Hummingbird
I work a lot next to this open door with a balcony off to two flowering pear trees. For about three years now I’ve idly heard this bird, and finally I’m going to identify it. Well, it’s (I think, to the best of my knowledge) called “Anna’s Hummingbird.” Isn’t that ironic?
I think it’s a female since it’s brown. When I play the video, the bird replies, it’s kinda cute.
Hummingbirds are *fascinating*. Besides what we know about how they eat 3X their body weight every day, they usually just sit around, eating only 10% of their day. They also go into “torpor” frequently, and store their food for really long migrations. They are only in the Americas, and evolutionarily they’re from Central America, I guess. But then there’s this fascinating bit about lost fossils found in a museum cupboard:
In 2004, Dr. Gerald Mayr of the Senckenberg Museum in Frankfurt am Main identified two 30-million-year-old hummingbird fossils and published his results in Nature.[13] The fossils of this primitive hummingbird species, named Eurotrochilus inexpectatus (“unexpected European hummingbird”), had been sitting in a museum drawer in Stuttgart; they had been unearthed in a clay pit at Wiesloch-Frauenweiler, south of Heidelberg, Germany and, because it was assumed that hummingbirds never occurred outside the Americas, were not recognized to be hummingbirds until Mayr took a closer look at them.
Sources:
Wikipedia, “Hummingbirds”
David Leahy’s Birds of Northern California, “Anna’s Hummingbird”
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on Tuesday, October 7th, 2008 at 4:52 pm and is filed under local color.
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