Hummingbirds

After watching the hummingbirds at my sister-in-law's a few weeks ago, I decided to do a very short study on hummingbirds last week. We read 2 books: The Hungry Hummingbird by Sayre and It's a Hummingbird's Life by Kelly.

The book by Kelly had some really interesting facts:

• "The female buils (her nest) by stitching the walls together with spider silk, gluing them with salive, and stamping a soft cottony down into the lining with her feet." She adds lichen and moss to camouflage the nest.
• "Each egg weighs less than one-half a gram."
• Mother hummingbirds eat 2,000 insects every day!!!
• Hummingbirds can't smell and depend on their eyesight to find food.
• Hummingbirds only have a few enemies. "Some frogs and large fish ahve been known to leap up, catch a hummingbird, and pull it underwater." Other things that eat hummingbirds sometimes: small hawks, kestrel, praying mantis (I found several photos online, including this one IF you want to see it - it's not as grusome as others: ), and dragonflies have been known to try to eat them!!! I had trouble believing this one, but also found this fact on EEK!
• They travel from Florida across the Gulf of Mexico in about 25 hours flying at a rate of about 25 mph.
• "Sometimes balloonists hang feeders from their baskets to give the voyager (hummingbird) a much-appreciated snack" during their long trip.

We also made what we called hummingbird nests, but their usually called bird's nests. Ours are made of melted chocolate chips (in microwave), chow mein noodles, and then a candy egg. We actually didn't care much for the taste, but they were fun to make... and cute!

And, we did this grid drawing of a hummingbird. I thought Alexandra's turned out great!