82 Fun Facts About Hummingbird

Which aerial trick can hummingbirds pull off that most birds can't?

Fly backwards: their wings join the body only at the shoulder, letting them fly straight up and down too, and they can even fly upside down.

Some hummingbirds raise more chicks by nesting close to which birds of prey?

Hawks hunt jays, so jays change how they forage near hawk nests, and hummingbirds nesting close by raise more young.

What is the smallest bird in the world?

The bee hummingbird lives only in Cuba, and besides sipping nectar it catches small insects.

Hummingbirds detect sugar with a taste receptor that, in humans, senses which taste?

Umami: birds lack the usual sweet receptor, so hummingbirds rewired the umami one to sense sugar, letting them exploit nectar.

How do mountain hummingbirds warm up after a night of torpor?

By shivering: birds that stay in torpor longer burn off less body weight before morning.

Which hummingbird migrates about 6,300 km each way between Alaska and its wintering grounds?

The rufous breeds farther north than any other hummingbird and loops clockwise, north up the Pacific coast in spring and south along the Rockies.

Hummingbirds split from which sister group about 42 million years ago?

Swifts and treeswifts eat insects; only after the split did hummingbirds evolve a way to taste sugar, which opened up a life on nectar.

Though hummingbirds now live only in the Americas, their oldest modern-type fossils were found on which continent?

Europe: those extinct hummingbirds may have helped shape some Asian and African flowers.

How do hummingbirds get about on their feet?

They shuffle along perches: their legs are too short for walking or hopping, and their feet serve mainly for perching and preening.

What is the iridescent throat patch of a male hummingbird called?

A gorget flashes only at the right angle, so males position themselves to catch the light when showing it off to a potential mate.

Who raises the chicks in most hummingbird species?

The female: after mating, male and female go their separate ways, leaving her to nest and rear the chicks.

Hummingbird nests are commonly bound to a branch using what?

Spider webs bind the cup, yet orb-weaver webs sometimes trap hummingbirds.

Which country has the most hummingbird species, more than 160?

Colombia sits on the continent where hummingbirds took off: they reached South America about 22 million years ago and diversified fast.

Dozens of hummingbird species live year-round high in which mountain range?

The Andes' thin air suits them because high-altitude species evolved haemoglobin that binds oxygen more tightly.

Which Old World birds resemble hummingbirds through convergent evolution but are only distantly related?

Sunbirds are the Old World's nectar-sippers, but they usually perch to feed.

Which species is the only bird with a beak longer than the rest of its body, excluding its tail?

The sword-billed hummingbird's bill lets it reach nectar deep inside long-tubed passionflowers that other hummingbirds can't get into.

Hummingbird-pollinated flowers tend to be which colour?

Red petals signal rich nectar to hummingbirds, yet sugar water in a feeder needs no red dye to attract them.

Which kind of light, invisible to humans, can hummingbirds see?

Ultraviolet vision comes from a fourth colour cone, letting them tell apart colour mixes such as UV-green that humans never see.

Which body of water can a migrating hummingbird cross in one nonstop journey?

The Gulf of Mexico crossing can take up to 20 straight hours, powered by fat the bird stores up before it sets off.

Which hummingbird did Vancouver voters elect as their official city bird in 2017?

Anna's has spread north in recent decades, probably helped by garden flowers and feeders, and now nests as far as British Columbia.

Which insect has been seen seizing hummingbirds at garden nectar feeders?

The praying mantis has company: frogs and roadrunners also catch hummingbirds.

What shape do a hummingbird's wings trace as it holds still in mid-air?

A figure of eight, with the downstroke giving most of the lift, overturning the old assumption that both strokes shared it equally, as in insects.

How does a hummingbird's tongue gather nectar, as high-speed filming revealed?

By trapping and pumping: the tongue's grooves close around nectar and spring back like a pump, overturning the long-held idea that capillary action draws it up.

What goes wrong when honey is used in a hummingbird feeder?

It lets microbes grow fast: diluted honey spoils quickly and can breed dangerous fungus, so safe recipes use refined white sugar and water.

Which Aztec god of war is often depicted as a hummingbird?

Huitzilopochtli, in legend, told the Aztecs to settle where an eagle perched on a cactus, and that eagle is on Mexico's flag today.

Which painter's 1940 self-portrait shows a hummingbird hanging from a thorn necklace?

Frida Kahlo painted it after her divorce from Diego Rivera, and her former lover, photographer Nickolas Muray, soon bought it.

