What are hummingbirds known for, besides their dazzling iridescent plumage, is their remarkable ability to hover in mid-air with incredible agility, thanks to their rapid wing beats that can exceed 50 times per second.
Hummingbirds are birds native to the “Americas” and comprise the biological family “Trochilidae.”
What Are Hummingbirds?
Hummingbirds stands for intelligence, beauty, devotion, and love. These little birds are also respected as fierce fighters and defenders of their territory. Hummingbirds are a symbol of good luck. Seeing one of these birds before an event, such as a hunting trip, or travelling to another village, was considered a good sign.
Hummingbirds are the smallest known and smallest living avian therapod dinosaurs. The iridescent colors and highly specialized feathers of many species (mainly in males) give some hummingbirds exotic common names, such as sun gem, fairy, wood star, sapphire or sylph.
A hummingbird is a small bird with a long, slender bill. Many hummingbirds have brightly colored, glittery feathers. Often the males are more colorful than the females.
Table Of Content
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What are hummingbirds?
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Evolution of hummingbird’s
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What type of evolution is a hummingbird?
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Lifecycle of hummingbirds
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Specialized characteristics and metabolism of hummingbirds
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Migration of hummingbirds
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Myth and culture of hummingbirds
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What is story about hummingbirds?
Evolution Of Hummingbirds
The biggest differences between a male hummingbird vs a female hummingbird are their size, color, and gorgets. Female hummingbirds are slightly larger than males because they must carry and lay eggs. Male hummingbirds are more brightly colored than female hummingbirds.
Is hummingbird convergent evolution?
The hummingbird moth and the hummingbird are examples of analogous convergent evolution. The latest common ancestor in each did not carry the hovering flight behavior and yet they each, independently, converged on this trait.
What type of evolution is a hummingbird?
Co-evolution with plants has been strong in the history of hummingbirds. Sometime after about 45 million years ago, hummingbirds started switching from a mostly insect diet to a mostly flower nectar diet. Although modern hummers eat some insects to supplement their diet, they are marvelously well-adapted nectarivores.
Different species of hummingbirds have differently shaped beaks that evolved to allow them to drink from a certain kind of flower. In return, the flower species it feeds from has evolved to produce nectar especially tasty to hummingbirds and to prevent bees and other animals from stealing it.
Hummingbird beaks and the long-tubular flowers on some of the plants they pollinate are often used as examples. Charles Darwin described an interesting case of pollinator-flowering plant coevolution in Madagascar: the star orchid, Angraecum sesquipedale, has foot-long spurs, with the nectary at the tip.
Life Cycle Of Hummingbird:
A hummingbird begins his life as an egg the size of a small pea, in a nest no larger than a cup. The little bird’s life span can be remarkably short, at less than a year for many. If a hummingbird survives his first year, he can live to about age 5.
A hummingbird spends most of his life in search of food, nourishing the highest metabolism in the animal kingdom. His wings beat 70 to 200 times per second, and he can fly up to 200 mph.
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Hummingbird Mating
Hummingbirds can be found anywhere in North America, depending on the time of year. They summer as far north as Alaska and winter from Mexico to Chile. They return to cooler climates in the spring to build nests and raise their young.
Male hummingbirds precede the females to their northern destinations, staking out territory for breeding grounds to prepare for the females’ arrival. About a week after the males arrive, the females land to select their mates. Hummingbirds do not mate for life.
A male may mate with several females during one season. Once breeding’s done, the male moves on to breed again, leaving each inseminated female to build the nest and raise her young.
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Nesting
The hummingbird nest is a work of art. A mother hummingbird will sometimes build several nests at once before laying eggs in her nest of choice only a few days after breeding. She chooses a location protected from the wind, usually in the fork of a tree branch shielded from weather and predators
. The process takes about five days as the mother gathers spider webs and plant material, molding it carefully until it is perfectly formed. A mother hummer builds her nest alone, working about four hours a day, resting and eating during the remainder to prepare for laying her eggs.
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Laying the Eggs
Once she is satisfied with her nest, the mother bird settles into roost. As labor begins, she wiggles and shakes a bit to lay the first egg. She will lay a second egg a day or two later, but both eggs will hatch at the same time.
The mother bird controls this by delaying incubation of the first egg until the second is laid. Once both eggs have arrived, the baby birds continue to develop in embryo form inside the eggs for 16 to 18 days, depending on the temperature.
A mother hummingbird keeps the egg temperature at 96 degrees while they are incubating. She leaves the nest for five minutes each hour for food, ensuring that the eggs never chill.
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The Eggs Hatch
Inside the egg, baby hummers have strong necks and little hooks on their beaks to help them peck their ways out of the eggs. The baby birds’ eyes are closed, and their bodies have no feathers. The little hatchlings are about 1 inch long.
The mother bird cleans the eggshells from the nest and continues to keep the babies warm until feathers begin to grow on their dark bodies. She makes brief trips for nectar and insects that she regurgitates into the babies’ beaks.
Although their eyes are not open yet, they feel the movement of air from her wings as she flies in and raise their heads to be fed. The egg teeth disappear shortly after hatching, but the babies’ beaks remain short and yellow for several weeks.
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Fledgling to Adult
The tiny hummingbirds double in size by their third day of life and triple by the eighth. By the ninth day, the mother bird leaves the nest for longer periods to search for food. The little birds’ bodies are large enough to fill the nest now.
