What Foods, How Often and How Much Do Hummingbirds Eat?
Updated: Mar. 18, 2022Birding experts discuss what do hummingbirds eat—and how often they eat it! A hummingbird's diet includes more foods than you may think!
What Foods Do Hummingbirds Eat?
If you want to attract these majestic fliers, you need to know what foods hummingbirds eat. Hummingbirds consume a variety of foods in their diet. They drink nectar from flowers and sugar water for energy. Roger Emerick of South Glastonbury, Connecticut, asks, “Should I add anything to the sugar water for my hummingbirds to make it more nutritious?”
When you’re feeding them at your hummingbird feeder, there’s no need to put in additives such as red dye or honey. Offer hummingbirds the perfect meal by making this sugar water recipe.
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Nectar-rich tubular flowers are another way for backyard birders to lure hummingbirds to eat in your backyard. Bee balm, salvia, coral honeysuckle and fuchsia are popular flowers with hummingbirds, offering the vibrant colors they love and easy access to nectar. However, the sweet stuff covers just one dietary need. Hummingbirds forage for other food sources besides flowers and feeders.
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Hummingbirds also require protein to survive. They get their fill of it by eating small insects like fruit flies, mosquitoes and gnats. They eat spiders, too. Multiple food sources like sugar water, flowers and bugs are especially important as baby hummingbirds seek nutrition and prepare for fall migration.
Hummingbirds are so resourceful that they often forage for insects in the sap wells drilled in trees by sapsuckers.
Like many other hummingbirds, Anna’s eat insects like midges and leaf hoppers. The high-protein diet might help them tolerate colder conditions in gardens, parks and streamside areas all along the West Coast year-round. Allen’s hummingbirds pluck bugs and spiders off spiderwebs.
How Often Do Hummingbirds Eat?
Because they constantly burn energy while on the move, hummingbirds may eat up to three times their body weight in a day. To find that much nectar, one bird might visit hundreds of flowers per day. This is why a hummingbird-friendly backyard is so important.
Anusha Shankar, a postdoctoral fellow conducting research at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, explains why these birds are always eating. She says, “Hummingbirds need to eat constantly because they use up energy very quickly. If we had their metabolic rate, we’d need to eat 300 hamburgers a day to survive!”
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How Much Do Hummingbirds Eat?
“I use about a gallon of sugar water a day. Is it possible to determine how many hummingbirds I feed by the amount of sugar water they drink in a day?” asks Marge Kaufman of Sigel, Illinois.
According to lab studies, the amount of sugar water consumed by a hummingbird will vary depending on the richness of the sugar concentration. With the typical 4:1 ratio of water to sugar, a ruby-throat probably won’t drink more than about 2 fluid ounces per day. A gallon of sugar water could feed about 60 hummingbirds in a day! The actual number of individuals could be even higher if some are just stopping briefly, or it could be lower if some of the sugar water is being lost to evaporation, dripping, insects, etc. It’s tricky to come up with solid numbers, but it’s still fun to ponder how many hummers might be out there.
Birds & Blooms reader Elijah Gildea of Redding, California, writes, “Every spring and throughout most of the year, 50 to 100 hummingbirds visit my 11 feeders. They drink about 2 gallons of sugar water per day! April is my favorite month. I’ve had as many as six species show up then—Anna’s, rufous, Calliope, black chinned, Allen’s and a single Costa’s.”
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