December 12, 2018, UC Davis
Beep" is not a sound you expect to hear coming from a hummingbird feeder. Yet "beeps" abounded during a study led by the University of California, Davis to monitor hummingbirds around urban feeders and help answer questions about their behavior and health.
For the study, published today in the journal PLOS ONE, veterinary researchers tagged 230 Anna's and Allen's hummingbirds with passive integrated transponder (PIT) tags and recorded their visits to feeders equipped with radio-frequency identification (RFID) transceivers. This is the same technology animal rescue shelters use when placing microchips under the skin of cats and dogs so they can be tracked if lost.
Similar to when a grocery item is swept across a supermarket scanner, little beeps sounded each time a hummingbird fluttered inside one of the study's feeder stations. This gave researchers around-the-clock information about how often individual hummingbirds visited the feeders and how long they stayed there.
Such information can help explain how hummingbirds interact with each other at feeders, as well as inform veterinarians about potential disease transmission that could occur from such interactions.
In the wild, hummingbird species do not tend to directly interact much with each other. But with urban feeders, that dynamic changes.
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