**Male ruby-throated hummingbird at our feeder**

OK…. hold your arms straight out to each side and flap them like wings for a few seconds. Now instead of flapping them, rotate them in a figure of eight. Now pin your elbows to your sides and rotate your forearms and hands in a figure of eight. Finally, do this 80 times a second. That’s how a hummingbird flies - and he or she can fly forwards, straight up or down, or hover in place. Hummingbirds are the only birds that can fly backwards and, even at times, upside down! Hummingbirds can actually rotate their wings in circles unlike all other birds. Of course, we humans only learned how to fly a little over a hundred years ago. Birds have been flying for more like 90 million years since they left their dinosaur ancestors behind, so there has been time to perfect and vary the technique.

In the 1980’s my parents began wintering in Green Valley, Arizona, south of Tucson to escape midwestern winters. Our family spent many April vacations visiting them enjoying the warmth, the sun, and the dramatic change in landscape from New England. East of Green Valley are the lovely Santa Rita Mountains where Madera Canyon is one of the prime stopovers for migrating hummingbirds of the western United States. In the spring it is deluged with hummingbirds - and birders. There are 16 species of hummingbird in North America with 15 of them found west of the Rocky Mountains and only one - the ruby-throated hummingbird found east of the Mississippi.

**Hummingbirds can perch, but they can’t walk on their tiny legs**

Most hummingbirds winter in Mexico and Central America. The Madera Canyon western birds fly overland to their northern breeding grounds. The tiny ruby-throat flies up to 900 miles non-stop over the Gulf of Mexico on its 2000 mile journey to our backyard. To do this, they increase their weight by 50%, all of it fat. (If you weigh about 3.5 grams (1/10 of an ounce), that’s a 1/20 of an ounce weight gain!) Hummingbirds have the highest metabolic rate of any animal on Earth with a heart rate of around 1200 beats per minute. If my energy output were the same as a hummingbird, I would have to consume and burn off 285 pounds of hamburger, 370 pounds of potatoes, or 130 pounds of bread - every day! But they are not all brawn and no brain. With a brain weight that is 4% of its body weight, the hummingbird has the largest brain size to body weight of all birds.

**Female ruby-throated hummingbird stretching her wings**

I’ve enjoyed the challenge of photographing these tiny birds if only to capture their “true colors,” which are almost invisible when they are zooming around. Unfortunately, they are a little scruffy right now because, like all birds, they are molting - shedding all of their feathers and recreating a new wardrobe for their upcoming trip to the tropics. Emily Dickinson had the following observations about hummingbirds presumably without a telephoto lens or even binoculars:

A Route of Evanescence,
With a revolving Wheel –
A Resonance of Emerald
A Rush of Cochineal –
And every Blossom on the Bush
Adjusts it’s tumbled Head –
The Mail from Tunis – probably,
An easy Morning’s Ride –
Emily Dickinson, "A Route of Evanescence"

*The cochineal is a scale insect in the suborder Sternorrhyncha from which the natural dye carmine is derived.