At day nine, they begin to hum their wings for the first time, clinging to the bottom of the nest to avoid falling out. They remain in the nest for another week, when their feathers and beaks have grown in. They will begin to venture from the nest around day 21, returning for the mother to feed them until about day 25.
Fledglings will not venture further out than a branch on their home tree initially. The mother bird teaches them where to find bugs and nectar, and ultimately chases them from the nest to live as adults. About this time, she begins construction on a second nest where she will lay another round of eggs and begin the cycle again.
Specialized Characteristics And Metabolism:
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Physical Characteristics:
One of the most recognizable features of a hummingbird is its small size, in fact, several hummingbird species are the world’s tiniest birds. Other species, on the other hand, are larger and more robust, though still small in comparison to most other birds.
Hummingbirds may differ from other bird species in appearance, but they always have a distinctive form that makes them easily identifiable. Every hummingbird’s shape includes a small streamlined body, long wings, and a long, thin bill.
A hummingbird’s most distinguishing physical feature is its needle-like bill. The bill is unusually long and thin in comparison to the bird’s overall size, and it serves as a conduit for the bird’s long and agile tongue to drink nectar from flowers, sap wells, and feeders.
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Flight:
Hummingbirds can’t walk or hop, although they can scoot sideways with their feet while perched. Smaller feet have evolved in these birds to allow them to fly more efficiently. They will, however, utilize their feet for scratching and preening. The most unique behavior of a hummingbird is its flight.
Hummingbirds are the only birds that can hover for an extended period of time, and they are acrobatic flyers capable of flying backwards and changing directions nearly rapidly. Hummingbirds can even fly backwards at times. A hummingbird’s wings are long, slender, and tapered to help it fly more quickly.
However, the construction of the wing is more significant than its design. A hummingbird’s wing’s shoulder and elbow joints are quite near to the body, allowing each wing to pivot and tilt. The capacity of even the smallest hummingbird to change flight directions and hover depends on this.
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Humming:
Hummingbirds are named for the prominent humming sound their wingbeats make while flying and hovering to feed or interact with other hummingbirds. Humming serves communication purposes by alerting other birds of the arrival of a fellow forager or potential mate.
The humming sound derives from aerodynamic forces generated by the downstrokes and upstrokes of the rapid wingbeats, causing oscillations and harmonics that evoke an acoustic quality likened to that of a musical instrument. The humming sound of hummingbirds is unique among flying animals, compared to the whine of mosquitoes, buzz of bees, and “whoosh” of larger birds.
The wingbeats causing the hum of hummingbirds during hovering are achieved by elastic recoil of wing strokes produced by the main flight muscles: the pectoralis major (the main downstroke muscle) and supracoracoideus (the main upstroke muscle).
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Heat dissipation:
The high metabolic rate of hummingbirds – especially during rapid forward flight and hovering – produces increased body heat that requires specialized mechanisms of thermoregulation for heat dissipation, which becomes an even greater challenge in hot, humid climates.
Hummingbirds dissipate heat partially by evaporation through exhaled air, and from body structures with thin or no feather covering, such as around the eyes, shoulders, under the wings (patagia), and feet.
While hovering, hummingbirds do not benefit from the heat loss by air convection during forward flight, except for air movement generated by their rapid wing-beat, possibly aiding convective heat loss from the extended feet. Smaller hummingbird species, such as the calliope, appear to adapt their relatively higher surface-to-volume ratio to improve convective cooling from air movement by the wings.
When air temperatures rise above 36 °C (97 °F), thermal gradients driving heat passively by convective dissipation from around the eyes, shoulders, and feet are reduced or eliminated, requiring heat dissipation mainly by evaporation and exhalation. In cold climates, hummingbirds retract their feet into breast feathers to eliminate skin exposure and minimize heat dissipation.
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Kidney function:
The dynamic range of metabolic rates in hummingbirds requires a parallel dynamic range in kidney function. During a day of nectar consumption with a corresponding high water intake that may total five times the body weight per day, hummingbird kidneys process water via glomerular filtration rates (GFR) in amounts proportional to water consumption, thereby avoiding overhydration. During brief periods of water deprivation, however, such as in nighttime torpor, GFR drops to zero, preserving body water.
Hummingbird kidneys also have a unique ability to control the levels of electrolytes after consuming nectars with high amounts of sodium and chloride or none, indicating that kidney and glomerular structures must be highly specialized for variations in nectar mineral quality. Morphological studies on Anna’s hummingbird kidneys showed adaptations of high capillary density in close proximity to nephrons, allowing for precise regulation of water and electrolytes.
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Natural enemies:
1. Predators
Praying mantises have been observed as predators of hummingbirds. Other predators include domestic cats, dragonflies, frogs, orb-weaver spiders, and other birds, such as the roadrunner.
2. Parasites
Hummingbirds host a highly specialized lice fauna. Two genera of Ricinid lice, Trochiloecetes and Trochiliphagus are specialized on them, often infesting 5-15% of their populations. Contrarily, two genera of Menoponid lice, Myrsidea and Leremenopon are extremely rare on them.
Migration Of Hummingbirds
Many hummingbirds spend the winter in Central America or Mexico and migrate north to their breeding grounds in the southern U.S. and western states as early as February, and to areas further north later in the spring. The first arrivals in spring are usually males.
Myth And Culture Of Hummingbirds
