Mandevilla

I was looking for a flower with a classical conformation having blooms with a trumpet shape to use as a prop in filming the hummingbirds. The Mandevilla was almost the first plant I laid eyes on at the nursery and it was a deep red to boot, a color I felt sure would be attractive to the hummingbirds.

Waiting on the hummingbirds gave me plenty of time to view this lovely tropical flower under many different lighting conditions. It was totally captivating and I almost couldn't help myself taking one photo after another.

There were times when the lighting would ignite only the trumpet and not the petals. The trumpet interior is an orange-red rather than the deep red of the petals themselves and, at times, it was as though a light were turned on.  The deep red is the kind that changes to a blackish-red like a red velvet.

The Mandevilla wasn't as attractive to the hummingbirds as I had hoped. They would work it over occasionally, but not nearly as often as I thought they would. Some days, they didn't even go near it.

I would take it in at night because I didn't want them working it over before I was ready to film and becoming so familiar with the flower that they wouldn't go near it, but I'm not sure that worked.

The blossoms are very long lasting. It is a tropical plant and is not hardy outdoors in zones north of Florida. I'll have to see if I can overwinter it indoors and enjoy it again next year.

Be A Professional Photographer In as Little as Thirty Minutes

The incident the other day where I waited six hours for what turned out to be one picture got me to thinking. That image was taken at a shutter speed of 1/2500th second. In other words, 2,500 photos taken at that speed would still only amount to one second of actual camera use.

One minute's worth of actual photo time would yield 150,000 pictures and an half an hour would bring the number of photos to a grand total of 4,500,000 images! You see where I'm going with this? Thirty minutes should be ample time for anyone to become a professional hummingbird photographer. I'm up to 1/5th of a second with these six photos alone!

The Hummingbird Tongue

If you didn't know any better, you would think a hummingbird had a tubular bill with a hole in the end of it for sucking up nectar. That would appear to be true from observing them, but those would be completely false conclusions. Their bills are divided - and this may be surprising because it is not commonly seen - into upper and lower parts like most other birds. There is no hole in the beak through which their tongue can pass nor do they suck up nectar like sucking on a straw.

Instead, they lap nectar like a dog would lap water. Their tongue is controlled by a very long muscle which extends around the lower part of their jaw and up the back of their skull. This allows them to extend their tongue beyond the bill almost as far as their bill is long

I saw a little comedy on the river one morning that had me laughing. Trumpet flowers, with their long, tubular orange blossoms are common on the shore of the river. It is not unusual to see hummingbirds stopping to sample the nectar. I don't know that I had ever watched one sampling these flowers, but one that was very close caught my eye one morning.

The tubular portion of a trumpet flower is so long that, even with it's extremely long tongue, the hummingbird couldn't reach the interior of the bloom where the nectar was residing. So, it was having to dive into the flower and push in as far as it could.  Once it did, another problem was created because the bird was unable to use it's wings in the tight quarters and the weight of the bird caused the flower to descend several inches like a down elevator. The blossom would dump the bird out and the flower would return to it's previous position, and the bird would start over again.

Another feature about a hummingbird tongue is that it has structures on the side that hold the liquid. When they are drinking at a feeder, they are actually lapping nectar at several times a second. Tiny grooves on the tongue allow the bird to take advantage of capillary action and easily drink the fluid.

Finally, the tongue is split and divided to about half it's length, but this is hardly ever visible. Who knew this small bird could have a tongue with so many unusual features? Since it is so integral to it's survival, maybe it is not all that surprising.

Urban Legends

There are a couple of urban legends concerning hummingbirds I would like to address.

The first concerns adding red food dye to the feeder formula. It isn't necessary. If you have hummingbirds coming to your feeder, they know where it is located. The food dye adds nothing to their ability to locate the feeder. Even a feeder in a new location does not need to use red dye. The color of the feeders themselves are often enough to attract them.

The correct concentration of sugar is a 20% solution. One-half cup of sugar dissolved in two cups of boiled water yields sixteen ounces of hummingbird food. That is enough to fill most standard-sized feeders twice. Refrigerate the unused portion until it is needed.

The final urban legend concerns taking down the feeder. Some people claim that leaving a feeder up tempts them into staying when they should be migrating. It just isn't true. They know when to leave. There is an upside to leaving them up a while longer, however. Hummingbirds passing through your area from farther north will be given a chance to rest and rejuvenate themselves before continuing their migration. I usually leave the feeder up for a week or so after seeing the last hummingbird.

