busconews.com

by Neil A. Case

I wrote an article about the snowy owl, how rare it is to see one in Indiana, that I’ve seen just two in Indiana and I’ve lived here nearly fifty years. My article prompted Tia Buckland of Kendallville to contact me and tell me she and her husband had seen a snowy owl this winter in their backyard. That gave me the idea for a second article about snowy owls. Then a friend gave me an article from the Chicago Tribune reporting there’s an invasion of snowy owls this winter all across the northern states of the U.S.

Now I’ve received an article from the North Vernon Plain Dealer, not about a snowy owl, but another rare bird in Indiana. It’s not only rare, it’s the first time a bird of this species has ever been seen in Indiana.

This bird is about as different from a snowy owl as it can be. It’s a hummingbird and not the commonly seen ruby-throated hummingbird of summer in Indiana. This is a Calliope hummingbird. It was spotted at a hummingbird feeder outside a home in North Vernon recently.

Calliope hummingbirds nest in mountains and canyons of the northwest, from California north into British Columbia and east into Wyoming, Montana and southeast Alberta. They go south for the winter, to central Mexico and even farther. Instead of being in North Vernon, Indiana this bird should now be south of the Rio Grande, south of the U.S. border with Mexico.

A ruby-throated hummingbird is little. A Calliope hummingbird is even littler, half an inch shorter. At three and a quarter inches long it’s the littlest hummingbird seen in North America. It’s the littlest bird seen in North America.

A calliope hummer is colored much like a ruby-throated hummingbird, green on the top of its head, on its wings and tail, lighter green on its back, white underneath except for a bit of green on a male, buff on a female on each side. A male Calliope has flamboyant purplish-red streaks on its throat. A female or an immature has streaks of dull brown spots on its throat.

A hummingbird in Indiana in winter, or in any other northern state will be noticed. It must have been a sharp-eyed observer, however, who noticed this was not a ruby-throated hummer and publicized the presence of this first-time-ever feathered visitor to Indiana.

Calliope is a strange name for this bird. That’s not just my opinion. In “Words for Birds” Edward Gruson wrote, “The muse of eloquence was called Calliope, a name meaning ‘beautiful voice.’ It is not clear why a species lacking a voice should be dedicated to this particular muse.”

The Calliope hummingbird does have a voice. But that voice is described as high-pitched chirps and buzzes. I’ve seen Calliope hummingbirds but I’ve never heard one.

Every fall I am asked, “When should I take in my hummingbird feeder?” My answer has always been, “When you no longer see any hummingbirds or when the temperature goes below freezing long enough for the sugar-water in your feeder to freeze.” When asked if having a feeder out into the fall won’t cause a few hummingbirds to stay too late and perhaps be caught by an early winter storm, I say, “No, when hummingbirds are ready to go south they’ll go.”

Maybe I should change my advice. Hummingbirds have been seen in a number of states in winter in recent years, almost always at a hummingbird feeder that has been left out and is either heated or thawed and refilled frequently. Since a number of those birds, like the Calliope in Indiana, were out of their normal range they could not have stayed because of the feeder. They flew the wrong direction and found a winter food supply that would not be there if people followed my advice.