Lately I’ve been looking for birds in a small community garden near my daughter’s school in Orleans — as we saw with last week’s state-first Virginia’s Warbler, community gardens can yield a bountiful bird harvest in fall. This garden has patches of salvias and other tubular flowers, and I had a hunch they might attract a late or vagrant hummingbird. As I walked around the gardens yesterday morning, a small shape zipped through my peripheral vision, and I turned just in time to see a hummingbird land in a small, sunny locust. It began to preen, revealing bright rufous on the tail feathers and washed across the flanks — this was no local hummingbird. My hunch had paid off — this was a lost Rufous Hummingbird from western North America, and it was here to kick off rare hummingbird season on Cape Cod.
Rare hummingbird season is a real thing here, and it goes from early fall through late winter. There is only one species of hummingbird that breeds in the eastern U.S., our familiar Ruby-throated Hummingbird, but out west it’s a different story — the western mountains and deserts are littered with hummingbird species, and several of these have been recorded on the Cape and Islands in fall and winter. Believe it or not, six species of hummingbird have been recorded on Cape Cod in the month of December. Typically they show up in November at a house that still has a feeder up or in a community garden with lots of salvia.
Some of you have heard me say “keep your hummingbird feeders up in fall and winter”, and this is why. Mostly these late, lost hummingbirds turn out to be Rufous Hummingbirds, which breed up into southern Alaska and winter in Mexico, but we’ve also had Allen’s, Calliope, and even a Broad-billed Hummingbird from Mexico. Typically we get young birds, which require examination in the hand to identify. Luckily we have Sue Finnegan here on the Cape, one of just two bird banders in the state licensed to handle hummingbirds. She can trap, band, and release the mystery hummingbirds after identifying them to species. A Rufous Hummingbird that Sue banded at a feeder in South Orleans a couple of years ago stayed through the winter, thanks to the supplemental nectar, finally leaving in late April.
This may be hard to believe, but despite their famously high metabolisms, hummingbirds are tougher than people realize. As a group they are most common in cool mountains, including the high Andes. They eat a lot of small insects like aphids and midges, and if flowers are scarce they can make use of tree sap for a sugar source, often feeding at the holes of woodpeckers appropriately called sapsuckers. At night, hummers can drop their heart rate and go into a torpor to save energy. One spring, while doing research in the coastal rainforests of Washington, I shared a campsite with a female Rufous Hummingbird. It was cold, always wet, and little was flowering, but there she was, tending a nest all by herself. Sometimes she would land in my fire pit to eat the wood ash, a good source of calcium.
This Rufous Hummingbird I found in Orleans seemed very happy with the various tubular flowers offered, especially Salvia, Cuphea “Vermillionaire”, and Four O’ Clock, but also not-so-tubular zinnias. Incidentally, all of these plants we buy as annuals are native perennials in the hummingbirds’ wintering range in Mexico, where they would be seeking them in the wild right now — it’s not a coincidence that these plants are hummingbird magnets.
So add some of these “totally tubular” flowers to your yard if you can find any stock left, and get that nectar feeder back out. It’s rare hummingbird season on the Cape, and one of these surprisingly resilient little sprites just may settle in for the winter in your backyard oasis.
