ALBANY, N.Y. — Chickadees, cardinals and titmice are common visitors to a snowy bird feeder. But hummingbirds?
That's what Janet Allen saw last year in her yard in suburban Syracuse. For several days in dreary November, a young ruby-throated hummingbird shivered on a snow-laced feeder, sipping sugar water when it should have been flitting among tropical blossoms in sunny Mexico.
"It was kind of sad, really," Allen said. "I don't know if he got blown off course during migration or what. I assume he didn't survive."
A hummingbird spotted up north in the winter is an example of what birders and ornithologists call a "vagrant" -- a bird outside its normal range, or in its range in the wrong season.
Scientists at Cornell University's Lab of Ornithology are asking a nationwide network of volunteers to be on the lookout for such birds this winter.
In recent years, observers all over the country have reported seeing various species of hummingbirds far from their normal range.
Licensed hummingbird bander Stacy Jon Peterson of Mountain Home, Idaho, has maintained a website that tallies and maps winter and out-of-normal-range hummingbird sightings since 1999. He said he gets more than 1,000 reports a year of rufous hummingbirds, a Northwestern species, spotted in Eastern states after Nov. 15, when they should be in Mexico.
It's not known whether the birds are changing their range or if people are just becoming more aware of them.
"That's why it's important to monitor populations through long-term surveys like FeederWatch and the Audubon Society's Christmas Bird Count -- so we'll be able to answer questions like this in the future," said David Bonter, director of Cornell's Project FeederWatch, which enlists thousands of volunteers to submit reports on birds at their feeders. "Unfortunately, we don't have good historical data on winter hummingbird sightings."
Bird counts submitted by volunteers have also challenged the conventional wisdom about other birds in winter. Bluebirds and robins were a sure sign of spring in the Northeast until FeederWatch confirmed sightings of both in every month of the year throughout New England, Bonter said.
Data from FeederWatch's 15,000 volunteers also documented recent shifts in distribution of birds in the West, possibly in response to forest fires, he said.
