Plant Talk

Yes Hummingbirds Over-Winter Here - And the Males Are in Full Courtship Mode

Anna's Hummingbirds spend all year here in the Pacific Northwest - which is why we all need to plant a mahonia or two, and our native flowering currant for them to feed on...

Ellen Blackstone of BirdNote filled me in on the Valentines Day shenanigans (okay, really, the late winter courtship) of these vibratory little beauties. "The males are really gearing up right now, displaying for females", she writes.  Cornell's Birds of North America calls the courtship action “the most elaborate and spectacular dive displays of any North American hummingbird.”

Ellen describes it like this; "The male does his little buzzy thing, then zooms almost straight up into the air. When he hits the top of his flight, he all but disappears and -- almost simultaneously -- you hear a fairly loud POP. You might find it hard to believe that the sound was made by a bird, let alone a tiny little hummingbird." Wikipedia says that male Anna's are the only hummers that sing during courtship.

Just think - all this romantic drama is happening outside in our gardens right now - especially if you've planted to nurture our native hummers over the winter. Think how much nourishment they must need to keep up these spectacular mating rituals! (Anna's hummers eat insects and spiders as well as nectar).

Once the whole courtship affair is over, the female raises the family on her own, from building the nest, to incubating, to feeding and tending the young. And it's not uncommon for them to be nesting right now.  Learn more about Anna's Hummingbirds here.

Thanks to Tom Grey for these great photos - 

Here's the male Anna's Hummer, hovering, perhaps in preparation for his romantic sky diving - he looks pretty  cocky, doesn't he, for a bird that is about four inches long and weighs less than a nickel?

Female Anna's are sitting on nests out there right now...

A mother Anna's feeds her babies - truly, a single mother, doing all the work herself...

Poem for the Vernal Equinox

 
Finally, spring arrives with its abundance of work and pleasures. Since all the little birds rustling around our gardens herald the season, here's a bird poem in celebration of the equinox. Who but D.H. Lawrence could evoke a giant, scary hummingbird? ...From the beautiful little book  Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds, edited by Billy Collins (Columbia University Press, 2010).

Humming-Bird

I can imagine, in some otherworld

Primeval-dumb, far back

In that most awful stillness, that only gasped and hummed,

Humming-birds raced down the avenues.

 

Before anything had a soul,

While life was a heave of mater, half inanimate,

This little bit chipped off in brilliance

And went whizzing through the slow, vast, succulent stems.

 

I believe there were no flowers then,

In the world where the humming-bird flashed ahead of creation.

I believe he pierced the slow vegetable veins with his long beak.

 

Probably he was big

As mosses, and little lizards, they say, were once big.

Probably he was a jabbing, terrifying monster.

We look at him through the wrong end of the long telescope of Time,

Luckily for us.

                                                     

Feed The Hummers All Winter

  It's easy to keep hummingbirds happy in the summer - it only takes a few lobelia, fuchsias, agastache, sage, or honeysuckle to have hummingbirds whirring madly around your garden. But it's now, in the bleakness of winter, that our native overwintering Anna's hummingbirds need help finding sustenance. 

Nix that sticky red sugar syrup and beautify your garden with winter-blooming plants beloved by hummers. Indian Plum and salmonberry are native plants that bloom in the first months of the year. Starting early in January, winter jasmine (Jasminum nudiflorum) brightens the garden while nourishing hummingbirds. The bold evergreen foliage of Mahonia x media 'Arthur Menzies' is topped with huge racemes of fragrant yellow flowers this month. When the mahonia flowers fade, winter flowering currant (Ribes sanguineum) flowers through March. By that time, bleeding hearts, columbines, snowberry and elderberry are beginning to flower to carry the hummingbirds into spring.

Mahonia

 

Winter jasmine and red flowering currant