Certain hummingbird species are facing declining populations due to habitat loss and lack of food. Hummingbird banders — a small group of only 175 licensed individuals in the United States — are trying to figure out why.
Words by Jessica Bradley Wells | Photos by Logan Cyrus
June 15, 2022
It’s 8:25 a.m. in Southern Pines, North Carolina, and Susan Campbell stands beneath towering longleaf pines near the Weymouth Woods Sandhills Nature Preserve’s visitors center. In her left hand, she holds a modified spearfishing reel attached to a white nylon string that leads to a wire cage surrounding a hummingbird feeder.
She’s waiting to trap a hummingbird and secure a thin aluminum band around its leg. The band is so small, it fits around a diaper pin, yet it’s engraved with a code that tells the person who recaptures the bird where it’s been and its health status.
Campbell is one of only 175 people in the country licensed to catch and band hummingbirds — compared with the 1,500 people who have master bird banding permits. Earning a permit to handle hummingbirds, most of which are shorter than your index finger and lighter than a teaspoon of sugar, requires extra training, dexterity, and a gentle touch.
But the work hummingbird banders do is critical.
Susan Campbell, one of 175 licensed hummingbird banders in the United States, reaches inside a cage to band a hummingbird at Weymouth Woods Sandhills Nature Preserve.
Because of their size and speed, hummingbirds prove difficult to study. Historically, we know that ruby-throated hummingbirds, one of the most common species that breed on the East Coast, frequent Southeastern feeders from late March to September. But because of banders like Campbell, it's now known that ruby-throateds, along with 11 other species, spend winter here, too — a fact undiscovered until the 1970s.
Hummingbirds have evolved into more than 300 species over 42 million years. The United States has more than a dozen, with most living in the western half of the country. Hummingbirds are the second-largest family of birds in the Americas. But most remarkably, they have the largest hearts of all birds relative to their size — beating up to 1,200 times per minute as they reach speeds of 30 mph for 18 to 20 hours per day when traveling. Because they can more efficiently pump blood and oxygen throughout their bodies, they perform acrobatics like tiny Olympians. This, combined with a unique wing structure, makes them the only birds that can hover, and fly backward and upside down. This speed and stamina allow them to make one of the most magnificent migrations in the animal kingdom.
For all we know about how far and fast these wondrous birds fly, we don’t know exactly where they go and why.
With every bird that banders catch, they’re painting a clearer picture of these matchbox-sized creatures’ lives and how we can help them, especially in regard to habitat loss and lack of food.
It’s late April when I visit Campbell. She’s cocooned in a puffy teal coat that falls just above her ankles; her strawberry-blond hair, pulled under a baseball cap, reveals a pair of dangly hummingbird earrings. It’s only about 40 degrees outside, but Campbell feels good about the chances of banding a hummingbird.
“Now, we wait for a customer,” she says. “It’s like fishing. You just don't know how long it's gonna take.”
Within 10 minutes, a ruby-throated hummingbird enters the cage. Campbell, who speaks as quickly and confidently as a hummingbird flies, doesn’t even break conversation other than to note that the bird is an adult male. She removes a pair of fingerless gloves and her hand follows the bird as it squeaks and dashes from corner to corner. Finally, she grasps it loosely in her fist.
Campbell places it in a blue mesh bag and carries the bird toward a nearby bench where she's laid out a Wes Anderson-like spread: a scale, ruler, magnifying glass, crochet needle and a few other items she needs to band the hummingbird. The blue bag hangs from a hook on a handrail as she prepares to inspect and measure the bird.
The buzzing bird begins to mirror Campbell’s calm. She’s banded more than 4,500 hummingbirds since she started in 1999 at Weymouth Woods. Her first 500 were a little nerve-racking, she says, but now she works with ease.
“In the beginning, I felt like I was all thumbs,” she says, “but you get used to how to hold them, predict their behavior, and keep an eye on them to make sure that there's nothing wrong. But every one is different. I’ve handled a lot of them, but I still am excited to see the next one — that’s also what makes it special.”
