Ruby-throated Hummingbird

Look for

A tiny emerald missile — iridescent green back, pale underparts, long needle bill, and wings that beat too fast to see. The male has a brilliant ruby-red throat (gorget) that flashes like a coal when the light hits right and looks black from the wrong angle. The female has a clean white throat and a slightly longer tail with white tips.

This is the only hummingbird that regularly nests east of the Mississippi, and in Memphis, it's the only hummer you're likely to see — every "hummingbird at the feeder" question in Tennessee is almost always this bird.

Size: ~3.5" long and about 3 grams — roughly the weight of a penny.

Listen for

• Wing hum: a high, papery buzz — hence the name. Males produce a higher whine than females.
• Calls: sharp, squeaky "chip!" notes and a rapid "titi-titi" chatter during chases.
• No song in the usual sense.

Where in Memphis

Every yard with a feeder or a flowering garden. Peak abundance is late August through September as migrants from further north stack onto the Memphis population for the trip south.

• Backyards with nectar feeders or native flowers (bee balm, trumpet vine, cardinal flower, salvia)
• Memphis Botanic Garden — excellent hummingbird gardens
• Lichterman Nature Center
• Woodland edges at Overton, Shelby Farms

Behavior

• Wings beat ~53 times per second in normal flight — faster in courtship dives.
• They hover, fly backwards, upside down, and sideways — the only bird group that can truly fly in reverse.
• Fiercely territorial at feeders. A single male will guard a feeder against all comers — sometimes against bumblebees and moths too.
• They eat insects. About half their diet is tiny flies, gnats, spiders, and aphids — not just nectar. Nectar is the fuel; bugs are the protein.
• Males leave early. Males begin southbound migration in July–August, before females and juveniles. By late September most are gone from Memphis.

Story & folklore

500 miles across the Gulf, non-stop

The most astonishing fact in this entire field guide: most Ruby-throats fly non-stop across the Gulf of Mexico — about 500 miles, 18–22 hours, on a 3-gram body. They double their weight in fat before the crossing. They travel alone, at low altitude, over open water, at night.

The ones migrating through Memphis in September are either fueling up for that crossing or routing down the Texas coast. Your feeder in East Memphis is a gas station on a Canada-to-Costa Rica journey being made by a bird lighter than a nickel.

Indigenous stories

Across the Southeastern tribes, hummingbirds are messengers, healers, and tricksters. Cherokee oral tradition includes a story where a hummingbird retrieves stolen tobacco from distant enemies — racing there and back faster than any other animal could. Chickasaw and Choctaw stories share the hummingbird-as-messenger motif. The birds' iridescence made them sacred objects in many Southeastern mound cultures; hummingbird-themed copper artifacts appear at sites across the Mississippi valley.

The Memphis window-feeder culture

Across Midtown and East Memphis, late-summer feeder-watching is a genuine neighborhood activity — porches get an extra feeder in August, and "have your hummers come through?" is September small talk. The birds return to the same yards year after year; individual females sometimes nest in the same tree for several seasons.

The red fiction

There's no need to dye sugar water red — it's potentially harmful to the birds, and the feeder's red plastic is more than enough attraction. This myth dies hard; please don't pass it on.

Fun facts

• A Ruby-throat's heart beats ~1,200 times per minute in flight, ~250 at rest.
• They enter torpor overnight — body temperature drops to near ambient, heart rate to ~50 bpm. Otherwise they'd starve by dawn.
• Their tongue is forked and grooved, and it laps nectar at 13 licks per second.
• The red gorget color isn't pigment — it's structural color, microscopic feather ridges refracting light. Turn the bird's head and the red vanishes.
• A hummingbird in flight metabolizes about 10 calories per day — proportionally about 155,000 calories per day for a human-sized equivalent.
• Courtship flight: males fly a steep pendulum U-shape in front of a female, 10–40 feet tall, producing a loud buzz at the bottom.
• The longest-lived recorded Ruby-throat was over 9 years old — incredible for a bird that small.

Field notes (to add)

• Feeder recipe card: 1 part white sugar : 4 parts water, boiled + cooled, no dye, changed every 3–4 days in summer
• Native flower list for Memphis hummingbird gardens
• Chickasaw / Choctaw names (to research)
• Arrival date tracking for Memphis (first-of-year sightings from eBird)