This beautiful female hummingbird was a surprise visitor to our area four years ago. She’s not a hummingbird we typically see here, not one of our familiar ruby-throated hummingbirds. The ruby-throateds migrated south for the winter months ago.
She’s a rufous hummingbird, a bird of the mountains of the American West. Only a handful of rufous hummingbirds have ever been sighted in our area, all of them in the fall and early winter when they occasionally wander far eastward of their usual path. It’s typically young birds that make an accidental visit like this bird did in early January 2022.
