a special place

I had heard about Paul Adams' Baiting Hollow Hummingbird Sanctuary but I had no idea how beautiful it was (the attached pictures give only a very small idea of what this place is like). Paul Adams is a Professor of Neurobiology and Behavior at Stony Brook and a MacArthur 'genius' award winner. He is also a passionate admirer of hummingbirds and he has created this sanctuary on his property in the Harbor Hills glacial moraine in Baiting Hollow, a stunning site overlooking the bluffs and Long Island Sound, surrounded by as-yet pristine forests and filled with native and garden flowers as well as feeders, all set up to attract (you guessed it) hummingbirds. So this is a partnership between nature and a most singular man! As readers of this blog will recognize, he is also the videographer of our East Quogue hummingbirds which he photographed on two occasions during their nesting. After that, there was no way that we could resist his invitation to see his masterpiece!

August is the time of year when the Ruby-throated Hummingbirds start to move south. Their population has much as doubled and, when we went to visit yesterday, the tiny creatures were everywhere. Baiting Hollow Sanctuary is a place where hummingbirds gather and fatten up for the long journeys that await them. Most of the birds were juveniles but, young as they were, they were all expert in flying, hovering, flower feeding and, above all, chasing. These chases were nothing short of spectacular and often culminated in furious split-second aerial battles sometimes involving three or even four hummers! Apparently, they set up small territories and then defend them from poaching. Sometimes one hummer will sneak into another's patch by staying low in the foliage but, almost invariably, they are discovered and another aerial battle and/or high speed whiz-bam chase ensues. It's almost inconceivable the amount of energy that these pixie creatures must expend searching, feeding, defending, chasing and, eventually, migrating; the flowers apparently offer a very high quality octane fuel for all this. As I think I mentioned before, there's a famous study that concluded that the hummingbirds cannot store enough energy in the form of fat to cross the Gulf of Mexico in flight; fortunately, the hummingbirds do not seem to have read the paper and continue these long over-water flights. Some winter on the Gulf and southern Atlantic coasts of the U.S. but most cross the Gulf to winter in Mexico and Central America.

More information about the sanctuary is available at the Baiting Hollow Hummingbird Sanctuary web site (from which the attached photos are taken).

There was actually more to the sanctuary than 'just' the hummers. Also visiting the great variety of flowers, there were large numbers of insects, mostly bees and dragonflies that were apparently feeding on the insects. The most spectacular insect that we saw was a Clearwing Sphinx Moth with bright yellow markings; this diurnal sphinx moth feeds exactly like a hummingbird.

Moving across the Sanctuary bluffs as well as the farm fields to the south were large numbers of Tree Swallows, also in migration. Best of all, there were some half a dozen Common Nighthawks passing by one at a time, all heading west (and eventually south), flying between the bluffs and the Sound. In spite of their name, these large nightjars are neither common nor are they hawks but they are indeed very falcon-like in flight with long pointed wings which are marked by a white stripe at the base of the primaries. Their flight is quite spectacular with deep wing beats and long glides. They are, for various reasons, a declining species and the migration on the LI north shore (they can be seen from Sound Avenue) at this time of year offers the best chance to see them. They tend to appear at dusk but, with an overcast sky yesterday, they were flying a bit earlier in the day than expected. It was a nice bonus to our hummingbird day.

Eric Salzman