Hummingbirds are beloved for their glittering feathers and spunk, as well as their epic aerial battles and buzzy chirps. We put out feeders to entice these tiny birds and delight in how loyally they visit our yards, day in and day out—we name the birds we see, and we watch them joust and duel, bills at one another’s throats. But have you ever wondered if those two birds locked in combat are the same ones every time—and every year? When it’s all said and done, where do the victors and the defeated zip off to, out of sight? Territoriality (defending resources from others) is a complicated web of physical advantage, movement, and energetics.

 

To tease apart this murky story, I’ve specialized in the use of “biologgers”: miniature electronic tags that we equip to the animals themselves, to better understand how they go about their lives in their natural habitats. These include rice-sized radio-frequency tags that let us determine which hummingbirds are visiting feeders and when; radio-transmitters that hummingbirds wear like backpacks, to map out where they’re defending their territories and searching for flowers; and accelerometers that let us calculate how much time they spend on the wing each day. Check out the videos! ↓