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Hummingbird Creates Big Stir At Jacobsburg Environmental Ed Center
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To fly from the Pacific Northwest to Louisiana, and then to Pennsylvania, is no small task. To do it all on wings reaching just inches across, is a feat of herculean proportions. Especially for one very tiny bird weighing just a few grams. The rufous hummingbird, it seems, lives up to its billing.
“The feistiest hummingbird in North America.” So says the Cornell Lab of Ornithology website.
At Jacobsburg Environmental Education Center there is another descriptive term for this western vagrant species of the avian world: popular. Very popular, as in having the ability to draw in almost 100 visitors last month to the Northampton County facility. Most were birders hoping to glimpse the rare visitor flitting about the center’s butterfly and hummingbird garden and feeder stations.
“Yep, we actually had two here in November,” said Rick Wiltraut, environmental education specialist at Jacobsburg. “We had an immature male that showed up for two days, and then we had an adult male that had a band on it, which is really rare.”
Frequenting the center feeders for about 10 days, from mid-November until the end of the month, it was the banded visitor that commanded the attention of visitors and the avian live-trapping skills of Scott Weidensaul, Pennsylvania-based naturalist, author and migratory bird researcher.
Weidensaul’s capture and release of the banded rufous hummingbird—so named for its strong yellowish-pink to moderate orange-colored plumage—showed the tiny bird that breeds in the Pacific Northwest also had quite a colorful past, according to Wiltraut. From its suspected breeding grounds in California, Washington or Canada, it is known to have traveled to Louisiana, where it was captured, banded and released January 9, 2011.
Next stop—some 10 months later and much to the delight of Wiltraut and fellow birders—the feeders at Jacobsburg.
Did some come specifically hoping to glimpse the banded visitor, a bird that is said to glow like coals in strong light?
“Absolutely,” said Wiltraut. “This was a significant event in birding circles and I could tell the word was getting out. I’d say we had 75 to 100 people come in hoping to see it.”
All to the delight of the man who keeps track of the center’s winged visitors.
“I have been a birder for more than 40 years, they basically are my whole life,” said the environmental education specialist. “Most recently, for over 15 years, I’ve focused on hummingbirds. We have a hummingbird/butterfly garden in the park which, with the feeders, really draws them in.”
Most are the ruby-throated variety which has since moved south to warmer climes. But not all of the feisty rufous variety, said Wiltraut, who attributes a reluctance to move on to the bird’s ability to find food and enter a semi-hibernation, or torpor, state when frigid winds howl.
“There still are some rufous hummingbirds in the area that are hanging around,” Wiltraut said. “They have to have food and they’ll get it as long as homeowners maintain their feeders and bring them in at night so they don’t freeze.
“But the birds can’t exist solely on sugar and water. They need insects for protein, and when there are no insects they have to migrate south, or they die.”
(Reprinted from DCNR's December 7 Resource online newsletter.)
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12/12/2011 |
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