The hummingbird keepers of Portland

Lily Roby

PORTLAND, Ore. (CN) — It’s a cold, foggy February morning, and Bev LaBelle is on the hunt for hummingbirds.

Walking along a trail in Southeast Portland’s Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge, she pauses as a flicker of movement catches her eye.

It’s an Anna’s hummingbird, the most common hummingbird species on the West Coast. Hovering in the air with dizzying wing beats, her throat patch glitters with purple as the morning light catches it. LaBelle knows this bird. She’s been watching it for weeks, ever since the first hints of spring stirred in Portland and she began her regular rounds here.

LaBelle walks this trail three times a week, recording details in a weatherproof notebook: data points like location, tree species, nest height, behavior.

While she doesn’t cover all of Oaks Bottom, she covers a large enough sample size to track the refuge’s hummingbirds year after year. Taken together, the data tell a story about these birds: Which ones are vying for territory, and which ones are successfully bearing offspring.

The woman and hummingbird watch each other inquisitively, one through polished birding binoculars, the other with beady black eyes. It almost seems as if this bird recognizes LaBelle, too.

The hummingbird settles into a nest no larger than a walnut. Expertly camouflaged with lichen and moss, it’s balanced in a crook between a tree’s branch and trunk.

This female has been incubating for nearly two weeks. Soon, hopefully, her eggs will hatch. LaBelle will know that’s happened by how the bird behaves. Rather than sinking into the nest to warm her clutch, she’ll perch on the rim to feed her babies.

LaBelle first saw a hummingbird nest decades ago, when she accidentally stumbled upon one. The experience stirred something inside her, and she became a hummingbird devotee.

With a permit to conduct off-trail research, she began submitting annual population reports to the city. Falling down a rabbit hole of research and obsession, she started to feel a sense of personal responsibility to watch and care for these tiny, majestic birds.

Late January and early February are nest-building season for Anna’s hummingbirds in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, where Portland sits.

Historically native to Southern California, the species has expanded north in recent decades as the Pacific Northwest experiences increasingly mild winters. In Portland, they’re now as common as sparrows, their metallic chatter stitching through urban and natural areas alike.

LaBelle floats nest to nest, documenting each success and loss in her little corner of the hummingbird world.

Each nest tells a story. Some seem to thrive, while others struggle all season.

To follow the birds’ stories this closely takes passion and dedication. Almost anyone could recognize the charismatic hummingbird. But to trudge to the forest several times a week, to get to know each bird and their stories — that takes real commitment. Joggers, dog walkers and hikers travel this trail regularly, oblivious to the little lives they’re missing.

Overhead in a blackberry thicket, a female hummingbird explodes with noise. She’s defending her territory, scolding an intruding male with sharp notes as she zips in furious arcs around a patch of brambles.

“Look at the show today,” LaBelle whispers. “Wow.”

The male, it seems, would like to mate — but the female is not interested. He hopefully flares his rosy gorget, peacocking (hummingbirding?) a shimmering patch of feathers lining his neck. She rockets forward to where he sits on a branch in her territory, threatening to pierce his throat with her needle-like beak. Her suitor gets the message and immediately flies off.

Conflicts like these are not uncommon.“Hummingbirds are among the most territorial species,” hummingbird expert and Oregon Bird Alliance staff member Brodie Cass noted in a phone interview.

“Their survival depends on access to nectar,” he said. “They remember which flowers they’ve visited and which they haven’t. It’s an extraordinary memory.”

LaBelle has seen countless aerial duels up close. She has watched males sing sweetly only to be rejected like this. Their advances can be premature if the female is still constructing her nest or clearing other females from a prime nesting spot.

She recounts a story from years ago. “I was watching a nest and a male came and started singing to her, showing his gorget while she was already sitting [and] incubating eggs,” she says with a laugh. “She opened her beak, bit his head and chased him off.”

Farther down the trail, LaBelle pauses beneath a vine-wrapped branch, where another female has been hard at work for more than a week. The bird zips back and forth in a rapid blur, chattering as she tears plant fiber from branches and carries the material piece by piece to her new home.

Hummingbirds construct their nests with unbelievable patience, typically first gathering moss and plant fibers, then strands of spider silk to hold it all together.

The silk acts like an elastic glue, binding materials into a tight orb that can stretch as nestlings grow in size. Lichen cloaks the exterior and renders the nest nearly invisible, just a knot on a branch.

These tiny architects often build in precarious locations. This nest is anchored in an awkward spot, balanced directly at the intersection of branch and vine.

“I’m just going to hope for the best,” LaBelle says with a sigh, marking the update in her notebook. “Her nest is what’s holding it all together.”

When hummingbirds mate, it lasts only seconds — two birds briefly fused in a falling blur before separating midair, just before they hit the ground.

After that, the female does it all alone.

For LaBelle, that solitary feminine vigilance is one of the most inspiring things about hummingbirds. But just like with humans, individualism can come with trade-offs in terms of less of a safety net. In January 2024, a violent freeze overtook Portland. Snow blanketed the city, and food opportunities dwindled. While her 2023 count totaled 41 nests, LaBelle found only 16 that year.

“It was just so quiet. It was horrible,” she says. “They can’t handle a drop like that. It’s hard to keep themselves alive, never mind their eggs.”

For hummingbirds, whose metabolisms burn at astonishing rates, cold snaps are catastrophic.

