Look at the tongue on that hummingbird!

This little hummingbird worked herself into such a tizzy defending her nectar source I couldn't take my eyes off her. Fierce and protective, she eventually settled down on a small branch in the American Hornbeam tree. If you didn't know better, you would think she was sticking her tongue out at the juvenile trying to muscle in on her nectar source. This photo is not high quality, but it's great for teaching. Look at that long, long tongue!

Hummingbird tongues can be as long as or longer than their bills.

Hummingbirds have very unique tongues! To start with, the tip is forked and covered in a fringe that works like a mop to help the hummingbird lap up nectar, but it doesn't stop there...the edges of the hummingbird's tongue curl up to form small, open channels that use capillary action to pull in nectar. At one time, it was thought hummingbirds had straw-like tongues and sucked in nectar just like butterflies or moths do with their proboscis, but now researchers know they flick their tongues in and out up to 13 times a second to lap up nectar.

Update: I just read the article, "How the hummingbird's tongue really works," by Deborah Braconnier, so I thought I'd add it in. According to the research of Associate professor of ecology Margaret A. Rubega and graduate student Alejandro Rico-Guevara from the University of Connecticut, hummingbirds do not use capillary action to take in nectar. Instead, they curl their tongues to trap liquid. It's an unconscious, automatic effort that requires no energy by the bird. Click here for the entire article and a video of the hummingbird's tongue in action.

Because the tongue is so long, it lets the hummingbird

lap up nectar even if it can't reach its bill into the flower.

If you look carefully at this photo, you can see the tongue

curving down into the flower at a 90-degree angle to the bill.

Sometimes hummingbirds sip nectar from the base of

a flower from holes drilled in the blossom by insects. In

this photo you can see the hummingbird looking under

the flower. I don't think she found a hole, though...

Tucked in the dark shadows of the pines about

15 feet from the Lucifer crocosmia, this little female

hummingbird chattered and squeaked and

scolded. Her bill looks so sweet here...

Beak Bit (...literally this time!)

Every time I've watched a hummingbird, I've never seen one open his or her bill up wide. Even while chattering and scolding, the birds always seem to have such tiny little openings, so I wondered how they caught insects. Hummingbirds can not live on nectar alone. They also need protein, and therefore they become predators on the hunt for fruit flies, small spiders, and all sorts of flying insects, but their bills just don't seem suited to nabbing insects in the air like a flycatcher, so I wondered how they did it. All of my books at home talk about the importance of insects in a hummingbird's diet, and one even recommends putting out rotten fruit to attract fruit flies, but they never say how a hummingbird catches the insects, so I did a quick Internet search and found lots of interesting articles. Apparently, a hummingbird's lower mandible is bendy. Here is a clip from "Flexible feeders: the lower bill of the hummingbird makes a nectar-drinking beak into one for catching insects" by Adam Summers in "Natural History," Sept 2004. Click here for a link to the full article.

"To see how hummingbirds catch insects, Yanega and Rubega ran a video camera at 500 frames a second to film individuals of several species in slow motion as they fed on fruit flies. Projected at far slower rates, the movies reveal that a hummingbird catches flies at the base of its bill rather than at the tip. Most surprising, as the bird opens its beak to catch a fly, the lower bill suddenly bends downward at a point near the middle and widens, enlarging the bird's mouth to the detriment of the fly."

As in the previous hummingbird posts, any information I didn't know already, I gleaned from the "National Geographic Reference Atlas to the Birds of North America," edited by Mel Baughman. This is one of my favorite books for little details about bird behavior.