“A ruby-throated hummingbird is so small that it can easily fit inside a walnut shell!”
Ruby-throated hummingbirds breed across eastern North America and migrate to Mexico and Central America. Rapid wingbeats hold them beside flowers for nectar, while tiny insects supply protein and males flash a red throat patch during territorial and courtship displays.
By An Nguyen · Published · Updated
Measured against the 176 species profiled on this site. Each figure is converted to one unit system from the published range on the page, so the ranks are computed, not quoted.
| Measure | This species | Rank here | Exceeds |
|---|---|---|---|
| Body mass | 5.95 g | #167 of 176#28 of 28 Aves | 5% |
| Body length | 8.9 cm | #166 of 176#28 of 28 Aves | 6% |
| Lifespan in the wild | 5 yr | #156 of 169#28 of 28 Aves | 7% |
Closest in body mass
Ranks use the upper end of each published adult range, so they compare typical large adults rather than records, and metrics with no published number are left out rather than estimated. The full table is downloadable from the species dataset, and any two species can be put side by side in the comparison tool.
Browse photographs of ruby-throated hummingbird across habitat, behavior, anatomy, and life stages.
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Core article
A closer look at habitat, diet, behavior, reproduction, and conservation.
The ruby-throated hummingbird (Archilochus colubris) is the hummingbird that breeds most widely across eastern North America. It powers its hovering flight on flower nectar but also eats small arthropods for protein, and most individuals migrate to Mexico or Central America for winter — many crossing the Gulf of Mexico in a single flight.
Adults are 2.8 to 3.5 inches long and weigh 2 to 6 grams. Males have an iridescent ruby-red throat patch (gorget), green backs, and a forked tail; females and juveniles lack the red patch and have white-tipped tails. Pectoral muscles make up about 30% of body mass, and the shoulder joint lets each wing rotate through a broad arc, generating lift on both the downstroke and upstroke at 50 to 80 beats a second. A grooved, forked tongue captures nectar at up to 15 licks a second. The species belongs to the hummingbird family Trochilidae.
In the breeding season ruby-throated hummingbirds spread across eastern North America, from the U.S. Gulf Coast into the deciduous and mixed forest of southern Canada and west to the Great Plains, favouring forest edges, orchards, and gardens rich in tubular flowers and insects. As neotropical migrants they shift radically for winter to Central America, from central Mexico to Costa Rica and occasionally Panama, wintering in tropical dry forest, scrub, and farm margins where winter-blooming flowers sustain them until the northward return.
To fuel one of the highest metabolic rates of any vertebrate — a heart that can hit 1,200 beats a minute in flight — a ruby-throat must eat almost continuously, taking up to its own body weight in nectar daily. Its main energy source is sucrose-rich nectar from red and orange tubular flowers like trumpet creeper, cardinal flower, and bee balm, and it memorizes the locations of the best blooms, a behavior called traplining. But nectar carries no protein, so the birds also hunt tiny prey — hawking gnats, mosquitoes, and fruit flies from the air, gleaning spiders and insects from foliage, and raiding the sap wells drilled by sapsuckers.
Ruby-throated hummingbirds are solitary and territorial. Both sexes defend rich feeding patches with calls, dives, and aerial chases. In courtship, the male flies a U-shaped display, climbing up to 50 feet and descending past a perched female while its tail feathers produce a mechanical buzz. During cold nights or long rain, the birds may enter torpor, lowering body temperature and slowing heart rate to around 50 beats a minute, which can reduce energy use by up to 95%.
Reproduction falls entirely to the female: after mating the male leaves, and she builds the nest, incubates, and feeds the young alone. The nest is a 1-to-2-inch cup of plant down, bud scales, and lichens bound with spider silk that stretches as the chicks grow, usually on a slender downward branch. She lays two tiny white eggs, incubates 12 to 14 days, and feeds the blind, naked hatchlings a regurgitated slurry of insects and nectar; they fledge in 18 to 22 days. Wild ruby-throats typically live 3 to 5 years, some banded birds to 9. The great feat of their year is migration — many cross the Gulf of Mexico nonstop, a 500-mile, 18-to-22-hour flight over open water that burns nearly all their stored fat.
The ruby-throated hummingbird is Least Concern and currently increasing, helped by suburban feeders and ornamental plantings that supplement natural nectar. Still, it faces real pressures: fragmentation and loss of migratory stopover habitat, pesticides that cut its arthropod prey and can poison the birds directly, and climate change that risks decoupling their migratory timing from the bloom of their key nectar plants. Free-roaming cats and window collisions add notable mortality.
Kingdom
Animalia
Phylum
Chordata
Class
Order
Apodiformes
Family
Trochilidae
Genus
Archilochus
Species
A. colubris
A ruby-throated hummingbird is so small that it can easily fit inside a walnut shell!
To migrate south for winter, these tiny birds fly non-stop across the Gulf of Mexico—a 500-mile (800 km) journey that takes 20 hours!
A hummingbird's heart beats up to 1,200 times per second when flying, and they breathe 250 times per minute.
They are the only birds that can fly backwards, upside down, and hover in place like a helicopter.
A hummingbird's nest is tiny—about the size of a ping-pong ball—and is held together with sticky spider webs that stretch as the babies grow.
Hummingbirds must eat half their body weight in sugar every day to keep up their energy.
Select a question to reveal the answer.
They flap their wings about 50 to 80 times per second, which makes a buzzing hum sound—that is why they are called hummingbirds!
They eat sweet nectar from colorful flowers for quick energy, and they also eat tiny bugs and spiders to get protein.
In autumn, they fly south from the United States and Canada to spend the winter in warm places like Mexico and Central America.
Their nests are tiny, about the size of a ping-pong ball. The mother bird wraps spider webs around the nest so it can expand as the chicks grow.
Adults commonly weigh about 3 grams, with a typical range of roughly 2 to 6 grams.
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