Campbell Vaughn: Hummingbirds are back and are amazing
When trying to get out of town some during the kid’s spring break, I usually try and head to the family cabin up near the lake in Lincoln County. It is quiet and it gives me a chance to breathe deep.
There are always thousands of projects to work on when you have an old cabin in the woods and years ago I decided to plant some native plants in some little pockets in the woods. I visited my buddies at Nurseries Caroliniana over in North Augusta and found some small native plants and smattered them around the place. One of the plants I bought has done amazingly well and is a great reminder of a fun event that happens once a year.
When I am visiting the cabin around spring break, the red tubular blooms on the red buckeye (Aesculus pavia) are always the first time I will see a hummingbird for the season. This year was no different. How do they know when to arrive?
Rumors had been spreading that the hummingbirds were on the way which prompted me to put out my feeders at my house in Augusta. I hadn’t seen nary a one for the couple weeks leading up to Masters Week and after seeing them on my blooming buckeye, I came back home and the female ruby-throated hummingbirds were busy zipping all around the feeder on my back porch.
Being the only hummingbird known to breed east of the Mississippi River, the ruby-throated in our area’s only summer hummingbird visitor. These little guys over winter in Mexico and Central America and move into the eastern US all the way to Canada come spring.
When I say little guys, these Georgia frequenters weigh in at a whopping 3.5 to 6 grams. I did the conversion to US weights and that is about 1/100th of a pound. The reason the birds have such a wide spreading body weight is that they need the body fat to fly the 500-mile nonstop flight they do in an 18- to 22-hour period. If I could lose that much weight in such a short period of time, maybe I need to learn to fly.
Campbell Vaughn: Few plants can rival the color display of azaleas
Campbell Vaughn: Time has come to take care of your grass
The spring migration does coincide with the blooms of native plants like the red buckeye and columbine. Since hummingbirds are actually very good pollinators, scientist believe that close to 20 plants found in the eastern U.S. have co-evolved with hummingbirds. This evolutionary relationship has a lot to do with the plants that flower with a tubular shape because of the long slender form of the hummingbird’s bill. The bill fits deep into the bloom to use its forked tongue to lap nectar. In the process of feeding on this carbohydrate rich nectar, the hummingbird will collect pollen on its feathers and bill to pollinate other plants.
Another fascinating fact that I learned recently, mostly because I never put two and two together, is that hummingbirds actually eat a lot of insects. I always wondered how those little guys just drank sugar water and their hearts never exploded. They do catch insects that give them fat and protein to build up muscle mass for the 50 times per second they flap their wings as well as added weight for their long seasonal migrations. The sugar water that I feed them in my porch feeder helps their hearts with the sometimes as high as 1,200 beats per second boost they get from the almost instant carbohydrate load. I wonder how fast my son’s heart was beating after the 4 pounds of Easter candy he inhaled last weekend.
Hummingbirds are such amazing birds. If you haven’t tried getting a feeder out to supplement their diets and enjoying the buzzing around, don’t delay. You won’t regret it.
This article originally appeared on Augusta Chronicle: Campbell Vaughn talks about the amazing hummingbirds