She swaps her baseball cap for a visorlike magnifying glass and lowers the eyepiece before removing the bird by lightly pinching the sides of its body between her index finger and thumb. She wraps the bird in a scrap of white cloth that she trimmed off the toe of an old nylon stocking, which further calms the bird as she gently maneuvers its body.
With the point of a crochet needle, Campbell lifts the hummingbird’s leg by sliding it under the toes and pulling it away from the bird’s body. She tucks her thumbnail under his leg with one hand and with the other crimps the band onto his leg with her pliers. On his back, the bird lies completely still as she places the band. He only kicks his feet, shorter than the width of her thumbnail, as she makes adjustments so that the band can move around his leg but not fall off his foot.
Sometimes, she says, they get fidgety when they’re hungry, so she offers them a drink from a feeder once the band is set correctly.
After feeding him, she lifts the bird up to a jewelry loupe to inspect his bill. Hummingbird bills are made of a living tissue similar to our cuticles. Young hummingbirds have grooves in their bills, but this bird’s bill is completely smooth, so Campbell estimates he’s about 2 years old. Most hummingbirds have a three- to five-year lifespan, but some have lived up to 12 years.
She measures his bill, wing, and tail with a ruler, and records her measurements on a clipboard before checking to make sure he’s in good general health. With a plastic straw, she blows under his feathers to inspect his skin and then places him on a scale to weigh him.
Lying on a scale wrapped in his nylon blanket, the bird weighs in at just under 3 grams. During his migration, he would have weighed up to 6 grams to prepare for his 500-mile trip from somewhere in Central America across the Gulf of Mexico, stopping anywhere along the Gulf from Texas to north Florida. By the time he reached North Carolina, he would have lost half his body weight.
Less than 30 minutes after catching the hummingbird, Campbell dips a tip of pine straw in white craft paint and leaves a dot on the top of the bird’s head — his annual “beauty mark.” “So I know he’s one of the birds banded this year. This will only last four or five months. It’s not a permanent mark, unlike the band,” she says, before walking to a sunny area to release him. By now, his feathers are puffed, a sign he’s possibly on the verge of torpor, a sort of short-term hibernation. At night, and especially when it’s cold, hummingbirds will find a safe branch, puff their feathers, and point their bills to the sky before reducing their heartbeat, body temperature, and breathing to conserve energy.
The bird sits still in her hand for about 30 seconds, with his patch of ruby-red feathers sparkling in the sun. “He just doesn’t know he’s free to go after all this,” Campbell says, so she places him on a branch to give him time to wake up.
Most hummingbirds are shorter than your index finger and lighter than a teaspoon of sugar.
Campbell, who has a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Cornell University and a master’s degree in ecology from North Carolina State University, has worked part-time at Weymouth Woods since 1999 in addition to working at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Science since she was a graduate student in 1993. She was working in the bird collections group when Bob and Martha Sargent, two hummingbird banders from Alabama, visited the museum and talked about the growing effort to document hummingbirds’ winter migration patterns. They needed help expanding their network of banders in the Southeast and asked Campbell if she’d like to cover North Carolina.
“I thought about it for about two seconds and said yes,” she says.
Since then, she’s captured 12 species of hummingbirds in North Carolina and spends most of her time studying hummingbirds in the eastern half of North Carolina. She has a partner, Dwayne Martin, who works under her guidance as a sort of apprentice and covers the western half of the state.
“I marvel at these birds, even though I’ve seen and banded thousands of them. Every time I see them and every opportunity I have to band, it’s kind of like Christmas because I never know who I am going to catch,” she says. “These birds are just amazing in so many ways. It blows me away still even knowing what I know.”
The U.S. Geological Survey’s Bird Banding Laboratory issues banding permits and records data from every banded and marked bird in North America. Since 1960, about 1 million of the 78 million recorded species have been hummingbirds. While official records begin in 1960, Bird Banding Laboratory biologist Matthew Rogosky said researchers were banding hummingbirds in the 1930s, though the records were much less standardized and have not been digitized.
