Events, Summer 2022

This year’s late summer hummingbird season is going to be packed with activities, both in-person and virtual.  Join me if you can!

 

Fall Befuddlers: Broad-tailed, Rufous/Allen’s, and Calliope

“Female-plumaged” Broad-tailed, Rufous/Allen’s, and Calliope hummingbirds are often confused with one another during fall migration. Image © 2020 by Sheri L. Williamson. All rights reserved.

In fall migration, the similar plumages of juvenile female Rufous and Allen’s hummingbirds, female and juvenile male Broad-tailed Hummingbirds, and female and juvenile male Calliope Hummingbirds cause a lot of confusion, especially when they stray east of their usual migration routes.

Shape is one of the first clues for quickly separating these doppelgangers. Broad-taileds are long and relatively slim, with proportionally smaller heads, longer, often slightly decurved bills, longer wings and tails, and relatively broad primaries except for the outer two (P9-10). Rufous and Allen’s are relatively compact, big-headed, and barrel-chested with tapered outer primaries that give the folded wing a scythe-like shape. Calliopes have even bigger heads, plus shorter bills, shorter tails, and broad, curved outer primaries distinctly different from either Broad-tailed or Rufous/Allen’s. 

On the fanned tail, the amount and distribution of rufous coloration is important but variable within as well as between species. In juvenile female Rufous/Allen’s, R2 has rufous across the entire base or on both the inner and outer vanes divided by a stripe of green. In Broad-tailed, R2 is predominantly bright green with a partial border of rufous along the edge of the outer vane and variable black at the tip. The stubby tails of Calliopes are predominantly dull green, black, and white, with significantly less rufous in the outer four pairs of tail feathers than either Rufous/Allen’s or Broad-tailed (typically most conspicuous on the basal edges of R2-4 in juvenile males and adult females). The number of outer tail feathers with white tips is often helpful in distinguishing juvenile females (typically R2-5) from adult females and juvenile males (typically R3-5), but it’s not helpful in separating species.

There are other, more subtle clues to separating these often confusing species, but shape and tail pattern will resolve the vast majority of ID dilemmas.

The illustration above is styled after the all-new plates in the forthcoming successor to A Field Guide to Hummingbirds of North America in the Peterson Field Guide Series. The new guide will be published by Princeton University Press should be available from your favorite bookseller in early 2022.

The fall migration of Ruby-throated Hummingbirds

What’s “wrong” with this picture?

eBird map of Ruby-throated Hummingbirds, August-September, 2010-2019

Image credit: eBird

In this map from eBird, each of the purple squares represents sightings of one or more Ruby-throated Hummingbirds reported during the peak of fall migration (August-September) over the last 10 years. The darker the purple, the more reports of Ruby-throated Hummingbirds from those blocks. Though the U.S. has many more eBird contributors, certain parts of Mexico and Central America, including major population centers and tourist destinations, get at least some birding coverage. That accounts for much of the uneven distribution of purple squares on this map, but there’s something more troubling about it.

According to conventional wisdom, Ruby-throated Hummingbirds cross the Gulf of Mexico in fall migration, heading from the southern coast of the U.S. to the Yucatan Peninsula and then south into Central America (note the purple squares in Costa Rica, a major wintering area for the species). Considering the huge concentrations of southbound Ruby-throateds along the northern and western Gulf Coast in September, resident and visiting birders in the Yucatan Peninsula could hardly miss seeing these trans-Gulf migrants after they make landfall. That is what’s “wrong” with this picture: There are only a handful of light to medium purple squares in the Yucatan region.

Why aren’t there more and darker squares? It’s not that there aren’t enough birders in the Yucatan Peninsula and even out in the Gulf itself in August and September. In the map detail below, the gray, blue-gray, and green-gray squares indicate the locations of August-September checklists that didn’t include any Ruby-throated Hummingbirds:

eBird map detail showing no-data checklists between the Mississippi River delta and the Yucatan Peninsula in August and September.

eBird map detail showing locations of August-September checklists with no Ruby-throated Hummingbirds reported; the Mississippi River delta is at the top, the Yucatan Peninsula at the bottom.

