The Angry Hummingbird

The hummingbirds have been very active in the past few weeks, and they've been constant visitors to the butterfly garden in my backyard. So far this summer, I've shown you pictures of hummingbirds feasting while flying (July 5, July 15, and July 20), surveying their colorful kingdom (July 21), and happily contemplating one of the garden's big red monarda blooms (July 22).

These have all been very peaceful scenes so far. But there is another side to hummingbirds, and that is that they can be very territorial and aggressive little creatures! I started the summer with an occasional hummingbird or two; now that we're up to three or four (or more) visitors, sometimes all at once, things have gotten quite lively in the backyard, and the air is often full of chittering little birds who swoop and dive and chase one another all around the yard.

Over the weekend, I had the bright idea of getting out some trellises and placing them in and around the butterfly garden for the little birds to sit on. Since then, they have made good use of them. I often see a little bird sitting on one, sometimes just enjoying a rest, but often checking the sky for other incoming hummingbirds.

And so it was on this particular evening. The longest days of summer have passed, and dusk is starting to fall a bit earlier than before. Around 8 pm, I start to lose good light in the backyard, and sunset follows shortly after 8:30.

I was sitting in the backyard around 8 pm, trying to get just a few more minutes with the hummingbirds in the fading light, when I saw this one perch on top of one of the trellises, where she sat for several minutes.

I snapped away, getting some photos, and then I saw her take on a new posture. She puffed herself up and stretched out her wings to appear bigger, fanned out her tail, arranged herself in as intimidating a posture as she could manage, and started chirping loudly! When I looked up, I saw what she was responding to: another hummingbird was overhead approaching "her" garden.

The two little birds chirped at each other (almost every hummingbird kerfuffle begins with a little trash talking), and there was a brief chase that went up, up, up into the sky! And then BOTH birds came back down and settled peacefully into visiting the big red blooms of the garden not far from each other. So some of the "aggression," I think, is just posturing: perhaps a way of establishing or enforcing a hummingbird social pecking order of some kind.

The song to accompany this photo of an angry hummingbird is the Dixie Chicks' Not Ready To Make Nice. This photo is dedicated, with great respect and affection, to all of those (even the littlest among us) who stand their ground for what they believe in, regardless of the personal cost.