“Our knowledge of bands from that long ago,” Rogosky said by email, “is quite murky.”
Campbell measures the male hummingbird before recording his weight and noting his general health.
As technology advanced, new ways of studying hummingbirds emerged. According to Campbell, the earliest bird bands for any species were pieces of string. Researchers would assign colors to species and seasons and tie the string around a bird’s leg. When they’d see the bird again, they’d have a general idea of where it came from, but the string didn’t provide information as detailed as that from current bands, and wasn’t as permanent. The same method was used for hummingbirds until researchers developed a band, between 1.27 and 1.52 millimeters in diameter, that was small enough to put around the bird’s leg. Campbell says she came across a study from the 1960s in which researcher James Johnson used a series of thread-color combinations to track hummingbirds.
“They would sit with a feeder until [the bird] came in at close range and they could see, ‘OK, well, it's blue and green again, or it's red and yellow again.’”
The evolution of photography helped hummingbird observation, too. On a mission to make the invisible visible, engineer and photographer Harold “Doc” Edgerton invented a flash tube in 1936 that made it possible to capture hummingbirds in flight on film for the first time. Today, researchers rely on bird watchers with cameras to document birds at their feeders so the researchers can try to capture and band them.
Campbell gets ready to release the hummingbird.
Our knowledge of hummingbirds’ behavior in the Southeast started with a backyard bird watcher, too. When Nancy Newfield began bird watching in her Metairie, Louisiana, yard in the 1970s, scientists believed ruby-throated hummingbirds only visited the Southeast in summer. Any hummingbirds reported in the winter were dismissed as moths and not recorded.
When Newfield reported two black-chinned hummingbirds (usually found in the western United States and Mexico) she saw at her feeder in October 1975, she was met with disbelief.
“All the good ol’ boys in this area said, ‘She’s crazy,’” Newfield says when I call her. “So I said, ‘Well, I’m pretty sure I know what I’m talking about.’ I felt like there was something going on with hummingbirds that I was seeing that no one knew about.”
Newfield decided to study wintering habits of hummingbirds in Louisiana as a five-year master’s thesis project at LSU. At the time, the closest hummingbird bander was in Oklahoma, so she taught herself how to band hummingbirds and earned her permit in 1979, becoming one of only 12 licensed hummingbird banders in the United States at the time, and the only one in the Southeast.
Since then, she and other banders have spotted 14 species of hummingbird pass through Louisiana during their migration. She’s written three books and two guides on hummingbirds, including her most popular, Hummingbird Gardens, which teaches birders how to attract the fast-flying birds to their yards with native plants. While on the book tour, she was invited to dinner in Austin, Texas, by former first lady “Lady Bird” Johnson, a fan interested in tips for her own garden.
“She had a copy of my book and had me autograph it,” Newfield says. “That was an awesome, awesome week.”
It was almost as unexpected as her five-year study’s continuing for more than 40 years.
Campbell bands the male hummingbird she catches and records its data. Of the 78 million species recorded by the U.S. Geological Survey’s Bird Banding Laboratory since 1960, about 1 million have been hummingbirds.
Newfield is 77 and still banding hummingbirds at the same house she and her husband bought in 1970. When I speak with her on the phone, she’s at home recovering from a broken leg, but she has plans to teach a Tulane University student how to band hummingbirds the following week. When I ask her if she plans to retire, she tells me the hummingbird community wouldn’t let her, but she doesn’t feel the need to stop banding, either.
“I’ve had the opportunity to really put myself into the study,” she says, “but I have stayed with it because it’s still extremely interesting. I enjoy the people I meet, and I feel that my place is between the scientific community and the everyday gardener.”
She’s banded more than 20,000 hummingbirds and trained about 50 people to band them, including the Sargents, who made it their life’s mission in retirement to band as many hummingbirds as possible and recruit volunteers to do the same.
