All Hummingbirds Explained In 10 Minutes

Hummingbirds are the only birds that can fly backwards. They are also the only birds whose hearts beat over 1,200 times per minute. There are 366 species. Here they are. The ruby-throated hummingbird. The only hummingbird that breeds east of the Mississippi River. If you live east of the Rockies and you've ever seen a hummingbird, this is what you saw. The male has a throat that looks black in most light. In direct sunlight, at the right angle, it ignites into pure iridescent red. The color is not pigment. It is structure. The feathers contain no red dye. The color is produced by microscopic structures that refract light, the same physics as a soap bubble or an oil slick. It weighs 3 grams, less than a penny. Every fall, it flies nonstop across the Gulf of Mexico. 500 miles, over open water. A bird that weighs less than a penny flies 500 miles over the Gulf of Mexico. And it does this on a fuel tank that would fit inside a thimble. Coming up, the one that is literally impossible by the laws of physics. The bee hummingbird is the smallest bird on Earth. 5 centimeters long, 1.6 grams. Lighter than a dime. In 1934, aeronautical engineers calculated that a bumblebee's body is too large and its wings too small for flight to be physically possible. They were wrong. They hadn't accounted for the wing's rotation speed. The bee hummingbird has the same problem. By early 20th century aerodynamic theory, it should not be able to fly. It flies anyway, at 80 wing beats per second. It lives only in Cuba. The entire world population of the smallest bird that has ever existed is confined to a single island, Hook. The next one is three times its size. But what it does with that size is something no other bird on Earth can do. The sword-billed hummingbird has a beak longer than its entire body. Four inches of beak on a five-inch bird. It is the only bird on Earth whose beak is longer than its body. It evolved this beak specifically to access a single flower. Passiflora mixta. A passionflower with a nectar tube so deep that no other bird can reach the bottom. The sword-billed hummingbird and this passionflower have been locked in an evolutionary arms race for millions of years. The flower getting deeper, the beak getting longer. Each one dependent on the other for survival. It cannot preen its own feathers with its beak. It uses its feet instead. What that beak evolved to do is one thing. What happens when this bird sleeps is something else entirely. And something almost nobody knows. The rufous hummingbird is the most aggressive hummingbird in North America. It will attack anything that approaches a flower, it has claimed. Other hummingbirds, hawks, eagles, humans. It has attacked golden eagles, birds 200 times its size, and one. It also makes the longest migration of any hummingbird. 3,900 miles from Mexico to Alaska. It weighs 3 grams at the start of the migration and arrives in Alaska after flying 500 miles a day with no significant stops. It is the hummingbird most likely to appear in your backyard if you live in the western United States. It is also the hummingbird most likely to attack you if you get too close to its feeder, hook. It can do this because of something in its metabolism that humans have been trying to replicate for decades. Stay with it. The Anna's hummingbird has the highest metabolism of any warm-blooded animal on Earth. To maintain its body temperature and power its flight, it must consume roughly its own body weight in nectar every single day. That is the human equivalent of eating 300 pounds of food daily. When food is unavailable at night in cold weather, the Anna's hummingbird enters torpor. Hook. A state so close to death that its heart rate drops from 1,200 beats per minute to 50. Its body temperature drops to near ambient, as low as 48 degrees Fahrenheit. It cannot be woken by touch. It appears dead. Every morning, the Anna's hummingbird chooses to come back to life. Hook. The next species solved the food problem differently. It doesn't rely on nectar at all. Most hummingbirds defend a territory, a patch of flowers they guard aggressively and feed from repeatedly. The green hermit does something completely different. It trap lines. Instead of defending one patch, it memorizes a route through the forest, sometimes one kilometer long, visiting dozens of individual flowers in sequence, returning to each one on a precise schedule, timed to when each flower has refilled its nectar. The green hermit remembers the exact location of every flower on its route, the exact time each flower refills, the exact order to visit them to maximize efficiency. It is running a logistics operation through the rainforest every day with a brain the size of a pea. That brain the size of a pea is about to do something that will make you question everything you thought you knew about bird intelligence. The Calliope hummingbird is the smallest bird in North America. It weighs 2.3 grams, less than a sheet of paper. It breeds in the mountains of the western United States and Canada in habitat that routinely drops below freezing at night. A 2.3 gram bird survives temperatures that would kill most animals its size because it enters torpor every night and its heart slows to a near stop. It also has the most complex song of any North American hummingbird. Males produce a sequence of sounds that scientists have documented as individually unique. No two male