Great Videos, though not from Baiting Hollow

Here I provide links to several Youtube vids not taken by me. First up, a short vid showing a rufous wintering in Alabama. You can see she's almost identical to LaLa, the rufous currently wintering at the Baiting Hollow Sanctuary. However, the one in Alabama does show a small patch of red on the throat. Despite this the movie says it's a she, and this is probably correct. Mine has no red spot, and is presumably a juvenile. The rufous is the hummingbird migration champion, breeding in Alaska and wintering in central america, and covering a distance of 4000 miles. They are also considered the most aggressive of US hummingbirds. These 2 facts might partly account for why they show up on the east coast in winter - even as far north as Long Island.

Many of my readers will have already seen the wonderful "Nature" video "Hummingbirds: Magic in the Air" -

I recently came across an equally good one, "Jewelled Messengers", presented by "National Geographic" and beautifully narrated by David Attenborough: 

                                    

The sequence starting at 23.00 is particularly striking- it shows the courtship dance of the tiny Wire-Crested ThornTail, which is found in Ecuador and Peru.