A giant hummingbird is among the animal figures of which ancient desert geoglyphs?

The Nazca Lines were damaged in 2014 when Greenpeace activists laid a banner beside the giant hummingbird.

Which Caribbean nation shows two hummingbirds on its coat of arms?

Trinidad and Tobago redesigned its arms in 2025, swapping Christopher Columbus's three ships for a steelpan, the national instrument.

The 'doctor bird', a streamertail hummingbird, is the national bird of which country?

Jamaica's tourist board promoted a banana 'doctor bird cake' in the late 1960s, and it spread across the American South as hummingbird cake.

At the bottom of one Californian hummingbird's courtship dive, what makes its loud chirp?

Its tail feathers flutter in the rushing air like a flag, settling a debate over whether the dive sound was vocal.

Which insect is often mistaken for a hummingbird?

A moth: some species beat their wings fast enough to hum and sip nectar through a long tongue, just like a hummingbird.

Which is the only hummingbird that breeds in the eastern United States?

Ruby-throated: besides nectar, it sometimes sips sugary tree sap from wells drilled by sapsuckers.

Hawaii banned the import of hummingbirds to stop them pollinating, and so spoiling, which plantation fruit?

Pineapple fruit is spoiled by seeds, and in the wild hummingbirds are the plant's main pollinators. Hawaii's 20th-century canning industry therefore kept the birds off the islands.

The zunzuncito, a hummingbird just five to six centimetres long, lives wild only in which country?

Cuba and its small neighbour Isla de la Juventud are the zunzuncito's entire range. Its closest rival for size, the vervain hummingbird, lives on other islands nearby.

The Juan Fernández firecrown hummingbird lives on a single Chilean island named after which fictional castaway?

Robinson Crusoe Island took that name in 1966, honouring the novel partly inspired by Alexander Selkirk's four years marooned there. Its firecrown is rated critically endangered.

Which technology company gave the codename Hummingbird to a major 2013 rewrite of its search algorithm?

Google chose the name to suggest precision and speed. The new algorithm had already been running for about a month when it was announced in September 2013.

Hummingbirds learn their songs by imitation, a rare skill shared with songbirds and which other group of birds?

Parrots, songbirds and hummingbirds are the only birds known to learn sounds by copying them. Few mammals can do it either: humans, bats, whales and elephants are among the handful.

Which English naturalist, in Chile in 1834, noted giant hummingbirds arriving each spring from northern deserts?

Charles Darwin wrote that the birds came from the parched deserts of the north, probably meaning the Atacama. Tags have since shown some giant hummingbirds fly a loop of over 8,000 km.

Flit the hummingbird and Meeko the raccoon are the animal companions of which Disney heroine?

Pocahontas has Flit, a feisty hummingbird who at first prefers the warrior Kocoum to John Smith. Veteran voice actor Frank Welker supplied his sounds in the 1995 film.

Which bird of the American Southwest, a hunter of lizards and young rattlesnakes, also eats hummingbirds?

The greater roadrunner snatches hummingbirds and also tackles scorpions, tarantulas and centipedes. One of its old nicknames is the snake killer.

Slow-motion film shows a hummingbird flying in rain shedding water by shaking like which wet animal?

A dog shaking itself dry is the closest match: the bird whips its head and body from side to side in mid-air. In heavy rain the drops on a hummingbird can weigh 38% as much as the bird.

Gram for gram, hummingbirds hold the record among all warm-blooded animals for the highest what?

Metabolic rate per gram is higher in hummingbirds than in any other warm-blooded animal. In hovering flight their muscles burn oxygen about ten times faster than those of elite human athletes.

Tiny mites that feed on flower nectar hitch rides between blooms by climbing into which part of a hummingbird?

Its nostrils carry the mites: they climb in while the bird feeds and climb out at the next bloom. Several mite species live this way, competing with their carrier for nectar.

Hummingbirds are the smallest living members of which dinosaur group, the one that included Tyrannosaurus?

Theropods are the dinosaur branch that gave rise to birds, so every living bird is one. A hummingbird of about two grams is the smallest of them all.

The tiny cup nest of a hummingbird is often compared in size to half the shell of which nut?

A walnut half-shell is bigger than the smallest hummingbird nests, which are only a few centimetres across. The cup stretches as the two chicks inside it grow.

Some North American hummingbirds feed at small holes drilled in living tree bark by which woodpeckers?

