Natural habitats give hummingbirds, like this purple-throated lucifer hummingbird found in Ash Canyon in the Huachuca Mountains, places to forage for insects, perch, roost and build nests.
Editor’s note: With hummingbird migration gearing up in July, birder and garden consultant Marcy Scott chose 14 plants for Tucson-area gardens, including a few summer bloomers, that will attract the tiny birds. What follows are short excerpts from in-depth profiles on those plants from her new book, “Hummingbird Plants of the Southwest.”
Hummingbirds have been capturing imaginations as long as there have been imaginations to capture.
“Glittering fragment[s] of the rainbow,” John James Audubon dubbed these most marvelous creatures, and indeed it is next to impossible to entertain a discussion about hummingbirds without waxing poetic.
***
A hummingbird habitat is much more than a profusion of red flowers, although the more of these the merrier as far as the birds are concerned. Certainly, feeders can help fill any voids in flower availability, but a number of other features are important as well. Natural habitats are often quite sparse on blooms, but they provide other amenities that are less obvious but just as necessary, such as places to forage for tiny insects, prominent perches from which to monitor a territory, open spaces for courtship flights, roosting spots to spend the night, and secretive places to build nests.
***
As habitat across the Southwest dwindles, how we decide what to replace it with becomes increasingly significant. If we think of our yards as outcroppings of habitat of which we are the stewards and strive to manage them accordingly, we have a tremendous opportunity to make a genuine difference to hummingbirds and the extraordinary flowers they pollinate.
