The best way to track bird populations is through bird banding. However, the White House’s 2026 budget cuts this significantly.
Hummingbird Banding in the Davis Mountains
A Feather-Light Encounter
The hummingbird Susan Heath is banding weighs 3.06 grams. This is a weight I’ll find hard to grasp when she places the bird in my open palm. It feels so light that my mind struggles to register it. Ten minutes earlier, a bird flew into a nearby trap. This snare wrapped around a feeder in netting, leaving just one opening. It was at the Nature Conservancy’s Davis Mountains Preserve in West Texas. Heath is now measuring and fitting the leg band it will wear for life, all for science.
The Weight of a Hummingbird
A Feather-Light Encounter
It’s a dreary August morning and the second day of the biennial Davis Mountains Hummingbird Celebration. Heath explains the identification process. Around her table, about a dozen onlookers gather.
Identifying the Species
The bird is not bright green or rufous, a warm rust color, which eliminates many species. Heath spots a hummingbird. It’s either black-chinned or ruby-throated. When she sees its flight feathers form a club shape instead of a point, she knows it’s a black-chinned. Its small size makes it likely a young male. Adult male birds have a ring of shiny purple feathers around their necks. However, this bird only shows dark spots where those feathers will grow later. “He looks like a teenager trying to grow a beard,” Heath says. She takes a six-inch magnifying glass to the skull and sees that the sheath on the outside of his bill has little wrinkles. This also shows that the bird hatched this summer. Adult bills are hard and smooth, without wrinkles.
MD Imdadul Haque is the founder of BirdzFly, a research-backed resource on North American backyard birds. Drawing on years of independent study into bird identification, behavior, and migration patterns, he writes in-depth guides designed to help US birders understand the species in their own backyards — from common feeder visitors to seasonal migrants passing through.