Calliope hummingbirds produce exactly the same song. The smallest bird in North America has a song that belongs only to it, Hook. The next species also has something that belongs only to it, but what it does to attract a mate makes the Calliope's song look quiet. The Costa's hummingbird lives in the Sonoran and Mojave deserts of Arizona and California. The male has elongated purple gorget feathers that extend sideways past his face, a mustache of iridescent purple. To attract a female, he performs a dive display. He climbs to 130 feet above her, then dives. At the bottom of the dive, he passes within inches of the female at 60 miles per hour, creating a loud screaming whistle using a specific tail feather that vibrates at the exact frequency to produce that sound at that speed. The female sits still throughout. She has heard this before. She will assess whether the whistle is loud enough, the trajectory precise enough, the courage sufficient. She usually says no, but when she says yes, what happens next is one of the most hostile childhoods in the bird world. The black-chinned hummingbird is the most successful urban hummingbird in the American West. While most hummingbirds require specific native habitats, the black-chinned has figured out that American suburbs, with their gardens, feeders, and ornamental flowers, are actually ideal hummingbird territory. It is now the most commonly seen hummingbird in urban and suburban areas, from Texas to British Columbia. The female builds a nest the size of a large thimble, made from plant down and spider silk. The spider silk allows the nest to stretch as the chicks grow. The nest expands with the chicks inside it. A nest that grows. She raises two chicks in this expanding thimble. Alone. The male has left. Hooked. The male leaves immediately after mating in every hummingbird species. Every single one. Here is why that matters for the next bird. The giant hummingbird is the largest hummingbird on Earth. 8 inches long. 21 grams. By hummingbird standards, it is enormous. By any other standard, it is still small. But next to a bee hummingbird, the smallest bird on Earth, the giant hummingbird looks like a different animal entirely. It lives in the Andes Mountains of South America, at altitudes up to 14,000 feet, where the air is thin and the flowers are scarce. At these altitudes, the giant hummingbird does something unusual for a hummingbird. It perches for long periods between feeding bouts, conserving energy in a way that smaller hummingbirds cannot afford to. A hummingbird that sits still. Because at 14,000 feet, even a hummingbird has to rest. Hooked. And at the other end of the scale from the giant is a bird so small, so fast, so strange, that it was mistaken for an insect for 200 years. The marvelous spatula tail. The male has four tail feathers. Two of them are standard. Two of them end in large, iridescent discs, blue-violet rackets on wire-thin shafts that extend several times the length of the bird's body. He controls these feathers independently. During courtship, he crosses them, uncrosses them, vibrates them, and moves them in patterns that females appear to evaluate over minutes of display. It lives only in a single river valley in northern Peru. Nowhere else on Earth. It is critically endangered. Fewer than 1,000 individuals remain. The single valley it inhabits has been reduced to fragments by agriculture. The last species in the bonus block was discovered so recently that it does not yet have a stable scientific name. It was found in 2022. Two more. Fast. The fiery-throated hummingbird. Found only in the cloud forests of Costa Rica and Panama. Its throat contains every color of the visible spectrum simultaneously. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. All produced by structural color. All visible at once from the right angle. No other bird on Earth displays all spectral colors simultaneously in a single patch of feathers. Scientists study it specifically to understand how living tissue can produce the full visible spectrum. It is a throat that contains a rainbow. The white-necked jacobin. The male has a pure white tail that it fans in flight, making it one of the most visible hummingbirds in the Amazon canopy. But the female is something else entirely. Some females look exactly like males. Pure white tail, blue head, the full male plumage. These females are not displaying. They are avoiding harassment. Female hummingbirds that look like males get left alone by territorial males. Evolution as disguise. There are 366 species of hummingbirds. Every single one exists only in the Americas. No other continent. No other hemisphere. The entire family of 366 species evolved here and stayed here. They are also one of the most threatened bird families on Earth. Over 30 species are currently endangered. The primary cause, habitat loss in the Andes and Central America, where the majority of species live and where deforestation is fastest. The marvelous Spatultail's Valley shrinks every year. The bee hummingbird's island is half the forest it was 50 years ago. A bird that evolved to be impossible, that flies backwards, that comes back from the dead every morning, that built a nest that grows, is disappearing at a rate faster than we can name the species we're losing. 366 species. 12 covered here. 366 species. 12 covered here. Drop the hummingbird you want next in the comments. Most requested. That's the next video.