Ruby Throat 101

OK, I know I said that the post from a couple weeks ago would be the last hummingbird post but we were asking ourselves at breakfast a couple days ago about when the fall migration starts. The answer is that, in some parts of the country, it's already begun. The Ruby Throat Hummingbird lives in the eastern 2/3rds of the US and into Canada during the summer. They migrate to Central America in the winter. They are the only hummingbird found in Texas and in much of their habitat area. In North Texas they begin arriving in the latter part of March each year and, by mid-November, the fall migration to Central America is complete. So we'll only have our little visitors for a few more weeks.


A couple interesting facts I discovered while researching this: (a) To determine how many birds are visiting your property each day, you should count the most birds that you see at one time and multiple by five. Our picture above has nine hummers in it and when we made it there were more birds hovering outside of the camera range and perched in a couple trees so a total of 15 would not be unreasonable - times 5 is 75. That's a lot of hummers! (b) During migration the birds you see today are not the birds you saw yesterday. The ones that were here yesterday are gone. Both of these 'facts' are hard for me to accept but they're from published works!


Theres also a web site devoted to these little ones - http://www.rubythroat.org/