Friday Bird Blogging: Rare Rufous Hummingbird Sighting

It's fairly uncommon to see a rufous hummingbird on the east coast, though they are known to stop over at feeders on occasion. This one, apparently, had been stopping at a woman's feeders for two weeks. She agreed to let someone post directions to her house on the New Hampshire bird group. We took a visit out on the first day we had available and it was only a few minutes before it showed itself. We sat on this very nice woman's deck for half an hour or so, taking pictures and watching the bird as it came by multiple times. Not bad for a first ever sighting.


A couple interesting facts about the rufous hummingbird, per Cornell:

1. the Rufous Hummingbird makes one of the longest migratory journeys of any bird in the world, as measured by body size. Its 3,900 mi (6,276 km) movement from Alaska to Mexico is equivalent to 784,500 body lengths. In comparison, the 11,185 mi (18,000 km) flight of the Arctic Tern is only 514,286 body lengths.
   
   
2. The Rufous Hummingbird has an excellent memory for location, no doubt assisting it to find flowers from day to day, or even from year to year. Some birds have been seen returning from migration and investigating where a feeder was the previous year, even though the feeder was currently absent.

All five of my rufous photos can be seen here