Bird Profile

Black-chinned Hummingbird

The Southwest's default backyard hummingbird is also its least colorful, and the way it pumps its tail while hovering identifies it faster than the throat ever will.

The Black-chinned Hummingbird (Archilochus alexandri) is the workhorse hummingbird of the interior West. It nests in cottonwood bottoms, desert canyons, suburban yards, orchards and city parks from British Columbia to central Mexico, and across much of Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah and west Texas it is the bird on your feeder in June unless you have reason to think otherwise.

It is also the plainest hummingbird most people will ever look at closely. The male's throat is black. There is a violet band along the bottom of it, but the angle that lights it up is narrow, and you can watch a male for ten minutes without seeing a flicker of color. Females and young birds are green above and dingy white below with no field mark at all worth naming.

Which is why the useful identification here is behavioral rather than a matter of plumage. Black-chinned Hummingbirds pump their tails while they hover, a steady up and down wag that other western hummingbirds mostly do not do, and their wings make a soft dull buzz rather than a whistle or a trill. Learn those two things and you can name this bird from across a yard.

This profile covers identification and how to separate it from the rest of the western lineup, the nectar recipe and the cleaning schedule that goes with it in genuinely hot country, feeder choice and placement, and the shape of the season at a Southwest feeder.

How to identify a Black-chinned Hummingbird#

Adult male

Dull metallic green above, grayish white below, with a velvety black throat that shows a thin band of iridescent violet to purple along its lower edge. That band is genuinely hard to see. It needs the bird facing you with light coming over your shoulder, and it is a narrow strip, not a full gorget of color. The tail is dark and slightly forked, and there is usually a whitish collar between the black throat and the green back.

Adult female

Green above, plain whitish to grayish below, with an unmarked pale throat that sometimes carries faint dusky flecks. The outer tail feathers have white tips. The bill is fairly long and slightly downcurved. There is no reliable single mark, and separating her from a female Costa's is a real problem addressed below.

Juvenile

Like the female. Young males start showing scattered dark feathers on the throat in late summer, sometimes with a single violet feather, which produces a lot of confused August photographs. A young male with a half-finished throat is still a Black-chinned if he is pumping his tail.

Telling it apart from the other western hummingbirds#

Six hummingbirds account for the great majority of North American feeder sightings, and they sort out cleanly once you use range, sound and tail shape together rather than trying to judge color on a moving bird. The comparison below is written for adult males, since females and immatures of several of these species are genuinely difficult and are best left unidentified.

The hardest pair on that list are Black-chinned and Costa's females, which overlap widely in Arizona, southern Nevada and southern California. Costa's is a shorter, more compact bird with a stubbier tail that does not project past the folded wingtips, and Black-chinned is longer with a longer bill and a tail that does project. The tail pump helps here too. There is more on sorting the whole group in the hummingbird identification guide.

Where Black-chinned overlaps with Broad-tailed in the mountain Southwest, sound settles it instantly: the Broad-tailed male's wings produce a shrill metallic trill, and the Black-chinned male's do not. Along the Pacific coast the resident bird is usually Anna's, and in late summer any orange-backed bird crossing the region is likely a migrant Rufous.

Where and when you will see one#

Black-chinned Hummingbirds are the most habitat-tolerant of the western species. They breed along desert washes and river canyons, in oak and pine-oak woodland, in orchards, and in ordinary irrigated suburbs, generally from low country up to mid elevations rather than into the high meadows where Broad-tailed dominates. That flexibility is why they are so common at feeders across the Southwest.

Most arrive from mid March in southern Arizona and south Texas, through April across the Great Basin and into the Northwest, with the northern edge of the range filling in by early May. Adult males show up first and leave first. Southbound movement runs through August and September, and the great majority of the population winters in western Mexico.

A growing number now winter along the Gulf Coast, from Texas through Louisiana and into the Southeast, which is why a hummingbird on a Houston or New Orleans feeder in January is worth a careful look rather than an assumption. Guidance on hanging dates is in when to put out hummingbird feeders, and on the other end of the season in when to take them down.

Nectar: one recipe, no variations#

Four parts water to one part plain white granulated sugar. That is one cup of water to a quarter cup of sugar. Stir until it is fully dissolved. Warm water dissolves it faster, and boiling is optional since the mixture stops being sterile the moment it goes into a feeder outdoors.

