5/18/2023 0 Comments Hummingbird food![]() ![]() To sustain their fast-paced lifestyle, hummingbirds evolved a specialised high-sugar diet and to fuel the engine that keeps those wings beating, hummingbirds require an equivalent of what would be 150,000 calories for a human! Nectar, which can be some 50% sucrose, provides energy in abundance. This is partly because of their small size and low weight - they need to generate an enormous amount of force to create lift and fly. Their metabolism is turbocharged their hearts beat thousands of times a minute and their wings flap at an amazing 60 to 80 times a second. Hummingbirds eat nectar for similar reasons that athletes consume a high-energy diet. Read on to discover more about the nuances of a hummingbird’s diet and many more interesting facts about the foraging behaviours of these beautiful and complex birds. Still, nectar is indeed a massive component of their diet and provides energy to fuel the hummingbird’s extraordinarily fast metabolism - their hearts beat as fast as 1,260 beats per minute, and their wings can flap some 80 times a second! ![]() Hummingbird diets are more flexible than many ornithologists first perceived, and many are excellent aerial hunters. In fact, one major study into 140 species of tropical hummingbirds found that as many as 79% consumed arthropods, including spiders, flies, aphids, gnats and mosquitoes. Hummingbirds primarily eat nectar, but this doesn’t tell the whole story as, like all birds, they also require protein which they gain mainly from insects. Known for their delicate form and often vivid and colourful plumage, hummingbirds include the smallest birds on the planet - the Bee hummingbird weighs just around 1.8g! Such small birds must have a specialised diet to match, so what do hummingbirds eat? The hummingbird family Trochilidae consists of an incredible 361 species and counting.
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