do humming birds eat bugs

There’s high excitement on this lovely afternoon as a male ruby-throated hummingbird guzzles at our feeder. It’s my first sighting of this wee bird this year. “Oh, have I been waiting for you!” Last spring’s first long distance traveler made his fueling pit stop in our garden around this time so I was prepared for today’s little fella.

Shimmering green with the identifying ruby throat patch flashing in the sun, he perches for a long while, taking in the homemade sugary solution. “Drink up, my friend.” If there’s a repeat of the previous years’ pattern, this particular hummer will continue his journey north to other breeding grounds and a short time later two or sometimes three other hummingbirds will frequent our garden and make this area in Northern Virginia their summer home. Zooming, flitting, hovering and thoroughly delighting, our resident hummingbirds have become very special guests in our wildlife habitat.

So, what’s the secret to supporting these extraordinary creatures during their stay here in the Mid-Atlantic? It’s not simply hanging up a sugar-filled feeder.

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THE NATIVE PLANT PROMISE

My passion is growing stronger every day: using native plants to support our birds and other wildlife. The outdoor living area of our home is full of native plants, even though they are not yet common in today’s world: lovely ground covers, blooming annuals and perennials, slender grasses, shrubs of all sizes, mature native trees, and a large number of recently planted saplings. The reason we garden in this manner is to promote as much biodiversity as we can. As you can see, certain insects and locally native plants co-evolved. Most of these insects are herbivore specialists that can only eat particular plants. The egg-laying and larval stages of the insects depend on these plants, also known as host plants.

Additionally, research has demonstrated the amazing function that plant-eating insects play in transferring plant energy to other animals that are unable to consume plants. “In fact,” renowned entomologist Dr. “A large percentage of the world’s fauna depends entirely on insects to access the energy stored in plants,” writes Doug Tallamy. ” Native plants = insects = biodiversity.

What effects does this plant-insect relationship have on birds specifically? Tallamy states that 96% of our terrestrial birds require insects and spiders in their diets at some point during their lives. To make more birds, insects, particularly caterpillars, are not optional.

The ruby-throated’s diet is typically high in fat and protein and includes a variety of flying insects, such as gnats, spiders, flies, mosquitoes, aphids, bees, and beetles. In fact, some authorities, like Dr. Think of hummingbirds, Tallamy, as insectivorous birds that also happen to consume plant nectar. “Hummingbirds prefer nectar and require it, but 80 percent of their food consists of insects and spiders,” says Tallamy. No matter how many hummingbird feeders you have, you won’t be able to sustain hummingbirds if your yard is devoid of those insects and spiders. ”.

Although they can have an excessive number of legs and be large and hairy, spiders are an essential component of any healthy environment. Spiders are a gardener’s friend because they eat insect pests and preserve the great outdoors’ natural equilibrium. They serve as both predators and prey, giving hummingbirds and other birds as well as wild animals vital nutrition.

Besides being a hummingbird meal, here’s another great reason to be hospitable to spiders in our gardens: hummingbirds construct their nests with the fine, sticky web material. Purdue University’s Attracting Hummingbirds to Your Yard offers these facts: “Nests are made with down from dandelion, thistle, and milkweed, and portions of ferns, mosses, and young leaves. These materials are attached to the limb with several yards of sticky spider webs and droplets of tree sap. The nest is camouflaged with lichens usually found in the nest tree or surrounding trees. Some of these nest materials can be provided in your flower beds and surrounding yard plantings.”

More From Living Bird

Hummingbirds and some wildflowers have a symbiotic relationship that is well-known to birdwatchers. If you open any textbook on bird biology, you will almost certainly find a section explaining the relationship between the two, complete with diagrams showing the bills, tongues, stamens, pistils, and corollas as well as pictures of the birds nectaring. Because of their tubular, showy, and frequently red flowers, the plants attract pollinators that have long memories and frequently visit the same flowers. Additionally, the birds have access to energy sources that other animals do not readily have because of their long bills and flexible, grooved tongues. As they probe the flowers to gather the nectar at the base of the corollas, the birds leave covered in pollen, which they then transfer from one flower to another. The birds are fueled; the plants are fertilized.

The ecology lesson provided by hummingbirds and “hummingbird” plants is so captivating that textbook writers frequently retell it in their works, but birdwatchers frequently overlook the fact that this is not the whole picture.

It’s simple to overlook the caveat that most texts only briefly mention and seldom provide examples of: “Hummingbirds supplement their sugar diets by feeding on small arthropods.” The majority of us are aware of this fact, but I feel like too many of us overlook it. To what extent have birdwatchers observed hummingbirds feeding themselves outside of flowers, and how significant is that extra food source in any case?

We might not know what to look for, which could be one issue. Even though it’s easy to find pictures and drawings of the far rarer activity of hummingbirds being killed by praying mantises, I was unable to find many illustrations of hummingbirds hunting arthropods in my fairly extensive library and Internet search. The earliest explanations I could locate were from a 1946 paper written by German ornithologist Helmuth O. Wagner wrote a piece for The Wilson Bulletin titled “Food and Feeding Habits of Mexican Hummingbirds.”

