COVID Swarm

Spring through Fall of 2020 and 2021 witnessed an unusual and unprecedented hummingbird swarm in the Bay Area, or at least in my yard. Numbers rivaled that of what I have seen in some of the Arizona hot spots. On my array of perhaps six feeders I routinely witnessed 20 birds present at a time. I found the nectar consumption numbers hard to believe and can only speculate that the birds were overeating! One of the several feeders is 32 oz. It was consumed over the course of a single day. One common estimate is that the daily carbohydrate needs of one bird amounts to 1-2 oz of 4:1 sugar water. So that single feeder (one of several) would be sustaining more than 16 birds.

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Figure – Typical number of birds present at feeders, midday:

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Being hole up during the COVID years I completed a project to use my short duration flash setup to capture the behavior of this swarm. Being primarily a portrait photographer; my hummingbird photo style is that of a studio portrait: stop action of birds interacting with each other and feeding and the indigenous flora. Main, fill, and back lighting is use to create the “portraits.”

But note that other than cropping and resizing for the web, all photos I exhibit are right out of the camera. These are photos of real birds feeding on real flowers. Backgrounds are not ‘photoshopped,” levels are not adjusted, there is no sharpening or other processing other than what comes out of the camera.

Here is a link to the Swarm Photos.