They must feed constantly, consuming nectar for carbohydrates and insects for protein. When temperatures plunge, they grow even more territorial, fighting fiercely over dwindling resources.

Climate change has complicated that story further, not only by bringing extreme weather events but by changing species distributions. Warmer winters have allowed Anna’s hummingbirds to expand north, their populations increasing by nearly 50% over the past decade. Other species have struggled, including the native Rufous hummingbird.

Fiery orange and famously pugnacious, the migratory Rufous hummingbird has seen its numbers decline by nearly 30% in the past decade.

This species migrates south around late summer and typically returns to the Pacific Northwest around March. It prefers to reside in more wild and open areas, but those places — think: oak savannas and forest clearings — are also among the spots most impacted by logging, development and wildfire.

Habitat loss, pesticide-driven insect declines, changing seasonal flower blooms, mismatched migration timing, predation by outdoor cats and light pollution: All of it has created the perfect storm for the Rufous.

“It’s been a pretty stunning decline,” Cass Talbott said — but at least the Rufous has its aggression going for it. They can frequently be seen pushing around the larger Anna’s hummingbird, driving them away from feeders.

Those hummingbird feeders can be a mixed bag.

Maintenance and proper food is key. It’s essential to use only unprocessed white sugar, and to change and clean them basically daily.

“We try to get people to realize that the reason we feed birds is for us, because we enjoy watching them — and with that comes responsibility,” said John Rakestraw of the Portland-based Backyard Bird Shop. Rather than feeders, he says native flowering plants are “the healthiest thing for them.” In particular, he recommends salvias, penstemons and early bloomers like red flowering currant.

Back in the refuge, LaBelle spots a new female and tracks her flight path to a branch.

A tiny nest is just beginning to take shape. LaBelle records the location carefully, making a note to return to this spot.

Even when a hummingbird does find a perfect nesting spot, things can still go awry. LaBelle gets to a white oak tree where just a week ago, a would-be mother was hard at work building a nest.

Now, though, she is nowhere to be seen. Gray feathers hang loose, as if torn from their place.

It’s unclear what happened. Maybe a predator like a blue jay or squirrel raided her nest for lunch. Maybe the female didn’t feel safe here and decided to relocate.

“She had so much energy,” LaBelle says, disappointment evident in her voice. “I don’t know what went wrong. It’s a bummer.” She takes a few moments, then writes the outcome in her notebook. In witnessing and documenting scenes like these, she’s also grieving a loss.

Hummingbird fever can hit unexpectedly. Ali King never set out to become a steward of these birds. Instead, she simply planted native flowers and hung feeders, hoping to beautify her backyard in Southeast Portland’s Hawthorne neighborhood.

Then came the isolation of the pandemic. King started spending long afternoons in her backyard gazebo, which she dubbed the “Covid Cabana.” One day, she noticed a flicker of green in the rafters. A hummingbird had built its nest in a small candelabra that hung from the ceiling.

King was instantly enthralled by this little world. Year after year, she’s watched as a female — perhaps the same one, perhaps a daughter — has returned. Hummingbirds rarely reuse nests, as the delicate cups are often a mess by the time chicks fledge — but this site is perfect. Sheltered by tarp and roof, the gazebo offers protection from wind and rain.

King began leaving out bits of raw cotton and animal fur to be used as nest materials. She also installed a heated feeder for freezing nights, as well as tiny cameras to observe the female’s progress without disturbing her.

“Watching her build with just a beak, bringing in these materials one little branch or one piece of moss at a time, is amazing,” King said as she watched the bird flit to a feeder hung outside of her window. “She makes this perfectly safe nest that expands with her babies, and the instinct to do that is amazing to watch.”

When a mother hummingbird is finished building her nest, she lays jelly bean-sized eggs — typically two, and typically about a day or two apart. Although built for motion, she then must then spend more than two weeks in stillness as she incubates the next generation.

Soon enough the hatchlings, featherless and prehistoric-looking, peek from the nest with mouths open wide.

Now the mother has a new duty.

“She goes out and finds food and comes back to feed them hundreds of times a day,” King said. The cameras that King has installed have allowed her a close-up look at the mother’s regurgitation of nectar and insects. “The feeding is all day long, and it’s crazy. But at one point, she starts staying away a little bit longer.”

The older, bigger chick usually lifts first, conducting a test flight in the gazebo.

The younger ones tend to hesitate more, unnerved by the transition. Sometimes, King has seen the braver sibling return to coax its sibling into courage.

“I have mad respect for this mama,” King said. “She does everything by herself and never stops.”

As of late February, LaBelle had already found nine nests in the wildlife refuge.

It’s still early in the season, and the weather has been kinder than it was two winters ago. The Anna’s hummingbirds, at least, are certainly rebounding.

Busy with their nests, these birds are often unaware they’re being watched so closely. Also unaware are many of the people out for walks in Oaks Bottom, busy as they are with their own lives and troubles.

For those like LaBelle — those who don’t just stop for a moment to admire a hummingbird, but truly observe them — these tiny life stories make for a compelling natural drama.

“It’s such a gift when you find one,” she says, lowering her binoculars. Overhead, spider silk, moss and lichen are stitched together and bound into a cradle, stretching just enough to hold the future.

“They fly, stop, back up, go forward, go twirling,” she says. “They’re so curious, and they have such attitude. I’m so protective of them, because I know what they have to go through to be successful.”