There are gray squares covering most of the northern peninsula as well as a few out in the Gulf representing boats and offshore oil and gas platforms, popular resting spots for exhausted migrants. If tens of thousands of Ruby-throated Hummingbirds were crossing from the southern U.S. to the Yucatan Peninsula in August and September, more people should be seeing (and reporting) them along their routes and when they reach land. The inevitable conclusion is that they’re just not there, at least not in numbers big enough to get noticed.

Romance vs. reality

The trans-Gulf migration of Ruby-throated Hummingbirds has a powerful hold on our imaginations. Millions of other birds of dozens of other species make the same journey, but none so tiny and seemingly fragile as the Ruby-throated. The basic fact of this feat—that birds smaller than your thumb can and do cross more than 500 miles of open ocean—has become a matter of hummingbird dogma, leading to the overgeneralization that the trans-Gulf route is equally important in both spring and fall migration (or even that all Ruby-throated Hummingbirds cross the Gulf in both directions). Even many hummingbird researchers have embraced the image of hundreds of thousands of southbound Ruby-throateds striking out  across the Gulf as though it was established scientific fact. It’s not.

Despite hedging on the issue in the first edition of A Field Guide to Hummingbirds of North America (2002), I’ve long been skeptical of the importance of trans-Gulf migration to southbound Ruby-throateds. The main reason is geography. The Yucatan Peninsula may be a convenient launching point for birds headed north from Central America, but this narrow wedge of land would be a tricky target for southbound birds. A migrant whose course is off by just a few degrees east would end up out over the open Caribbean, with few dots of land for rest and refuge. A westward drift could add more than 200 miles to the journey, severely testing the limits of the birds’ endurance and fuel storage.

The other reason is weather. Fall is hurricane season, and storms traversing the Gulf present not only a formidable barrier to migrants intending to cross from the U.S. to the Yucatan Peninsula but energy-saving tailwinds for birds taking a westerly route around the Gulf. This animated satellite image of Hurricane Harvey as it made landfall on the Texas coast shows how a storm like this blocks the routes of trans-Gulf migrants while its counterclockwise winds provide a boost to circum-Gulf migrants:

Hurricane Harvey landfall animation

Image credit: NASA/NOAA GOES Project

In the 18-plus years since the guide was published, the picture of Ruby-throated migration has become much clearer, and I mean that literally. eBird’s mesmerizing animated abundance map shows both the trans-Gulf spring migration and western circum-Gulf fall migration:

If the embedded video won’t play for you, you should be able to view it here: Ruby-throated Hummingbird Abundance Animation

Additional support for the importance of circum-Gulf routes to southbound Ruby-throated Hummingbirds comes from a recent research project on the Alabama coast (Zenzal 2016 and 2018; summary). The study found that juvenile Ruby-throateds use overland routes around the Gulf rather than crossing it, and that departure timing from stopover sites (locations where migrating birds rest and refuel) was correlated with wind direction, with a significant preference for winds from the east rather than the north. Adults were rarely encountered at the study’s coastal site, leading the researcher to speculate that experienced migrants took off across the Gulf from points farther inland. Given the scarcity of early fall sightings on the Yucatan Peninsula, it’s far more plausible that the vast majority of adult Ruby-throateds are also taking overland routes, though apparently farther inland than inexperienced juveniles.

There’s more than one way across (and around) the Gulf

This doesn’t mean that Ruby-throated Hummingbirds don’t cross parts of the Gulf in fall migration, just that they may be doing it differently than most people imagine. In a study of migrating birds on and around offshore oil and gas platforms in the northern Gulf of Mexico (PDF; Table 9.3), detections of Ruby-throateds in fall had a distinct western bias, with two platforms off the central and southern Texas coast accounting for 58% of the sightings. The scattering of sightings on eastern platforms near the delta of the Mississippi River may represent a few birds that actually did strike out for the Yucatan Peninsula, but the birds detected further west were at least as likely to have been cutting across the northwestern Gulf on a southwesterly trajectory toward southern Texas and northeastern Mexico.