Wagner conducted research in Mexico in the 1940s on the foraging habits of over a dozen species. He provides examples of how hummingbirds such as violet-ears, sabrewings, and starthroats catch flying insects from treetops, across cornfields, and above forest streams. A number of hummers are depicted in silhouette, swooping down from tree branches to catch insects in the air in the manner of kingbirds—a modern-day equivalent of sally-hawking. He also talks about how hummingbirds gather food from water surfaces, leaves, and bark.

Wagner came to the conclusion that insects and spiders were far more important in hummingbird diets than is generally understood and that nectar was not as essential as many authorities believed based on his field observations, his work with captive hummingbirds, and the stomach contents of collected specimens. Hummingbirds modify their diet to suit available sources, frequently substituting arthropod prey for nectar. He wrote, “Hummingbirds’ diet is mostly determined by habitat and season.” Depending on the season, a certain species may eat primarily insects or nectar. Most hummingbirds in Mexico do not rely on flowers for their survival. ”.

A number of researchers have argued that arthropods play a larger role in hummingbirds’ diets than is commonly believed, despite the fact that few have asserted that the birds can live without nectar forever. Although a 1980 study that was published in The Condor only included one hummingbird, it is widely cited Robert D. Montgomerie and Catherine A. For two weeks in May, Redsell observed a female Broad-tailed Hummingbird’s foraging habits in and around her nest in Rose Canyon in the Santa Catalina Mountains of Arizona. When the researchers searched a one-kilometer-diameter circle surrounding the nest for nectar plants, they discovered none that were suitable for hummingbird blooms. They tracked the female’s activity over the course of several days, recording time budgets for every ten minutes of daylight (6:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M.). M. to 8:00 P. M. ) and did their best to track every step she took to leave the nest. “The hummingbird spent all of her time either flycatching, gleaning from leaves, probing among lichens on tree trunks, or flying between foraging sites during the 19 foraging bouts that we observed,” they reported. They came to the following conclusion: “The bird had to have survived for at least two weeks solely on arthropods.” ”.

A much larger study by J. V. Remsen, F. G. Stiles, and P. E. In a 1986 study published in The Auk, Scott investigated the stomach contents of over 1,600 tropical hummingbirds from 140 different species and discovered that 79% of them contained remains of arthropods. The data suggest that the majority of hummingbirds feed on arthropods on a daily basis, likely at regular intervals throughout the day, and show that most hummingbirds are currently digesting arthropods at any given time of the day. ”.

Could it be that hummingbirds preen in the open on leafless perches, chase each other through our yards, or, best of all, zoom right up under our noses to nectar at our feeders and garden plants? In those situations, they make themselves hard to miss. Why don’t we notice hummingbirds hunting more often? However, they appear to keep a lower profile when hunting for insects, often being noticed only by the most vigilant.

Summarizing his eighteen years of hummingbird observations in the lowland forest of La Selva, Costa Rica, F. published a report in The Condor in 1995. G. Stiles outlines and provides illustrations for the four main techniques used by tropical hummingbirds to catch arthropods. Do temperate-zone hummers use the same?.

Hover-gleaning, the first technique, resembles nectaring in that the bird hovers a few inches above a leaf or spider web and uses its bill and tongue to reach for the prey. Of the four techniques, this one could be the easiest to observe. If you see this behavior, you can attempt to identify the bird’s intended meal. Although hummers also parasitize from webs, they take insects that the spider has already captured. Occasionally, the bird’s meal is a spider. (And, naturally, female hummers frequently use the threads from webs as glue to construct their nests. Another technique is called “hover-hawking,” in which the bird hovers and zigzags through swarms of insects, killing them one by one, much like a swallow might. The last two techniques are most likely the most difficult to observe since they both entail the bird sitting calmly and largely still while searching for food. When a bird sally-hawks, it flies up to catch one flying insect before returning to its perch. The hummer sally-gleans, flying up to pick an insect off a leaf and then flying back to its perch.

In the limited space provided, Stiles’ excellent and lengthy article cannot be fully summarized, but the following are some highlights:

Hunting for arthropods accounted for more than half of all foraging activities that Stiles documented, including both nectaring and predation. Nectaring is actually the less-frequent activity.

Hawking occurs more frequently at higher elevations in the vegetation, whereas sally- and hover-gleaning occurs more frequently at lower altitudes. When the birds are at their hungriest early in the morning, foraging activity of all kinds is at its peak.

Many species prefer to feed on spiders, and some tropical hummers eat nothing but them. Stiles claims that when the hummingbirds approached, he saw some spiders withdraw from their webs. He speculates that this could indicate that hummingbirds with longer bills have an advantage over other species because they can still probe and grab without waking their prey with the whir of their wings.

At La Selva, at least, females spend three to four times as much time as males do during the nesting season looking for arthropods. Indeed, the reason why female hummers in many species—including several species found in North America—have longer bills than their mates could be attributed to the significance of arthropod foraging. Female hummingbirds are responsible for looking after their nests and young alone. They must collect all food for their nestlings, which require protein to grow.

The short answer is yes: can observers using only binoculars study these phenomena? Both Wagner and Stiles relied heavily on their visual observations of birds in flight to compile their data back in the 1940s, when binoculars were far less sophisticated tools than they are now.

Naturally, locating them away from our feeders is essential. That involves a little extra legwork. Like many other birding challenges, though, the real challenge is mental: we have to put in the effort to see past the flash and dazzle to the grimmer reality that lies just beyond in order to understand how these birds actually live their lives.

FAQ

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