Cold slows hummingbirds

ROCKLAND (AP) - It's a slow spring for hummingbirds at Carl Rudeen's ranch in Rockland.

The Rudeen family began feeding hummingbirds at their home near Pocatello more than 25 years ago, and since 2003 they've let a group of bird lovers on the ranch once a year to catch and count the tiny birds.

Carl Rudeen told the Idaho State Journal that this year's count was hovering around 150 to 200 birds. That compares to the 500 counted and banded at the ranch last year.

"Not bad, given the weather and everything," he said. "It's been a cold spring and the birds haven't shown up in the numbers like they usually do."

Some of the birds were heftier than normal. One male calliope hummingbird weighed in at 2.8 grams - they're typically around 2.4 or 2.5 grams. A female calliope hummingbird weighed 3.2 grams.

"So, she's a little chunky," he said about the weight. "She's probably a migrant. What they will do is they will stop and they'll tank up on a bunch of sugar, build a bunch of body fat, and then once they get a good reserve of fat, they will leave and use that to migrate."

The birds are surprisingly docile once they're caught.

"They are very feisty at the feeders, chasing each other around, but if we handle them properly and treat them well, they tend to calm right down," said Stacy Jon Peterson, who helped set up the annual bird count.

The hummingbirds are banded, dotted with a spot of water-soluble paint to keep them from getting caught twice in one day, and weighed, with all the information entered in a database. On average, about 30 percent of those caught already have numbered bands from previous years, Rudeen said. The information is used to determine how long the birds usually live - on average between four and five years, although they've counted some that are at least 7 years old - and whether they return often to the same sites.

Attention to the birds, although not yet widespread in the United States, is growing, Peterson said. That means that occasionally, a strange band is spotted on a Rudeen ranch bird.

"We have had a few of our birds encountered elsewhere, and we've actually caught a couple of birds here that have been banded in other spots," Peterson said. "It's giving us good information."