There’s also a second circum-Gulf route that almost no one talks about. It involves a shorter ocean crossing with the potential for multiple stopovers, and it may be a safer and more expedient route to Central America for Ruby-throateds from the Atlantic region. The southern tip of Florida is only about 475 miles from the nearest point on the Yucatan Peninsula, compared to over 550 miles from the Mississippi Delta, over 600 miles from Fort Morgan, Alabama, and over 640 miles from Rockport, Texas. Cuba sits between, providing a convenient place for less fit birds to rest and refuel. The first fall sightings of Ruby-throated Hummingbirds in southeastern Mexico are often on the northeastern tip of the Yucatan Peninsula, suggestive of birds that took the eastern circum-Gulf route. The relatively low numbers of Ruby-throateds reported in Florida in August and September indicate that it’s not a major route for the species as a whole, but it deserves a closer look to understand how habitats in South Florida and western Cuba figure into the conservation picture for Ruby-throated Hummingbirds and other southbound migrants.

Juvenile male Ruby-throated Hummingbird, Texas.

Juvenile male Ruby-throated Hummingbird, in Rockport, Texas. His survival depends on preserving habitats around the Gulf of Mexico as well as in southern Mexico and Central America. Photo © 2009 Sheri L. Williamson

Why it matters

It’s only within the last few years that we finally have enough evidence from enough sources to address the question of whether Ruby-throated Hummingbirds follow similar migratory routes in spring and fall. Citizen science projects such as eBird, research such as the studies cited above, and re-encounters with banded birds are all contributing to a clearer picture of migration, which in turn helps us to understand how we can help them survive and thrive in an increasingly hostile world. Ensuring a future for Ruby-throated Hummingbirds and millions of other migrants will require international cooperation to preserve and manage critical stopover habitats around the entire Gulf of Mexico. Understanding when and how birds are using the landscapes they encounter in their travels helps us prioritize these conservation efforts where it will do the most good.

References

Russell, R.W. 2005. Interactions between migrating birds and offshore oil and gas platforms in the northern Gulf of Mexico: Final Report. U.S. Dept. of the Interior, Minerals Management Service, Gulf of Mexico OCS Region, New Orleans, LA. OCS Study MMS 2005-009. 348 pp.

Zenzal, T.J. Jr. 2018. Migratory hummingbirds make their own rules: the decision to resume migration along a barrier. Animal Behaviour 137.

Zenzal, T.J. Jr. 2016. Stopover Ecology of Ruby-throated Hummingbirds (Archilochus colubris) During Autumn Migration. Dissertations. 348. https://aquila.usm.edu/dissertations/348

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American Birding Podcast interview

Black-chinned x Annas hybrid

This Black-chinned × Anna’s hybrid led to the discovery of a previously unrecognized field mark unique to Anna’s Hummingbird.

In the latest American Birding Podcast from the American Birding Association, Nate Swick and I chat about how I got into hummingbirds, how hummingbirds can serve as a gateway to the bigger world of birding, nature, and conservation, how friends and family of late birding icon Mary Jo Ballator plus some generous donors banded together to save her beloved private sanctuary, and how the peculiar voice of a hybrid hummingbird led to the discovery of a previously unrecognized field mark unique to Anna’s Hummingbird. Use the embedded player below to listen to the full podcast, or visit the American Birding Podcast page.

Interview on BirdCallsRadio

Recently I sat down for a long, fun chat with Mardi Dickinson of BirdCallsRadio. We talked about everything from hummingbirds (of course) and field guides to birding in Arizona and my favorite tropical destinations to making polymer clay jewelry and translating Mayan glyphs.

The episode is now available for your listening pleasure. Click the photo to go to the episode’s Web page and listen via your browser or subscribe and listen via iTunes.

A cardinal of a different color

A male Northern Cardinal with a rare mutation has become an Internet sensation!

Former shelter kitty Lucky Wilbury, who is currently recovering from a life-threatening bladder blockage.

To commemorate this avian celebrity (and gently rib certain curmudgeons in the birding community), I created this homage to Andy Warhol’s colorful silkscreen portraits of celebrities. It’s now available in my Mountain-Gem Arts store on Zazzle on men’s, women’s, unisex, and kids’ T-shirts, sweatshirts, hoodies, and more in a variety of bright, medium, and dark colors, including many bird-friendly options. A cropped version including the left and center panels is available for your wall and as a 2-inch square button to adorn your Tilley hat or birding vest (or as one of your minimum 15 pieces of flair).

Proceeds from sales of this design (and everything else in my Zazzle shop) will help defray the cost of recent lifesaving veterinary treatment for my indoor-only rescue kitty, Lucky Wilbury.