Some Things Never Change

Some of the actions hummingbirds perform can be surprisingly similar to other larger birds.  The look of normal flight in this hummingbird is not something you often see. Maybe it is because more pictures are taken of them hovering around a feeder and juking in and out. At any rate, this photo looks much like any other songbird.

This image which I also posted a few days ago puts me in mind of the predatory look and osprey will often display.

Here is a photo of an osprey where you can compare the intensity and similarity of the look.

Although I had never seen it before in hummingbirds, I recognized this posture as soon as I saw the bird display it. It is a threat posture used in defense of a territory or, in this case, defense of the feeder, which the hummingbird considered it's own. Since I knew what the posture meant, I kept firing the camera for a couple more frames and successfully captured one of the few images where I have ever had two hummingbirds in the same picture. (See the photos from the September 11 post.)

Having seen Great Blue Herons display the same posture many times tipped me off to some unusual action getting ready to occur.

This final image is also a universal avian activity. Birds seem to spend an inordinate amount of time preening, but the care of feathers is understandably high on the list of their priorities.

Migration

Scientists can sound so authoritative in their pronouncements. Examples abound. The "just so" stories concerning evolution (which I don't want to get into here), the big bang theory, or how about the one about tonsils being a vestigial organ serving no purpose. Doctors made a lot of money on that one when I was a kid!

Migration theories are another area where I think the jury is still out. Scientists have offered theories about how birds learn migration routes from their parents, or use the sun as a kind of global positioning device, or use an internal compass. When you begin with the wrong premise (either everything has evolved or everything has been created), whichever one is the lie is not going to lead you to a correct conclusion.

One of the problems is that migration is not necessarily like it is portrayed in Rio2. In the case of hummingbirds (and osprey, for that matter), mom, dad and the kids don't all leave together. All three migrate at different times! Males leave first, females later, and offspring last of all. So much for the idea of parents teaching their children well.

In speaking of hummingbird migration, one of the better birding books admits, "The precise guidance system involved in hummingbird migration is not known" (The Sibley Guide to Bird Life & Behavior, pg. 364). Yet, amazingly, these diminutive creatures navigate all the way to Mexico (most crossing the Gulf) and return to the same neighborhood the following spring. Birders banding birds during times of migration in Louisiana, have caught hummingbirds in mist nets on the same day as they were caught the previous year! Try getting that kind of precision out of a human.

Some birds are nocturnal migrants that  are thought to navigate

by the stars, but that does not include hummingbirds.

One year we failed to put the hummingbird feeders out on time. The previous year we had one hanging from heavy-duty fishing line on the side of the garage.  I was totally floored when a hummingbird appeared and flew up to examine the end of the empty fishing line. The only way she could have known that it once held a feeder was to have been in our yard the year before. That little incident raised my level of respect for their navigational abilities enormously.

Less is More

Less is more is one of the mantras of photography. The idea is to de-clutter and pare down your images until you have as few distractions as possible from the message you are trying to convey.

I generally subscribe to this rule, but the other day I accidentally discovered that the opposite (i.e., more is more) can also be true.

One nagging little thought that had constantly been in the background as I filmed the hummingbirds was the idea that the photos were nicely framed on one side by the feeder, but the other drops off into empty space. Not that I can find anything particularly wrong with that beyond the fact that it was slightly unsettling.

I wanted to give the hummingbirds a chance to check out the new Mandevilla flower I had purchased while at the same time having it close enough to the feeder to not have to spend too much time refocusing on the birds. Even though it is only a split second, that is a lifetime in hummingbird time. There have been numerous occasions when I have had a hummingbird in my sights only to end up having a picture with nothing in it by the time I pressed the shutter. So, I put the hanging plant close to the feeder.

After getting repositioned and everything was in readiness, I realized I had hung the plant a little too close to the feeder. It was visible in the pictures when a hummingbird was on the left side of the feeder. I discovered, however, that it didn't detract from the photos but actually added to the images.

It did at least two things immediately. It added a splash of color. Red and green usually look wonderful together since they are complementary colors. And, the hanging basket created a nice closed frame on the opposite side producing an atmosphere of intimacy in the photographs. That was something I didn't even realize I needed until I saw it.