Summertime means the birds are singing from morning until night, but one bird hasn’t been seen much this year.
Several viewers reached out to 13WMAZ asking us to VERIFY if the hummingbird population has dropped.
To find the answer, we spoke to Kevin McGowan at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
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Cathy Dobson loves her high-powered feathered friends. In Georgia, you can usually see the rub-throated hummingbird.
“I’ve got about five hummingbirds and when it’s time for them to start feeding again, I’ll get one or two at the sliding glass door to remind me to put the feeders out,” she said.
“They’re amazingly small [and] they weight about the size of a nickel. They’re interesting in that they’re adapted for a large habitat. They breed from Georgia all the way to Canada,” said Kevin McGowan.
He works with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. We asked him if hummingbird population numbers have declined in the last few years. He used two sources – the first is called Breeding Bird Surveys and it’s gone back 50 years.
“What I saw today while looking at the data is that the range of the ruby-throated hummingbird has been increasing over the last 50 years,” he said.
He says another study called eBirds says the population has stayed about the same, but if you’re not seeing the normal number of birds in your yard, it could be a predator or have something to do with the food source.
“Not all flowering plants have the same number of flowers every year,” he said.
So we can verify, the population has NOT declined, which is good news for Cathy.
If you have something you'd like us to verify, send an email to news@13wmaz.com or send us a message on Facebook.
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