When the Cherry trees are full of blossoms and the Rufous Hummingbirds appear, you know that spring has arrived on Vancouver Island.
A glint of copper fire, the tiny Rufous Hummingbirds fly more than 3000 kms from Mexico to the Pacific Northwest, and back, every year.
The female Rufous does not have the sparkle of the male plumage, but she is equally spunky and no less beautiful.
They normally arrive on Vancouver Island at the beginning of spring and return to their winter home by July. So what is this female Rufous doing here in November, defiantly sizing up the larger female Anna’s Hummingbird?
It was 2016, and the humans had added a hummingbird feeder in the yard of their new home that summer.
Anna’s Hummingbirds stay throughout the year, but it was unusual to see a female Rufous living in their yard even after some snow showed up.
Not only was she braving the cold winter, the little Rufous was also fighting off other hummingbirds, and sometimes a whole flock of Bushtits, who dared to drink out of ‘her’ hummingbird feeder. The humans were impressed by the feisty little Rufous and started calling her, Xena the Warrior Princess, or just Xena.
Then one cold evening, the humans saw Xena chasing a juvenile Anna’s Hummingbird under the glass roof of their port cochère. The distressed juvenile kept flying up and hitting the roof rather than down and out of the glass structure. The human climbed on a long ladder to rescue the poor bird out of its entrapment.
The stunned stunner clung to the human’s sleeve for several minutes, while the other human prepared a cardboard box to help him recover in peace. It was like holding a living shimmering jewel!
Just as they were about to put him in the recovery box, the juvenile hummingbird stretched his tiny neck, blinked a few times, and flew away. He didn’t fly far though. A few meters from the humans, he danced and chirped for several minutes as though he was really happy to be alive, as were the humans watching him. The humans added another hummingbird feeder in the yard for the juvenile Anna’s Hummingbird, whom they started calling Zane.
For the rest of her short life, Xena stayed on in the yard. Guarding her territory valiantly, even as she grew old.
The humans noticed that Xena still chased Zane, but never too far. After all, Zane now had his own feeder to defend from other intruders.
Note: Want to learn more about Hummingbirds? Go to the Cornell Lab, All About Birds.
Rufous Hummingbirds: https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Rufous_Hummingbird/id
Anna’s Hummingbirds: https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Annas_Hummingbird
Words: Meenal S.
Pictures: Sanjiv Shrivastava
Meenal's Blog 