken during Tonya Boyd Cannon Concert last Wednesday here at THD.

Photo Credit: Jenny Shively