Ruby and Gold

Kinglets are often found actively searching for food in winter. 

Take a walk in the bare winter woods and you’ll undoubtedly notice kinglets – tiny, highly active songbirds feeding high in the trees.  They are in the Regulidae family, which comes from the Greek meaning ‘petty king or prince’, and refers to their regal, brightly colored crowns.  Legend has it that these little kings derived their names from a fable about the election of the king of birds, defined as the bird that could fly the longest distance.  While the eagle was able to outfly all other birds, he was beaten by a tiny bird that had secretly hidden itself in his feathers.   

This male Ruby-crowned Kinglet is showing his namesake ruby crown.

Here in Central Texas, you can find both Ruby-crowned and Golden-crowned Kinglets most reliably from November through March.  The Ruby-crowned kinglet (Regulus calendula) is about 4 inches long, an olive-gray color overall with darker wings and white wing bars.  The males have ruby crowns that are barely visible and often covered by other head feathers, until responding to aggressive encounters by other males or even curious humans.  They sometimes forage in mixed flocks of chickadees and titmice, and may also show their crowns when in close proximity to other birds.  

Female Ruby-crowned Kinglets lack the namesake ruby crown.

Golden-crowned kinglets (Regulus satrapa) are similar but slightly smaller than their ruby-crowned cousins.  The males have an orange crown patch bordered in yellow and black, while the females have crowns that are yellow and black.  The males also raise their crowns during aggressive encounters.  Both species of kinglets sing fairly frequently even in the winter, with the male ruby-crowns having a complex, rich warbling song, and the male golden-crowns having a much higher pitched, shorter song.

The female Golden-crowned Kinglet has a gold crown, but it lacks
the orange patch in the middle that only the males have.

Kinglets have a very rapid metabolism and their tiny size means they must constantly forage to keep up with their energy needs.  In fact, they are so small that it would take 3 to 5 birds to total a mere ounce! They are always in motion and continuously flicking their wings.  While seen most often gleaning insects and their over-wintering eggs from tree branches, they can forage anywhere from the ground to the treetops, and often catch active prey while hovering or flycatching.  

This Golden-crowned Kinglet paused briefly from its
nearly constant foraging and feeding.

If prevented from feeding for even twenty minutes, they may lose a third of their body weight and could starve to death within an hour.  Golden-crowns are the smallest birds to routinely survive freezing winter temperatures, and huddle together in protected areas at night.  Their populations decrease during severe winters, particularly when ice storms make foraging much more difficult.    

This season take the time to walk through the winter woods and listen for the gift of song given to us by these littlest of kings.  Take your binoculars, and see if you can spot their crowns of ruby and gold! 

Magical Migrant

Typical hummingbirds in our area include Black-chinned and Ruby-throated.

Known for their diminutive size, long thin bills, and amazing agility in flight, hummingbirds are in the order Apodiformes, meaning ‘unfooted birds’, as they have characteristically tiny feet and are unable to walk on the ground. They are in the avian family Trochilidae, often described as a group of more than 300 species of small, often brilliantly colored hummingbirds.  

While we frequently have Black-chinned and Ruby-throated Hummingbirds here during the warmer months, we also generally expect to have a Rufous Hummingbird spend the winter in our yard.  As such, we are used to keeping a feeder up all year round, but imagine our surprise when a male Broad-billed Hummingbird (Cynanthus latirostris) showed up at our feeder on September 11th!

The male Broad-billed Hummingbird at our back porch feeder.

Most of the Broad-bill’s range lies in Mexico, but it normally spends the breeding season in the mountains of extreme southeast Arizona and southwest New Mexico, where it prefers semi-shaded stream canyons and riparian areas with sycamores, cottonwoods, and willows.  They are short-distance migrants, and their winter range is typically entirely within Mexico.  Very few remain in the U.S. in winter, usually very near the Mexican Border, so to find one in Central Texas is a rare treat!

The brilliantly beautiful male Broad-billed Hummingbird!

Broad-bills are a rather small hummingbird with a long, straight bill and a center tail notch.  The male’s vivid red bill, rich emerald green body, and glittering sapphire blue throat (also called a gorget) is unmistakable!  Females are golden-green above and pale gray below, with a white line behind the eye.  When courting the female, the male hovers about a foot from the female and makes a flight display that is likened to a precise swing of a hypnotist’s pocket watch.  

The male Broad-billed Hummingbird perches in our Escarpment Black Cherry
in between trips to the feeder.

The female typically chooses a nest site about three feet off the ground in a downward-hanging tree branch or shrub. They weave 1-inch tall, 0.75-inch wide cups of bark strips, grasses, and leaves held together with spider silk that appear similar to clumps of vegetation deposited in branches during periods of high water, offering them a degree of natural camouflage.  After laying a clutch of 2 to 3 white eggs, the female incubates them and raises the young alone.

In the warmer months these hummers visit flower gardens but rely on sugar water feeders in winter when blooms are not readily available.  They consume more than 1.5 times their body weight in nectar each day, and often travel long distances between nectar sources.  They feed most often in the morning and late afternoon, which is when flowers produce the most nectar. Broad-bills can also capture tiny insects by gleaning them from plants and flycatching.  As small as they are, they often join others birds in mobbing owls perched during the day, to reinforce to young ones what predators look like or to help drive potential predators away.

There are 5 or 6 similar subspecies of Broad-bills in Mexico, but only the subspecies magicus is known to occur in the U.S.  Climate change has already begun to reshape the range of this hummer, although scientists believe that the vulnerability of this species will remain fairly stable overall.  It has been estimated that for its current range, about 16% has already been lost in the mountains of Mexico, 85% is maintained, and 35% is gained by expanding further north into Arizona, New Mexico, and West Texas.  Whatever the outcome, we welcome this magical migrant, and hope that he spends the entire winter with us!

