Photo Credit: BirdLife International
The other day, while I was looking at my patio, I saw a hummingbird flying around my potted plants. The bird looks hungry, so I decided to purchase from Amazon the following two products.
Hummingbird Temporal range: Rupelian | |
---|---|
Four hummingbirds from Trinidad and Tobago | |
Scientific classification | |
Domain: | Eukaryota |
Kingdom: | Animalia |
Phylum: | Chordata |
Class: | Aves |
Clade: | Strisores |
Order: | Apodiformes |
Family: | Trochilidae Vigors, 1825 |
Type genus | |
Trochilus | |
Subfamilies | |
Subfamiles: |
Hummingbirds are birds native to the Americas and comprise the biological familyTrochilidae. With about 366 species and 113 genera, they occur from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, but most species are found in Central and South America. About 28 hummingbird species are listed as endangered or critically endangered, with numerous species declining in population.
Hummingbirds have varied specialized characteristics to enable rapid, maneuverable flight, exceptional metabolic capacity, adaptations to high altitude, sensitive visual and communication abilities, and long-distance migration in some species. Among all birds, male hummingbirds have the widest diversity of plumage color, particularly in blues, greens, and purples.
They are known as hummingbirds because of the humming sound created by their beating wings, which flap at high frequencies audible to other birds and humans. They hover at rapid wing-flapping rates, which vary from around 12 beats per second in the largest species to 80 per second in small hummingbirds.
Hummingbirds have the highest mass-specific metabolic rate of any homeothermicanimal. To conserve energy when food is scarce and at night when not foraging, they can enter torpor, a state similar to hibernation, and slow their metabolic rate to 1/15 of its normal rate. While most hummingbirds do not migrate, the rufous hummingbirdhas one of the longest migrations among birds, traveling twice per year between Alaska and Mexico, a distance of about 3,900 miles (6,300 km).
Hummingbirds split from their sister group, the swifts and treeswifts, around 42 million years ago. The oldest known fossil hummingbird is Eurotrochilus, from the Rupelian Stage of Early Oligocene Europe.( From Wikipedia)
Here are some photos I took with my humming bird feeder with Robin and Batman
Meanwhile, here's my photo with Glenn and Steve taken during Tonya Boyd Cannon Concert last Wednesday here at THD.
Photo Credit: Jenny Shively
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