Tonja Wiemeyer, age 14, of Salt Lake City, Utah, for her question:
Where do hummingbirds go in the winter?
Seventeen different hummingbirds spend the summer in North America where they build their mini nests and raise their mini chicks. Sixteen of these species depart before the first frost and fly far south to spend the winter. The gorgeous little Anna hummingbird spends the winter in Southern California, where he lives as permanent resident.
We all enjoy those TV programs that show how bird experts tag the legs of migrating ducks, geese and other sizable birds. Bird lovers around the world find some of these identification tags and return them, with notes on where and when. This patient global system enables experts to plot the migratory paths of most of the average birds.
However, the little hummer is not an average bird. The peppy little character resists capture with all his might. Besides, how could a readable identification tag be attached to his tiny leg or removed? Obviously bird banding is useless in tracing his winter whereabouts. All we can do is gather reports from reliable observers as he arrives and departs.
Ducks and geese migrate in flocks, so just a few banded birds can be used to trace the paths of large groups. The spunky little hummer is a loner. Hence, if an observer spies him in a remote village high in the Andes at Christmas time, we cannot be sure how he got there or whether the rest of his kinfolk favor the same winter home.
Hence, our information on hummingbird migration is rather sketchy. Of our 16 summer visitors, the two we know best are the rufous hummer who favors the west and the begemmed ruby throated hummer who nests in eastern and central North America. These favorites have been sighted during the winter season in various parts of Mexico but that is not the most remarkable chapter of their migration.
It seems that many of these miraculous midgets stoke up on extra rations of small bugs and take off on 500 mile nonstop flights clear across the Gulf of Mexico. A few observers also report that some of the other species detour to spend a few days or perhaps the whole winter in Cuba. Other reliable observers report sightings farther south in various remote regions of Central and South America. Some insist that the rufous hummer may migrate to the snow capped Andes, as high as 12,000 feet.
These remarkable feats are possible because the small hummingbird is one of nature's most dynamic packages of teeming energy. If he were as big as a man, he would consume 285 pounds of food a day. His metabolism is so high that this imaginar man size hummer would ooze 100 pounds of perspiration every day just to keep his skin from boiling.