The Simple Beauty of Sparrows

White-crowned Sparrow, Zonotrichia leucophrys

Coming from the Anglo-Saxon word ‘spearwa’ and literally meaning ‘flutterer’, sparrows often conjure up images of the ubiquitous and non-native House sparrow and the House finch, which isn’t a sparrow at all.  While most sparrows are generally small to medium brown birds with streaks, the differences between sparrows can best be determined by their relative size, head markings, and habitat.

White-throated Sparrow, Zonotrichia albicollis

All sparrows have conical bills that they use to shell seeds, a primary component of their diet year-round, but especially so in the winter months.  There is little difference between the males and the females in terms of appearance, but males are on average larger than females.  As a group, most sparrows are birds of grasslands, prairies, and marshes, and seem to prefer weedy fields and woodland edges in the winter.  Of the sparrow species that migrate, none travel further than the southern United States or northern Mexico.

Chipping Sparrow, Spizella passerina

One of our most common winter sparrows is the Chipping sparrow.  Small and slim, with a long notched tail, rusty cap, white stripe over the eye and a black line through the eye, this sparrow moves in loose flocks and frequently feeds in short grass and open woods.  While still fairly abundant, this sparrow is declining in numbers, mainly due to habitat destruction, and winters in the southern part of the United States.  When first identified in 1810 by an American ornithologist, it was nicknamed ‘the social sparrow’ for it was easily approached and associated with human habitation.

White-crowned Sparrow, Zonotrichia leucophrys 

A fairly large sparrow, the White-crowned sparrow is distinguished by its black and white striped head, unmarked gray breast, and dark pink bill.  It is found in large groups in thickets and weedy areas, foraging on the ground.  Discovered in 1772 by a German naturalist, this sparrow was originally named the ‘white-eyebrowed bunting’, for in the Old World, sparrows were usually called buntings. 

Found in a variety of grassy habitats, and often in small flocks, is the Savannah sparrow. Streaked on both their back and their breast, Savannah’s have pink legs, yellow above the eye, a thin white median crown stripe, and a short notched tail.  First described by a British ornithologist in 1790, it was called a ‘sandwich bunting’ due to the first specimens being collected from Sandwich Bay in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska.   

Lincoln's Sparrow, Melospiza lincolnii

Lincoln’s sparrow is a medium-sized bird with a rather short tail, broad gray stripe above the eye, buffy moustache stripe, and a buffy upper breast with crisp, blackish streaks.  Found in winter in brushy edges of ponds and other moist areas, this sparrow was named by John James Audubon in 1833 after his research companion, Thomas Lincoln, shot the first specimen in Labrador.       

Sparrows are gregarious and are often our most hardy winter visitors.  Adorned in various shades of brown, gray, black, and white, they reflect the subdued hues of a winter landscape.  Often dismissed as ‘little brown birds’ when seen with the naked eye, these birds invite closer inspection and are nature’s way of reminding us that subtle colors and patterns can be beautiful, too!   

An Overwintering Texan

Rufous Hummingbird (male), Selasphorus rufus.

Late August into September typically marks migration season for hummingbirds, when most individuals move from their northern breeding grounds to their southern wintering grounds. Several factors affect this seasonal movement including amount of daylight, the angle of the sun relative to the bird’s location, availability (or lack of) food resources, and local weather patterns. Mature birds often start their migration earlier than juveniles, and males typically migrate a few days before females.  But the longest migration of any hummingbird species belongs to the Rufous Hummingbird (Selasphorus rufus), a species that can typically travel from as far away as Alaska to spend the winter in Mexico. 

A fairly small hummingbird with a nearly straight, slender bill, fairly short wings that don’t reach the end of the tail when the bird is perched, and a tail that tapers to a point when folded, the Rufous is like no other hummingbird in terms of color or behavior.  Males are bright orange on the back and belly with a vividly iridescent copper-red throat, while females are green above with orange-washed flanks and often a spot of orange in the throat.  They are the feistiest hummingbird with a gift for fast, darting flight and exceptional maneuverability, tirelessly chasing away other hummingbirds wherever they feed.  Males court females with elaborate flight displays, including J-shaped dives and nearly horizontal figure 8s.

Rufous Hummingbird (female)

In recent years, the Rufous has become the most common overwintering hummingbird in the southeastern United States, particularly along the Gulf Coast.  For the last several years we have kept a small hummingbird feeder on our back porch filled throughout the fall and winter, and have been regularly rewarded with an overwintering Rufous.  This species seems particularly able to handle the colder temperatures, perhaps because they go into ‘topor’ overnight, a reduced physiological state where their body temperature and metabolic rate are reduced.

While it has been proven that this species has an excellent memory for location, which may explain why they find our feeder year after year, it remains a mystery to scientists as to why these birds don’t complete their traditional fall migration to the Pacific coast of Mexico.  While providing a nectar feeder does not delay a hummingbird’s migration, scientists are investigating the theory that established shifts in climate and flower-blooming times are affecting their typical patterns.  Not only do these shifts appear to affect where these birds overwinter, but they also affect the timing of the clockwise circuit they make each year as they move northward up the Pacific coast in late winter and early spring, and travel southward along the chain of the Rocky Mountains in late summer. There is still much to learn about these migration patterns, and why these hummingbirds show up in places we don’t expect them to stay in winter.    

Regardless of reason, we feel fortunate to have our yard brightened during the colder months with this colorful visitor.  Why not keep a hummingbird feeder filled in your yard this season, and you just might find you have an overwintering Texan, too!