I am tired and I don’t have anything else done for you today, so once again I’ll turn to Ze Frank to tell us all about hummingbirds. They’re cute, come in all sorts of pretty colors, and would stab you through the heart if their beaks were long enough.
future stirges – when the last flower dies hummingbirds will remain – to become megasquitoes
Well, we do have blood-drinking finches, so there’s precedent.
and like refugees from roger corman movies, those finches drink blood from boobies
Wow! What a great video! I’ve been watching birds for years, and still this brought up lots of new stuff I didn’t know about (e.g. the bifurcated tongue tip).
BTW, am pretty sure that the house with the numbered feeders (starting at 05:12) is a place I’ve visited once upon a time, the “Jardín Encantado” in San Fransico de Cundinamarca, Colombia. It’s just a fairly large house converted into a hummingbird-watching centre – a magical place, where it’s quite reasonable to sit on the veranda and, over the course of a single morning, see more hummingbird species than exist in the whole of the USA + Canada.
One paltry advantage to the limited number of species here is that I never have any doubt which hummingbird I saw, even if they’re a speck at the top of a tree. I only have one call to memorize (sounds like a muted starling burble), one pattern of behavior and flight and such. Kinda fun catching view of an Anna’s at a hundred fifty yards, makes u feel less blind than usual. One of my fave bird encounters ever was seeing a giant snowflake land on a lil hummingbird head in urban Seattle.
But that’s definitely one thing to envy in Colombia.
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