This is an Anna’s Hummingbird; named after Anna Masséna, Duchess of Rivoli.
Also, evidently hand feeding Hummingbirds is a kinda popular thing. All you have to do is put sugar-water that’s been dyed red or any other bright, flower like color in your hand and stand around some hummingbirds.
It highkey looks like that hummingbird just attacked that person’s hand and is now drinking the blood though. Lol
…have you ever met a hummingbird? They want nothing more than blood.
Red dye isn’t good for them, especially if they’re drinking a lot. Instead, make a fabric flower silhouette and train them to come to that in your hand for the sugar water underneath, then they’ll come to your hand without it once they learn.
Don’t put red dye in your feeders, either, the red on the base is enough.
Also, those tiny feet mean they can’t really walk. They can shuffle sideways a bit, but that’s it. The babies don’t really move in the nest until they start learning to fly.
One of them yanks another away by the head feathers near the start of the video. Hummingbirds may be adorable, but they think they’re tiny dragons.
It’s next to impossible to get decent photos of hummingbirds on my phone (through the front window, no less) but I felt the need to share this angry little lady, who took up residence in our front yard about eight months ago and has been enthusiastically dive-bombing LITERALLY EVERYTHING since. She is very chilly right now and also very fluffy, and shortly after this photo was taken she tried to pick a fight with a small flock of bushtits, presumably on the grounds that they dared to exist in her presence.
(the bushtits, for their part, couldn’t care less, and our Small Lady Of Fluff and Rage was left to return to her perch so she could yell at everything for a good five minutes)
Hummingbirds are incredible acrobatic fliers, capable of hovering for more than 30 seconds at a time, even in windy conditions. Their feeding habits are equally impressive. Many species of hummingbirds have a forked tongue, each half of which curls over like a partial straw. As the bird extends its tongue, its beak compresses the space inside the tongue’s curls. Once in the nectar, both halves of the tongue re-expand, pulling liquid in along the full length of the tongue. For the birds, this is a much faster technique than simply sucking the nectar up like a straw. Hummingbirds can lick nectar more than ten times a second this way. For more gorgeous imagery of hummingbirds, be sure to check out National Geographic’s full feature. (Image credit: A. Varma, source; via Aarthi S.)
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