The Hummingbird: America's Tiny Jewel That Flies Like No Other Bird

A shimmering blur of emerald and ruby hangs in the air beside a flower, its wings a near-invisible haze, and then in a heartbeat it darts away and is gone. Few sights in nature are as magical as a hummingbird in flight, and few creatures pack so many astonishing records into such a tiny, jewel-like body.

Found only in the Americas

Unlike almost any other family of birds, hummingbirds live exclusively in the Americas, from the cold edges of Alaska all the way down to the southern tip of Argentina. Nowhere else on Earth will you find these tiny fliers in the wild, which makes them a truly special treasure of the New World.

There are more than three hundred different species of hummingbird, and they count among the smallest birds on the planet. Their dazzling, metallic colors are not painted on with pigment, but shimmer and shift with the light, giving them the appearance of tiny living gemstones flitting through the air.

A master of hovering flight

The hummingbird owes its name to the soft humming sound made by its blindingly fast wings. Rather than simply flapping up and down, its wings trace a figure-eight pattern in the air, beating dozens of times every single second and reaching up to eighty beats per second in the smallest species.

This remarkable technique allows the hummingbird to do things no other bird can manage. It can hang perfectly still in the air like a helicopter, fly sideways, and is even the only bird in the world capable of flying backward, all while sipping nectar from a delicate flower without ever landing.

A body in overdrive

All this frantic activity comes at an enormous cost, for the hummingbird runs its body at an almost unbelievable pace. It has the fastest metabolism of any warm-blooded animal on Earth, burning energy at a rate roughly a hundred times faster than that of a giant elephant.

To keep such a furnace burning, its tiny heart can race at more than one thousand two hundred beats per minute while it flies. Living life at this breakneck speed means the hummingbird is almost always on the edge of running out of fuel and must feed again and again throughout the day.

Powered by nectar

To satisfy this endless hunger, the hummingbird lives mainly on the sugary nectar hidden deep inside flowers, which it laps up with a long, brush-tipped tongue. The sugar provides instant energy, and in a single day a hummingbird may drink an amount of nectar that rivals its own body weight.

Nectar alone, however, is not enough to keep it healthy. To gather the protein its body needs, the hummingbird also snaps up tiny insects and spiders on the wing. In return for their meals, these busy little birds pollinate countless flowers as they move from bloom to bloom.

Surviving the cold night

A creature that burns energy so quickly faces a serious problem when the sun goes down and the flowers close. To avoid starving during the cold night, the hummingbird performs an astonishing trick, sinking into a deep, sleep-like state known as torpor that resembles a brief hibernation.

During torpor its heart slows dramatically and its body temperature can tumble from around forty degrees to as low as nine degrees Celsius. In this way it saves precious energy until dawn, when it slowly warms itself back up and returns once more to its dazzling, high-speed life.

The epic journey of a tiny traveler

Perhaps most incredible of all is the journey many hummingbirds undertake each year. The ruby-throated hummingbird, weighing no more than a small coin, flies nonstop across the Gulf of Mexico, a punishing crossing of more than five hundred miles of open water without a single place to rest.

Every autumn, millions of these tiny travelers leave the eastern United States and Canada to spend the winter in the warmth of Mexico and Central America. Protecting the flowers, gardens and wild habitats they depend on is the surest way to keep these living jewels shimmering in our skies.