Sightings: Hummingbirds Arrive In Parts of NS: The Amazing Life Of Hummingbirds
By Andrew Macdonald
Interactive hummingbird maps of their North American journey, have hummers in NS now. The first sighting was early: April 17th, 2024 at Weymouth.
Maps show the hummers have been prevalent on the South Shore where folks are already hanging feeders.
The ruby-throated hummingbird is often the species spotted in NS.
The tiny flyer is one of thousands that reach Nova Scotia each year, going as far as Cape Breton.
The arrival of hummingbirds to Nova Scotia is always happy news, and each year when the first hummers arrive I mark the occasion in these Notebook pages, as well as the syrup recipe for a feeder: boil four cups of water and a cup of sugar; wait to cool before placing contents into a feeder. Do not use red dye.
Here is an encore presentation of how hummingbirds fly to Nova Scotia each year:
At rural cottages in the Maritimes, one gets to delight in the life of the tiny but super amazing hummingbird.
To understand the life of a hummingbird, I spoke with Andrew Hebda, now retired as zoology curator at the Museum of Natural History in Halifax.
He says the Nova Scotia variety of hummingbird — the ruby-throated hummingbird — often heads north in the spring from southern climes such as Costa Rica and even further south.
“Some also come from Colombia and Panama,” says Hebda.
That means the ultra-tiny bird flies over the Gulf of Mexico and the Gulf of Maine.
“You are looking at a good 4,500-kilometre flight. Not all at once. They do it in clumps.”
Lane Farguson, a camera buff captures a picture of a hummingbird at his HRM home on May 24, 2020.
They leave South America in February and wing their way north.
A website devoted to the hummingbird, www.hummingbirds.net, records the arrival of the bird in areas of North America.
“You can see them migrating all the way up,” says Hebda. “There are three months of flying. We start getting hummingbirds in Nova Scotia in May.”
The birds then spread all over the province in the spring to fall season, he notes. They feed on the nectar of flowers with their elongated beaks, but they also benefit from people putting out feeders.
You can make feed by boiling one cup of sugar with four cups of water, and preferably use a red-coloured feeder. Just let the water cool before putting it into the feeder and clean out the feeder frequently. In warm weather, the water can grow mouldy quite quickly.
“One of the neat things, they can see better at the red feeder than many insects can. That is why you don’t get many insects at your feeder,” says Hebda.
Male hummingbirds, with colourful throats, are in Nova Scotia to procreate and usually start south in mid-July. Mother birds depart in early September, leaving the youngsters to feed into September without less competition for food supplies, he says.
Smaller birds, like hummers, don’t live long lives, says Hebda. “The oldest one on record is nine years old. The average is four or five years.”
Lane Farguson took a photo of this hummingbird in May 2020, on the outskirts of Halifax.
They often return to the same spot each summer.
Depending on the concentration of sugar at a feeder, “they get extremely defensive and start fighting with each other to defend that resource.”
If you increase the sugar concentration, it can result in more hummingbirds at the feeder, he notes.
“When they get aggressive, they don’t fight. They put on a display,” he says.
“They are quite defensive around nests. People rarely see hummingbird nests because they are so small. They usually make them out of spider webs.”
Lane Farguson, a camera buff captures a picture of a hummingbird at his HRM home on May 24, 2020.
Hebda says hummingbirds make the long trek from South America to Nova Scotia “because it’s a reflection of food availability….Down in Costa Rica, they have phenomenal biodiversity, but they have low abundance. You don’t see great variety of species, so come wintertime, there is a lot of competition for that nectar,” says Hebda.
“The reason they migrate is to come to a high quality food source. The further north they come, there are fewer species to compete with. There is food here and little competition for it.”
