Now they’re the most unusual of living creatures. Deep in the winter — the time when sensible feathered bipeds of their ilk have flown to more hospitable places — the two male representatives of the species Anna’s Hummingbirds are living very close to Ronnie Allen’s home in southwest La Grande.
In recent days, the tiny critters have endured temperatures near zero. Allen worries over them constantly, watching out a back window each morning to see if they return to the feeder he keeps for them.
They keep coming back. Allen is optimistic his little charges will survive the winter.
“If they can live through five-degree temperatures like they have, I think they’ll make it,” he said.
Anna’s Hummingbirds, named for Anna Massena, the Duchess of Rivoli, are native to America’s west coast, from southern Canada to northern Baja California, and inland to Arizona.
According to Wikipedia, they live in wooded and shrubby areas and mountain meadows. They get their nourishment from the nectar of flowers, from tree sap and from insects.
Though they live mainly along the Pacific coast, they are showing up in inland regions in the Pacific Northwest in increasing numbers these days.
Trent Bray, a local bird expert, said Anna’s Hummingbirds sometimes get carried to these regions by the wind. Other times they show up simply because they’ve decided to fly and explore new lands.
“They come in micro-migrations. I call them a pioneer species. It’s probably built into them to try and go new places,” Bray said.
Bray said the species moved into Oregon from California, along the coast, in the early to mid 1940s. He said he thinks the birds were rare to non-existent in Union County until 2004.
In that year, in the aftermath of a rare tornado, he spotted one for the first time and photographed it.
“It was the first documented sighting of the bird in Union County. Since then, it’s been detected here every year,” he said.
Bray said he recommends that people take their hummingbird feeders down in September, so the birds won’t be tempted to tarry too long into the fall.
Allen said he had eight hummingbird feeders in his backyard this year. As summer came to a close, he took all but one of them down.
“I left it there thinking there might be some stragglers,” he said.
The two birds in question, one adult and one juvenile, both males, started showing up at the feeder in late October or early November. Allen said it would have made more sense to him if the birds had left for warmer climes.
“I was hoping they would go, but they didn’t,” he said.
He kept a close eye on the situation, and took steps to help the birds survive. He carefully blended pure cane sugar and water for his feeder, wrapped the feeder in heat tape, and warmed it with electric current.
Wikipedia and other sources say Anna’s Hummingbirds are capable of surviving winter weather conditions, and do spend the winter in northern climates.
During cold spells, they gain weight during the day as their bodies convert sugar to fat. Birds that don’t have enough body fat or feathers survive sub-freezing temperatures by lowering their metabolic rate and going into a state of torpor.
But it’s expecting a lot for the birds to live through cold snaps like the one seen recently in La Grande. According to Allen’s own research, the last time anything like this happened was in 1985, in Redmond.
That year, an Anna’s Hummingbird was spotted on a day when the temperature was 12 degrees Fahrenheit.
Last weekend in La Grande, temperatures plummeted to about 5 degrees. Day after day, as Allen anxiously watched, the birds were busy at his feeder.
“I think five degrees is a record,” said Allen, a nature lover who spends many hours caring for, observing and photographing birds and deer in his own back yard.
The Observer
