Cool Critters: Tiny hummingbird moms deserve big-league gratitude on Mother’s Day

On this Mother’s Day, let’s honor hummingbird moms everywhere with a bouquet of nectar-filled flowers. When it comes to motherhood, this tiny bird weighing little more than a ping-pong ball truly does it all.

Her to-do list includes an exhausting blend of nest-building, incubating eggs, foraging for food and feeding her chicks dozens of times from dawn until dark. All this, with no help from the father or other family members.

It takes a village? No, just one very committed and hard-working mother.

“Hummingbird mothers raise their young entirely on their own,” according to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Marlene Cashen, a 20-year member of the Spokane Audubon Society, puts it more bluntly: “The males are spectacularly handsome, but they’re deadbeat dads,” she said. “They don’t help at all.”

Since 2012, Cashen and her husband, Bob, have observed hummingbird activities around the three or more feeders they set up in their yard each spring. Each of Washington’s four hummingbird species have made appearances – the calliope, black-chinned, rufous and Anna’s, she explained.

Breeding season will soon get underway (with the exception of Anna’s, whose breeding season begins earlier than other hummingbird species) when the males use their bright, shimmery plumage and courtship aerial dives to woo females. After mating, which takes only a few seconds, the male immediately flies off to find more females to entice and mate. Ah, the thrill of the chase.

As a result of these avian hookups, “every hummingbird mother becomes a single mom,” Cashen said. Most bird species share some degree of parental care, she added, including robins, nuthatches, owls and ospreys. A smaller percentage engage in cooperative brood care, where birds help raise the offspring of other birds who share the same territory but not necessarily the same DNA.

Consider, then, what the mom hummingbird must do on her own.

First, she constructs an intricate, cup-shaped nest woven from grass, dandelion down and teeny twigs, “all held together by threads of spider silk taken from nearby webs,” according to the American Bird Conservancy.

Typically, she lays two eggs the size of coffee beans. Then she sits on them for two to three weeks, periodically zipping away for a quick bite to eat.

“Hummingbirds have a very high metabolism, which means they must eat frequently to survive,” Cashen said. Even several missed meals can cause starvation, she added.

Once the eggs hatch, the mother hummer begins the mammoth task of raising her featherless, bumblebee-sized babies. Every 20 minutes, she feeds them a regurgitated slurry of insects and nectar by inserting her beak into their throats. She provides this intensive care for roughly three weeks, until her chicks – by then fully feathered and near adult size – fledge the walnut-sized nest they’ve almost outgrown.

Even then, her motherly work continues. For one or two weeks, she guides her fledglings to nectar-rich flowers – bee balm, western columbine, salvia and fuchsia, to name a few – and also teaches them how to catch insects for protein and nutrients that nectar doesn’t provide.

Powered by tiny wings beating 60-80 times each second, her juvenile offspring will forage independently throughout summer. In late summer and early fall, they’ll begin their long migratory journey to warmer climates, flying as far south as Mexico and Central America while making stops at flowering plants and hummingbird feeders along the way. Come spring, they’ll likely return to the same general area where they were hatched and raised by a devoted mother who worked 24/7.