Sapsuckers drill small wells that fill with sugar-rich tree sap, and hummingbirds help themselves. Flower nectar and small insects remain the bulk of what the birds eat.

Hummingbirds range from southern Alaska down to which place, the southern limit of the whole family?

Tierra del Fuego is the family's southern limit, but most species live far from either extreme, in the tropics of Central and South America.

Hummingbirds living high in thin mountain air evolved a version of which protein that binds oxygen more tightly?

Hemoglobin in these high-mountain species picks up oxygen more readily, thanks to a few amino acid changes. Some of them live as high as 5,200 metres, where hovering takes extra power.

Measured in body lengths per second, a courting male hummingbird's dive outpaces the hunting stoop of which raptor?

Peregrine falcon dives are faster in raw speed, but relative to its size the hummingbird covers about twice the distance each second. Pulling out of the dive it endures roughly 10 g.

The giant hummingbird, the largest member of its family, is about as long as which familiar songbird?

A starling and a giant hummingbird are about the same length, but the hummingbird is far lighter thanks to its slender build and long bill. Its wings beat as few as 12 times a second.

Which hummingbird is the smallest bird breeding in the United States and Canada?

Calliope hummingbirds weigh just 2 to 3 grams, yet they travel up to 9,000 km a year between western mountain meadows and their winter range in Mexico.

The marvellous spatuletail, a hummingbird whose males carry two long racket-tipped plumes, lives only in which country?

Peru is the only home of the spatuletail, which lives in one small area in the north. The male's two racket plumes are far longer than the rest of him and cross over each other.

Which tropical fruit names a group of hummingbirds that includes the green-breasted and black-throated species?

Mango hummingbirds form the genus Anthracothorax, native to the American tropics. The green-breasted species ranges from Mexico through Central America and now and then strays into the United States.

Which gemstone names two glittering Amazon hummingbirds, the crimson and the fiery, whose males reach about 22 cm?

Topaz males are the largest hummingbirds in the Amazon Basin, and in the whole family only the giant hummingbird is bigger. Much of their length is made up of long plumes.

Which ancient American civilisation gives its name to a group of mountain hummingbirds also known as starfrontlets?

Inca hummingbirds belong to the genus Coeligena, whose members live in humid mountain forest in South America. The collared inca is easy to pick out by its bright chest patch.

Which curved harvesting tool gives its name to two hummingbirds whose bills bend through a quarter circle?

Sickle-shaped bills match the curved tubular blooms that the two sicklebills feed from. Unlike most hummingbirds, they typically cling to the plant while drinking.

Male hermit hummingbirds gather to sing and display for visiting females at communal sites known by what name?

Leks take their name from a Swedish word for play, and sage grouse are famous for them too. Visitors come only to pick a mate from the performers.

Which hummingbird of the western US highlands holds the wild longevity record, a banded bird aged at least 12?

Broad-tailed hummingbird history was made by a bird ringed as an adult and caught again 11 years later. Most North American hummingbirds probably live only three to five years.

Which sugar makes up more than half of the sugars in the flower nectar that hummingbirds drink?

Sucrose accounts for about 55% of nectar sugars, with glucose and fructose sharing the rest. It is also the sugar in ordinary table sugar, which is why simple sugar water suits a feeder.

Raw and organic sugars are discouraged in hummingbird feeders because they contain which potentially harmful metal?

Iron in unrefined sugar can be harmful to such small birds. Brown sugar, molasses, agave syrup and artificial sweeteners are also on the list of things to keep out of a feeder.

Hummingbirds remember which flowers they have already visited using an enlarged version of which brain region?

Hippocampus tissue handles spatial memory, letting a hummingbird map the blooms it has already emptied. A good map saves energy, since a drained flower is a wasted trip.

Which tropical plant genus, rich in nectar, was probably the first to coevolve with hummingbirds in the Americas?

Heliconia plants, often called lobster-claws, are the oldest known lineage pollinated by hummingbirds. The partnership is thought to have begun 16 to 23 million years ago.

Which garden shrub, pollinated by hummingbirds in the wild, shares its name with a vivid purplish-pink colour?

Fuchsia species grow wild mainly in Central and South America, where hummingbirds pollinate their dangling two-tone blooms. The plant honours a German botanist, Leonhart Fuchs.

Which botanical term describes pollination by birds such as hummingbirds, typically of scentless, tubular flowers?

Ornithophily has shaped thousands of plant species in the Americas, where hummingbirds are the leading bird pollinators. Such blooms hold plenty of nectar but give insects no landing platform.

