As long as the earth remains, there will be planting and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night. Genesis 8:22 NLT
I know all the birds of the mountains, And the wild beasts of the field are Mine. Psalm 50:11
We usually take our hummingbird feeder down in the fall when we no longer see the little flying darts hovering about. This year it slipped under our radar as we prepped for the winter.
Some people believe that keeping a hummingbird feeder up too long in the fall will cause the birds to miss their southern migration. Others think it makes no difference – the migrating hummingbirds will fly south when the cold weather hits, whether feeders are accessible or not. Meanwhile other (non-migrating) hummingbirds will remain in the area.
Like so many things today, it is difficult to sort out fact from opinion.
Sometime in December we noticed a hummingbird coming to our feeder. Then we saw two. It was 19 degrees, and some of the liquid inside the glass feeder had frozen. Until the temperature rose to above freezing, I would bring the feeder inside at night to keep the liquid food thawed and flowing. Then I’d hang the feeder back up in the morning whilst it was still dark outside.
I took the above picture in early January. The colored lights reflected in the picture are lights from our Christmas tree. And the white in the background of the photo is snow from the previous day or two. The hummers are still with us.
It seems to me that lots of things about hummingbirds are really fast. The wings, for example, can beat at an amazing rate of sixty times a second (see Hummingbird I). And they can dive at sixty miles an hour.
The heart of a hummingbird beats about four times a second when it is resting, and twenty times a second when it is feeding! However, when it is cold at night, they can enter the state of torpor. This is similar to short-term hibernation. At this stage their heart rate decreases to about one beat per second and their kidneys stop functioning so they can conserve sugar. Their metabolism slows to about 1/15 the normal rate.
Until recently, a hummingbird flitting about in the snow is not something I’d have ever guessed I’d see. What a remarkable little bird we have brightening our winter.
And what an amazing Creator, Who, as the above Scripture states, has all this figured out and keeps things in order and moving along. If you’d like to know how to have a relationship with this Creator, please see Got God?
Hope you have a great day.