Anna’s hummingbird is pretty much the only hummingbird you will see in great stretches of its range. You don’t even have to look it up or carefully scrutinize blurry photographs, or lure them with a feeder and bust out the field guide. If you see a hummingbird in Seattle, it’s a fuckin’ anna’s, with a very outside chance of the very different and unmistakable rufous hummingbird. I’ve never seen the latter, I’ve seen tons of the former.
The reason it’s often the only hummingbird in town is that it has had an incredible expansion of its historic range, moving farther north than any other hummingbird alive. Some people in my household claim to have seen them in Alaska years ago; that paper I linked only mentions them breeding as far north as British Columbia. I’ve personally watched as an Anna’s had a snowflake land on its head, proportionally the size of a fancy hat. When we lived in the U District, somebody in the courtyard of our apartment building, right on The Ave, had a feeder, and the lil guys would perch in a small tree there in easy view of anybody coming and going. They persist all year, doing their thing.
It’s hard for me to believe this is all on the back of feeders and flower gardens, but that must be the case. If so, when the humans go bye-bye, so do the birds. Hopefully they’ll find a good place to be when the biosphere comes to grips with us, and with the size of their population, they’ve got better odds than a lot of hummingbird species.
Their main song is a quiet grindy sound, but it has an amazing power to carry over great distance. I’ve heard the call, then looked to see them in trees up to a hundred feet from where I was standing. Learn it and listen for it whenever you’re around feeders or blooming flowers – especially fuchsias and other deep pink things. You might just hear it in places you didn’t expect. It carries much more effectively than the humming of their wingbeats.
I could write more about how wild and freaky hummingbirds are, but it’s pretty common knowledge and I don’t have much time. But I’m glad this particular species is keeping us company, in places where other hummingbirds fear to tread.
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We feed the Anna’s, they peek in the windows and watch us. They don’t share feeders, and spend an awfully lot of time chasing each other away from feeders. Neighbors moved here from the east coast, bought a feeder rig with two arms, two hanging feeders, each with 8 ports. Rufous would have loved and shared, but all that territory is one Anna’s at a time. A rural relative at the south end of Puget Sound fed Rufous, had up to 200 visiting her feeders at a time – and a cat lurking at the bottom to leap up and grab anyone who flew too low.