Bird Profile

Rufous Hummingbird

A bird the length of your thumb flies from southeast Alaska to Mexico and back every year, and spends the trip picking fights with everything at your feeder.

The Rufous Hummingbird (Selasphorus rufus) is a small, fiercely orange hummingbird about 3 inches (8 cm) long and weighing about as much as a penny. It breeds farther north than any hummingbird on earth, reaching southeast Alaska, and most of the population winters in Mexico. It is also, by a comfortable margin, the most belligerent bird likely to appear at a North American nectar feeder.

Those two things go together. A bird making a journey of close to 4,000 miles (6,400 km) has no slack in its energy budget, and defending a rich fuel stop against all comers is a rational strategy rather than a personality flaw.

This profile covers identification and the genuinely hard Allen's Hummingbird problem, the loop migration and its timing, how to run feeders when one bird is guarding them, the nectar recipe, and the careful version of the story about Rufous Hummingbirds wintering in the Southeast.

How to identify a Rufous Hummingbird#

Adult male: bright coppery orange on the back, flanks and tail, with a white breast band and an iridescent gorget that flares scarlet to orange-red. A small number of males show green on the back, which is where the trouble with Allen's begins.

Female: green above, whitish below, with rufous washing on the flanks and at the base of the tail, and usually a patch of orange or red spots in the center of the throat.

Juvenile: like the female, with variable throat spotting. Young males gradually acquire orange in the gorget through their first fall and winter.

The rufous tones in the tail are the mark to look for on any bird that is not an adult male. In flight the wings produce a distinctly buzzy, high trill.

Rufous, Allen's, and the rest of the western set#

Female and immature Rufous and Allen's are not reliably separable in the field, and honest reporting treats them as "Rufous or Allen's" unless the bird is in the hand. If your bird is east of the Rockies in fall or winter, Rufous is far the likelier of the two, but the identification is still worth hedging.

A 3 inch bird and a 4,000 mile route#

Rufous Hummingbirds breed from northern California and the northern Rockies through Oregon, Washington and British Columbia to southeast Alaska, at roughly 61 degrees north. Nearly all of them winter in Mexico. That is a round trip of something like 8,000 miles (12,800 km) a year in a bird weighing 3 to 4 grams, and measured against body length it stands among the longest migrations known.

The route is a loop rather than a line. Northbound birds move up the Pacific lowlands early in the year, tracking currant and salmonberry bloom. Southbound birds leave the breeding grounds remarkably early, from late June, and travel south through the Rockies and the Great Basin at higher elevation, following the mountain wildflower bloom.

The early southbound departure catches people out. In the Rockies, Rufous Hummingbirds are a July and August bird, and their arrival marks the start of the fall movement well before summer feels over. Guidance on feeding birds during these movements is in feeding birds during migration.

Aggression, and what to do about it#

A Rufous Hummingbird will pick a feeder, perch on a twig above it, and attack anything that approaches: other hummingbirds, larger species, and occasionally squirrels and chipmunks. A single bird can effectively close a feeder to every other hummingbird in the yard.

You cannot train it out. What works is geometry.

• Add feeders and separate them. Two or three small feeders on opposite sides of the house, or around a corner, cannot all be watched from one perch. This is the whole trick, and it is expanded in how many feeders and how far apart.
• Break sight lines. A shrub, a fence panel or a porch corner between feeders does as much as distance.
• Use small feeders. Several 8 ounce (240 ml) saucers beat one large reservoir, and they are easier to keep clean.
• Remove the guard perch. Take away the convenient bare twig above the feeder and defending it becomes harder work.

Nectar and feeder setup#

Four parts water to one part plain white granulated sugar. A cup of water to a quarter cup of sugar, stirred until dissolved. No red dye, no honey, no brown or raw sugar, no sweetener substitutes. This is the same mix for every hummingbird species in North America, and the details are in the hummingbird nectar recipe.

Change and scrub on a schedule set by temperature: daily above 90°F (32°C), every two to three days in the seventies and eighties Fahrenheit (low to high twenties Celsius), and weekly in cold weather. Scrubbing means a brush on every port and surface, as described in cleaning a hummingbird feeder.

Hang feeders in shade where possible, avoid yellow parts that draw wasps, and use a water-filled ant moat rather than any oil. Wasp and bee tactics are in bees and wasps at hummingbird feeders.

Winter Rufous in the Southeast#

Over the past several decades, growing numbers of Rufous Hummingbirds have been recorded wintering along the Gulf Coast and through the Southeast, from Texas and Louisiana across to Georgia and the Carolinas, with scattered records well up the Atlantic seaboard. It is now an expected annual event rather than a curiosity, and banders in the region handle these birds every winter.

The careful version of the explanation is that nobody is certain how much of the pattern is new behavior and how much is better detection. Feeders maintained year-round in the Southeast are far more numerous than they were, more people know to look, and banding programs have specifically sought these birds out. It is plausible that a genuine shift in wintering strategy is underway, and it is also clear that some of the apparent increase is a change in observation rather than in birds.

What follows practically is modest and safe. If you live in the Gulf states or the Southeast, keeping one clean feeder up through the winter costs little and may support a stray. It will not keep a Ruby-throated Hummingbird from migrating, because departure is driven by day length rather than by food, a point covered in when to take down hummingbird feeders. In a hard southern freeze the same swap-and-warm methods used on the West Coast apply, and they are in feeding birds in extreme cold.

If a hummingbird does appear at a southern feeder in December, note the tail and flank color and photograph it if you can. Local bird records committees and banding groups are genuinely interested in these birds.

Nesting#

Females nest alone, as in all North American hummingbirds. The nest is a cup roughly 2 inches (5 cm) across of plant down and spider silk, camouflaged with lichen and bark, usually placed 3 to 30 feet (1 to 9 m) up in a conifer, shrub or vine tangle, sometimes in loose groups where several females nest near one another.

Clutches are two white eggs. Incubation runs about 15 to 17 days and young fledge at around 3 weeks. Males hold display territories, mate, and take no further part, which is part of why they head south so early.

Breeding habitat is open forest, edges, second growth, thickets and mountain meadows, generally where there is abundant flowering. Sapsucker wells are an important early-season food, especially for birds arriving before much is in bloom.

Population and conservation#

Rufous Hummingbird numbers have declined substantially over the long term, and the species now appears on conservation watch lists. The candidate explanations are habitat loss and change spread across an unusually long route, and a mismatch in timing between when the birds arrive and when the flowers they depend on are blooming. Neither is proven as the dominant driver.

What a yard can contribute is small but real: native flowering plants that bloom across the season, no insecticide, and clean feeders during passage. The planting case is in native plants for birds.

If a Rufous turns up in your yard#

• Photograph the tail and flanks; that is where the identification lives, especially for females and young birds.
• Add a second and third small feeder out of sight of the first before the bullying starts, not after.
• Keep the mix at 4 to 1 and clean on a temperature schedule.
• In the mountains, run feeders hard through July and August.
• In the Southeast, keep one feeder going through winter and report anything that stays.
• Read how to attract hummingbirds for the planting and placement that make a yard worth defending in the first place.