From 1987 until Bob’s death in 2014, the couple banded hundreds of thousands of hummingbirds, the majority of them ruby-throateds, across 12 species in Alabama, and trained more than 100 people to band hummingbirds. Bob trained Campbell, who considers him a second father, and Fred Bassett, who Campbell says probably bands more hummingbirds than anyone in the Southeast today.
Bassett lives in Alabama and bands hummingbirds in Alabama and north Florida in the winter and Idaho in the summer. He’s banded more than 35,000 hummingbirds over more than 20 years across 18 states and Canada. He set a record for longest distance between banding and recapture for a bird banded near Tallahassee, Florida, in January and recaptured roughly 3,600 miles away five months later in Chenega Bay, Alaska.
“I've been in many more places than any other bander, so I enjoy learning about hummingbirds,” Bassett says, “but the thing I’ve learned about hummingbirds is the more we learn, the more we know we don't know diddly squat.”
Bassett hopes that technology will advance so researchers won’t have to rely on bands to piece together a hummingbird’s migration. With a tracking device light enough and with a strong enough battery to last a year, researchers could accurately record a hummingbird’s route.
“We’ll learn more in six months than everything we've learned before — and we'll learn at least half of everything we know is not true,” Bassett says.
For now, hummingbird banders’ collective work helps us understand the birds’ mysterious behavior, and localized research gives us more insight into broad trends. In 2019, research published in the journal Science showed bird populations in North America have declined nearly 30% since 1970 — roughly 2.9 billion birds gone.
The research showed that ruby-throated hummingbird populations had an overall increase, but in the Southeast, local data tells a different story. Though Campbell says populations in the Midwest and Northeast are doing well, she’s noticed a decline in the number of hummingbirds in many places she bands.
“I did summer banding in July in Wilmington [North Carolina], where there should have been plenty of adults flying around and a lot of youngsters already out and about,” she says. “I didn’t catch a single hummingbird in over four hours. That was shocking to me. Absolutely shocking.”
Newfield also says she’s seen fewer birds in her backyard, as green space becomes less common in her neighborhood outside New Orleans.
Bassett recorded about half as many rufous hummingbirds in Alabama and north Florida last winter than the previous year, but he’s not convinced it’s a trend so much as a cyclical population.
“Pretty much everything with hummingbirds is uncertain,” he says.
Though it’s hard to draw conclusions about hummingbird populations, Campbell believes chemicals used for landscaping, farming, and industry are affecting insect populations that hummingbirds rely on for food, and deforestation and increased development are making habitat harder to find.
“I’d like to think this is a trend that can be reversed with enough people being aware of what these birds need and taking action,” Campbell says.“When I am talking to groups and banding, I spend as much time talking about these issues as I do about the birds themselves.”
Campbell has banded more than 4,500 hummingbirds since she started in 1999 at Weymouth Woods.
To help, Campbell says people can plant native plants that support hummingbirds and insects, use fewer landscaping chemicals, clean hummingbird feeders every few days in the summer to prevent fatal fungus and mildew, and buy feeders that have openings large enough for the birds’ bills. (Some feeders have openings so small that hummingbirds break their bills, Campbell tells me.)
Campbell sets up near the Weymouth Woods visitors center every Wednesday during hummingbird season. There’s a medley of chirping sparrows, bluebirds, and pine warblers in the background as I get ready to leave on this April day, and Campbell tells me that though there’s much researchers may never know about hummingbirds, the work makes a difference because people fall in love with hummingbirds and think differently about the environment.
“We have to do what we can and remain hopeful,” she says, “because otherwise, we’re not going to sleep at night.”
Jessica Bradley Wells is a freelance writer in North Carolina interested in telling stories about nature and the problem solvers who protect it.
Logan Cyrus is an independent photographer working in the southeastern United States who calls Charlotte, North Carolina, home. Before establishing himself as a full-time freelance photojournalist, he spent six years as a Navy corpsman at Camp Lejeune. He's grateful to have the opportunity to help tell people's stories and welcomes life experiences that inform the way he makes pictures.