That ratio sits close to the sugar concentration of the flowers these birds feed on, and there is nothing to gain from changing it. Leftover mix keeps in the refrigerator for about a week, and the full reasoning is in the hummingbird nectar recipe.

• No red dye. The feeder does the attracting, and dye does the bird no good.
• No honey. It ferments fast and can grow fungus that harms hummingbirds.
• No brown, raw or turbinado sugar. The molasses content is the problem.
• No artificial sweetener. The calories are the entire point of the food.
• No stronger than 1:4. Thicker syrup is harder to drink and adds a water cost the bird has to pay in desert heat.

The feeder, and where to hang it#

Small beats large, especially in the desert. A feeder holding 8 to 12 ounces (240 to 350 ml) that you empty and scrub every couple of days is worth more than a quart reservoir turning cloudy in the sun. Saucer or basin designs, where the nectar sits below the ports, leak less, wash out faster and keep insects out of the liquid. The trade-offs are laid out in choosing a hummingbird feeder and in the overview of hummingbird feeder types.

Hang it where it gets morning sun and afternoon shade. In Phoenix or Tucson in July, nectar in full sun is spoiled before the day is over. Put it within a few feet of a perch, since hummingbirds spend most of the day sitting and watching, and avoid yellow feeder parts, which pull in wasps.

For ants, use a water-filled moat above the feeder and nothing else. Oil, grease and insecticide on the hanger all put birds at risk. The methods that work are in ants at hummingbird feeders, and the wasp problem is covered in bees and wasps.

Cleaning, which matters more than the feeder you bought#

Sugar water grows yeast and bacteria quickly, and the rate is set almost entirely by temperature. In the low deserts this is not a housekeeping preference, it is the difference between a feeder that helps birds and one that harms them.

Cleaning means hot water and a brush on every surface including the inside of each port, not a rinse and refill. Never top up over old nectar. The method, including how to reach the parts that hide mold, is in cleaning a hummingbird feeder.

What else they eat, and the plants that hold them#

Sugar water is fuel. The protein comes from small insects and spiders: gnats, aphids, leafhoppers, small flies, and spiders and trapped insects picked out of webs. Females feed nestlings almost entirely on this animal matter, which is why a yard that is heavily sprayed can hold hummingbirds at a feeder while failing to support a nest. The argument is made in full in pesticides and birds.

They also feed heavily at flowers, favoring tubular blooms in red, orange and pink but working a much wider range than that. Ocotillo, chuparosa, desert willow, penstemons, agaves, salvias, red yucca and hummingbird trumpet all pull them in across the Southwest, and a planting that flowers in sequence from March to September will hold birds even when the feeder is empty. See native plants for birds for how to build that sequence.

Water is underused. Hummingbirds do not wade, so a conventional bird bath is close to useless for them, but they will fly repeatedly through a fine mist or bathe in droplets on leaves. A mister or dripper aimed into foliage, as covered in moving water, brings hummingbirds into a desert yard when nothing else does.

Nesting and the shape of the season#

The female does all of it. She builds a small cup of plant down bound with spider silk, usually on a thin downsloping branch and often surprisingly low, from a few feet up to well overhead, frequently over a wash or a path. The silk lets the nest stretch as the young grow. The clutch is almost always two white eggs, and males take no part after mating, which is why they clear out of the breeding areas early.

At a feeder that plays out as a predictable sequence: territorial males from arrival through midsummer, then a stretch where the feeder is dominated by females and streaky-throated juveniles, then a general thinning out through September. A yard that had a black-throated male all spring and now has four plain birds squabbling has not lost its hummingbirds, it has lost one male.

A working setup for a Black-chinned yard#

1. Hang the feeder about two weeks before your area's usual arrival date and keep it filled even when nothing is on it.
2. Mix 4 parts water to 1 part plain white sugar. Nothing else goes in.
3. Fill only the amount you will actually change on schedule for your temperature.
4. Site it in afternoon shade, near a perch, away from yellow plastic.
5. Add a water-filled ant moat above the feeder, never oil or spray.
6. Scrub rather than rinse, and never top up over old nectar.
7. Add a second feeder out of sight of the first as soon as one male starts guarding.
8. Put in a mister or dripper, and plant something tubular that blooms in July.
9. Leave the feeder up two weeks past your last sighting in fall.

If a feeder in the right range sits untouched for three weeks in season, the cause is nearly always placement or nectar age rather than the hardware. Work through how to attract hummingbirds before buying anything new.