Every April, ruby-throated hummingbirds begin arriving in northern Arkansas after a long flight from Central America. For most of them, the journey will have included a 600-mile nonstop flight across the Gulf of Mexico. This is a prodigious feat for a bird only 3.75 inches long and weighing only 0.07 ounces.
Hummingbirds are so active they might eat two or three times their body weight every day to power their little motors. Anyone in Eureka Springs with feeders or showy flowers will have seen them hovering over flower after flower before darting around the corner to find a feeder. Ruby-throated hummingbirds are one of four birds that cannot walk, although it can scratch its head with its toe.
Ruby-throated females make tiny nests in our neighborhoods in spring and raise possibly two broods of two or three chicks each summer. Then as daylight shortens toward the autumnal equinox, hummingbirds instinctively know to fatten up for their journey. In mid-September, a dozen or more birds might gather at a feeder or in the flower garden feeding and storing up fat, then be gone within a week.
Sources claim hummingbirds migrate individually and can travel as fast as 30 mph during flight. Birds seem to know when to migrate, where they are going and how to get back, and they supposedly return to where they were born. The flight for a typical Eureka Springs hummingbird will, twice each year, include a 20-hour nonstop flight over water. A bird born in your backyard might fly to a yard lined by a row of canna lilies at the edge of the woods outside Campeche on the Yucatan Peninsula and back to your yard in Eureka Springs, over and over, its entire life.
There are records of a ruby-throated hummingbird living to be more than nine years old, so it might have might have flown over the Gulf 18 times.
Once a bird is back in the United States, it will gain about twenty miles per day toward its destination. That means a hummingbird in Lake Charles, La., will need almost a month to reach a nesting place on upper Spring Street.
Ruby-throated hummingbirds are neotropical migratory birds in that they breed in Canada and the United States during our summer, but winter in Mexico or further south. Other neotropical migrators that spend summers in our area include warblers, tanagers, vireos, scissor-tailed flycatchers and broad-winged hawks.
The theory is all these birds were squeezed toward the tropics during the most recent ice age, but when the ice receded, the birds expanded their breeding territories further north, yet they still migrate south in winter.
Male summer tanagers are the only completely all-red bird in North America. Females are greenish-yellow. They arrive in our area by the end of April from as far away as Suriname and Guyana after crossing the Gulf of Mexico. They perch in a prominent spot and serenade us all day most every day from May through mid-August.
They migrate at night because there are fewer predators to bother them, and they survive by eating bees and wasps along the way.
Indigo buntings are the little blue birds that are not bluebirds. They avoid heavily populated areas, but they find conspicuous perches in our woods and will sing their little indigo hearts out all day long. They are locally common in northwest Arkansas all summer, and follow a similar migration schedule as summer tanagers. They usually arrive and make their nests by the end of April and leave by mid-August, as they gradually return to coastal areas to fatten up for the big flight to the Yucatan or points further south and a winter among passion fruit vines and bougainvillea. Experiments have revealed indigo buntings use the stars to navigate during migration.
Some buntings winter in Florida and southern Texas, two areas blasted by hurricanes. Those buntings will have to improvise this year.
Scissor-tailed flycatchers are the birds of open meadows, conspicuous by their dramatic tail feathers more than a foot long. When autumn beckons, they gather in flocks of as many as 1,000 birds and skirt the eastern edge of Mexico on their way south as far as Panama. In the spring a handful will return to the fields surrounding that big church south of Berryville.
Chipping sparrows are ground-feeding sparrows with brown bands across the tops of their heads. The ones around here migrate, but birds of the same species living three or five hours to the south might not. Our chippers travel to Baja California in large flocks, sometimes with bluebirds and warblers. They return inconspicuously by mid-April. The chipping sparrows in El Dorado, just a bit farther south, might stay in Union County for the winter… and they could have gone to Baja.
In our part of the world, dark-eyed juncos and chipping sparrows, both ground-feeding sparrows, trade places in October and April. Juncos spend their summers in northern Canada and Alaska, and migrate here for our winters. They arrive in October just as the chipping sparrows get ready to leave. Sometimes the two species will sit side-by-side on a branch, but soon enough one of them is leaving town.
White-throated sparrows also live throughout northern Canada during the summer. In fact, mappings of their migration routes indicate they almost totally leave the United States during the summer, but they drift back down to us in the winter. They are especially obvious under feeders when it snows around here because of their habit of lurching forward with their feet and pulling the snow backward in an attempt to find a seed. Their migration is almost totally within the United States and Canada.
Bald eagles are common near our rivers, lakes and chicken houses during the winter, but their summers might be spent in Canada or the southern Alaskan coast. They follow the seasonal food supply. Typically, eagles in Florida do not migrate, but this year might be different.
Not all birds migrate. Carroll County has blue jays, cardinals, mourning doves, white-breasted nuthatches, Carolina chickadees and tufted titmice that reside here all year. Crows around here do not leave unless it is extraordinarily cold. Our red-bellied woodpeckers will stick around, while others of their species, from Pennsylvania for example, might move south for a few months. Goldfinches might be infrequent at times, but our locals might remain during the winter and be joined by migrating Canadian cousins. Anyone who puts out thistle seeds will attract goldfinches regularly.
Migrating birds have their own habits. Short distance migrators might travel only a couple hundred miles to the winter home. There are sandpipers, which traverse the length of North and South America and back again annually. Not near as far, but still impressive, is the trip from South America to the woods around town by nighthawks, cerulean warblers, barn swallows and red-eyed vireos.
The estimate for how far a barn swallow from Berryville would migrate in one day is alleged to be 90 miles. A broad-winged hawk from near the Kings River might go 60-300 miles in a day and eventually all the way to Venezuela. How birds find their way to their destinations is a mystery, whether it is by watching the stars, feeling the flow of earth’s magnetic field, following landmarks, or riding with the wind.
One might begin to think that with so many tiny tweety birds flying over the Gulf of Mexico, maybe it is not so hard. Hummingbirds do it twice a year. Several species that summer around here also winter in the same warm weather areas. It is possible that a summer tanager, an indigo bunting, and a ruby-throated hummingbird from Rockhouse Road find themselves slurping from the same stand of hibiscus flowers in a Campeche neighborhood every winter.
When it is time for the journey, the tanager asks, “You ready?” The bunting shrugs and says, “I can if Yucatan.”