Everyone loves Hummingbirds and for good reason, but I don’t think many people know how territorial they are and how mean they can be, especially around food sources. At bird feeders, there are often clashes of Hummingbirds as they fight for their food.

As my new best friend, Elias, and I were taking photographs of Hummingbirds at some feeders in Ecuador I mentioned to him that it would be cool to get a shot of the Hummingbirds clashing while in flight. He looked at me like I was crazy. I took that as a challenge and moments later I showed him this photo. He had nothing to say, but his silence was the best outcome.

These are both Peruvian Racket Tail. The one on the right is an adult male and the one on the left is a female. These Hummingbirds feature little booties above their feet. You can see that the female has little booties too but they are just not as defined as the male’s.

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I hope that this photo is impressive because I’m very proud of it. This photograph is titled Long Tailed Sylph but only to keep my titles from being easy to distinguish and not too long. Credit should still be given to the Woodstar as well.

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The Wire Crested Thorntail is a very small Hummingbird. This happens to be a male juvenile so the wire crest is still forming. The adult male has a crest that is fairly long protruding out of the back of its head and creates a really unique look. I only got to see an adult male for a brief moment and could not get a photo of it. Unfortunately it did not return to the feeders we were at. Maybe next time…

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The Sicklebill has a specialty bill to access the inner parts of strange shaped flowers. This Buff Tailed Sicklebill was very elusive and we could only see it by crawling under some bushes to see where it perches.

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Unfortunately this is the best shot I could get of a Giant Hummingbird. I say it’s unfortunate because I would have rather captured an image that truly shows the size of this Hummingbird. A better photograph would be of this Giant Hummingbird flying next to another Hummingbird for comparison. That opportunity did not work out this time so hopefully I will get to try again in the future.

This is still a pretty cool shot though.

The Giant Hummingbird is the largest of all Hummingbirds.

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Another photograph of the Black Tailed Trainbearer as it stopped to have a snack.

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This Black Tailed Trainbearer was very difficult to photograph, but my friend Dennis and I did our absolute best while up to our knees in tall grassy bushes. We both didn’t know what the word Trainbearer meant so we looked it up. In case you also do not know, a Trainbearer is a person that holds a person’s dress if it is very long and dragging on the ground. That long dress is called a train for some old timey reason I’m sure. Now you can see why someone named this a Hummingbird a Black Tailed Trainbearer.

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Another shot of the same Ecuadorian Hillstar from all the other posts. I told you that I have many to share. This is actually a photograph of that Hillstar in a sequence with the photograph in the previous post. In that other photograph the Hillstar is taking off from its perch and as it took off I held my shutter button down on my camera and followed it in my view while it dove down. This gave me a series of photographs because my camera takes a lot of photos as the shutter button is held down.

We all know how fast Hummingbirds fly, right? Well if you don’t now then I’ll tell you that they fly very fast. In fact, they are very mobile and are the only type of bird that can also fly backwards (people love to tell me that fact). So following them in my viewfinder while trying to hold down the necessary buttons on my camera is very difficult. It takes a lot of thought process so at the time I do not even know what I end up capturing. This sequence is a very good example of that. I had no idea at the time that this Hillstar was on the hunt. In fact, I would have never even thought that was a possibility as I thought it only ate out of flowers. But I have proof that this Hillstar was hunting because I captured it taking off of its orange perch, swooping down, and opening its mouth directly at a small bug that was flying right in front of it. You may not have even noticed the big in my photograph but it is there, just behind the orange blog on the right. That orange blob is an orange flower that happen to be real close to me and that’s what happens with my lens when its focusing on something a little further. This creates a cool depth effect but also takes up a bit of real estate in my photographs. However, it still manages to capture the little bug that existed behind the orange flowers because it is very good.

I have some bad news though… You may not get to see any more photos in this sequence. The other photos are not as good. The next photograph in this sequence would have been really cool because it is of the Hilltar in another pose as it was about to eat the bug. Unfortunately all that action is behind an orange blob, similar to the bug in this photograph. Therefore it is not very good so I will probably never share it.

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Another shot of the same Ecuadorian Hillstar from the previous post. I took a bunch of photos of the same Hillstar so I’ll have even more to post.

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