Hummingbirds appear able to smell formic acid in nectar, a warning to avoid flowers visited by which insects?

Ants leave formic acid and gathering scents in nectar, and hummingbirds appear able to smell both. For finding food and sizing up rivals they rely mainly on sight and hearing.

What colour are the two eggs, the smallest laid by any bird, in a typical hummingbird clutch?

Plain white eggs are the rule for hummingbirds, and though tiny they are large for the size of the bird that lays them. They hatch after two to three weeks.

Hermit hummingbirds check scattered flowers along a fixed daily circuit, a feeding strategy known by what name?

Traplining is named after fur trappers walking their line of traps. Hummingbirds that feed this way defend no territory and tend to have longer wings for efficient flight.

Hummingbirds form the third-largest bird family by species; which American family ranks first, ahead of the tanagers?

Tyrant flycatchers number more than 400 species, and like tanagers and hummingbirds they live only in the Americas. In most countries there they are the most varied bird family of all.

Tiny Lophornis hummingbirds, whose males sport outlandish crests, go by which common name?

Coquette hummingbirds rank among the smallest members of the family. Their scientific name, Lophornis, simply means crested bird in Greek.

Which German word for hummingbird was the codeword that set off the Night of the Long Knives in 1934?

Kolibri was the word Goebbels telephoned to Göring on 30 June 1934, releasing execution squads against the SA leadership. The purge is also known as Operation Hummingbird.

Hummingbirds spend 75 to 80 percent of their time doing what?

Sitting still and digesting takes up most of a hummingbird's day, because flying nonstop would cost too much energy. Feeding itself fills only about a fifth of its time.

Which American guitar maker has built an acoustic model called the Hummingbird, with an engraved pickguard, since 1960?

Gibson launched the Hummingbird as its first square-shouldered dreadnought, and it has stayed in production ever since. The pickguard shows a hummingbird feeding at a trumpet flower.

Which British action star plays a homeless ex-soldier in the 2013 thriller Hummingbird, retitled Redemption in the US?

Jason Statham plays a haunted veteran who befriends a nun while squatting in an absent photographer's flat. It was the first film directed by screenwriter Steven Knight.

The Hummingbird Highway, one of four major roads in which Central American country, ends near the town of Dangriga?

Belize's Hummingbird Highway runs from near the capital, Belmopan, down towards the coast. Part of it follows the bed of an old railway, the Stann Creek line.

Which US magazine printed the 1978 reader recipe that turned banana-and-pecan hummingbird cake into a regional classic?

Southern Living ran the recipe in February 1978 and later called it the most requested in the magazine's history. The layers are finished with cream cheese frosting.

Which 19th-century American poet captured a hummingbird's blur of a visit in the poem A Route of Evanescence?

Emily Dickinson's poem is echoed in the name Vanescaves, Latin for vanish birds, coined for the wider bird group that links hummingbirds with potoos and oilbirds.

Which Victorian bird artist exhibited a vast hummingbird collection in London in 1851 before ever seeing one alive?

John Gould had gathered 320 species by the time of the Great Exhibition, every one a preserved specimen. He saw a living hummingbird only in 1857, in a Philadelphia garden.

Which 19th-century American painter is known for small canvases pairing hummingbirds with orchids?

Martin Johnson Heade painted more than forty small hummingbird pictures, a series begun on an 1863 trip to Brazil. He meant them for a book that was never published.

The Nano Hummingbird, a tiny flapping-wing spy drone unveiled in 2011, was built for which US research agency?

DARPA put about $4 million into the project, which AeroVironment began in 2006. The finished craft weighs less than an AA battery, carries a video camera and can hover in place.

Which American soft-rock duo, known for Summer Breeze, reached the US top 20 in 1973 with a single called Hummingbird?

Seals and Crofts took Hummingbird to number 20 on the Billboard Hot 100. The bird of the title is a metaphor for Baháʼu'lláh, the prophet of the Baháʼí Faith.

The Portuguese name for a hummingbird, beija-flor, translates literally into English as what?

Flower kisser is the literal meaning, from beijar, to kiss, and flor. A samba school called Beija-Flor has won the Rio de Janeiro Carnival parade more than a dozen times.

Hummingbirds can live a decade, far outlasting which tiny, fast-living mammals that seldom survive beyond two years?

Shrews are among the smallest of all mammals, yet a wild hummingbird of similar size typically lives three to five years. A few banded birds have passed ten.