Tucson's new hummingbird rescue braces for busy baby season

Each time her cell phone alarm goes off, she has to drop whatever she is doing to tend to her tiny, hungry house guests.

At the moment, Jones is looking after two dozen orphaned, injured or sick young hummingbirds waiting for their latest meal. Some still hunker in their nests. Others wobble on makeshift perches. A few buzz impatiently around the small enclosures Jones keeps on folding tables inside her westside townhouse.

All these patients are in the care of Southern Arizona Hummingbird Rescue, Tucson’s newest — and perhaps only — wildlife rehabilitator dedicated exclusively to the famously flashy and frenetic birds.

Jones handles nestlings and fledglings for the group. That means feeding time every 30 minutes.

“It really does mess with your life, so you really have to be committed. Whatever you want to do, you can’t do it,” Jones says. “This is the first wave (of hatchlings). We expect another wave in the next couple weeks. I can’t leave the house for more than an hour at a time during the whole summer.”

To the rescue

Southern Arizona Hummingbird Rescue was founded in January 2023 by Carol Wilson and a fellow animal advocate, after about two years of work at another local wildlife rehabilitation center.

During its first full year of operation, the group took in 258 individual hummingbirds from at least five different species — all without so much as a website to advertise their services.

Wilson thinks they could end up doubling that total this year, with 138 intakes already and baby season just getting underway.

All the work is done by four permitted hummingbird handlers, including Wilson and Jones, with help from a handful of volunteer assistants.

One of the handlers keeps an aviary in her yard that serves as a halfway house of sorts. That’s where the hummingbirds go just before being released to get reacclimated to the outdoors, build up their strength and prove they’re ready to feed themselves.

Most of the young birds Jones is caring for right now are the broad-billed variety, but there also appear to be a few Costa’s and Anna’s hummingbirds in the mix. Jones says it can be a little hard to tell which species is which when they’re small.

Some of the recent arrivals were displaced by windstorms that hit Tucson over the past few weeks. Others had their nests accidentally cut down by tree trimmers.

Most, though, were reported or brought in by worried residents who feared the baby birds had been orphaned, after finding them alone in a nest or on the ground. Jones suspects that at least a few of those youngsters probably didn’t need to be rescued.

She says a mother hummingbird might only sit on her nest for a week or so. After that, it’s usually warm enough during the daytime for her to leave her babies, in search of food.

Even a person who is watching that nest closely could miss mom’s return trips, Jones says. “It takes seconds for her to feed her babies and take off again. She’s gone most of the time.”

It’s also common for young hummingbirds to leave the nest — or fall out of it — before they are fully fledged. When that happens, their mothers will often find them on the ground and continue to feed them, Jones says.

If you discover a young bird down in an enclosed space that’s safe from predators, she says, it’s best to leave it there and watch from a respectful distance to see if its mother returns.

The Arizona Game and Fish Department issued a similar advisory on Tuesday, urging the public to leave baby wildlife alone.

“While it might be difficult to resist the urge to help seemingly abandoned animals, including newly hatched birds and baby rabbits, a parent is likely nearby and will return once humans have left the area,” department officials said.

Licensed to heal

Several of the babies turned over to Jones and company so far this year were delivered still in their original nests. For those that weren’t, Jones maintains a stockpile of backup nests, including 10 collected so far this season and stored safely in a zip lock bag.

Nests with birds in them get messy fast, so she has to clean them regularly and swap out the facial tissues she uses to line the areas around them.

“I call it changing their diapers. It goes on all day long,” she says. “Sleep, eat and poop, that’s what they do.”

Once a week or so, Jones will hand off her babies to one of her fellow rescuers so she can take a day off. The rest of the time, she’s on the clock every half an hour or so from sunrise to sunset.

Her hungry patients get one of four different nutrient formulas, depending on their ages and conditions. Jones uses a pipette to squirt the milky liquid into the birds’ eager, upturned beaks.

After years of practice, she can feed her whole brood in just a minute or two, not counting the time it takes to prepare the food and clean all the pipettes and syringes she uses at meal time.

“The newborns are the size of a Tic Tac, and they have this tiny yellow triangle for a mouth. Even with glasses, trying to aim at that tiny mouth is a challenge,” she says.

Jones won’t reveal what’s in the formula, because she and her fellow rescuers don’t want people trying to feed and care for injured or orphaned hummingbirds themselves.

It’s illegal for one thing, Wilson says. Only rescue groups with the proper paperwork from state and federal wildlife agencies are allowed to care for protected migratory birds.

The rescuers at Southern Arizona Hummingbird Rescue operate under permits issued through Liberty Wildlife, a licensed, Phoenix-area rehabilitation center.

Wilson says every hummingbird that comes in is assigned a number and entered into a database that tracks its condition at arrival and the eventual outcome of its care.

Approximately 60% of the birds they handled last year survived long enough to be returned to the wild, which Wilson said is about 15% higher than the national average.

In general, she says, only about 20% of injured adult hummingbirds can be nursed back to health, while orphaned babies tend to survive at a much higher rate of around 80% with proper care.

Some birds only need to be kept overnight, while others require as much as 6 months to recuperate, Wilson says.

Those with no hope of recovery are humanely euthanized and their deaths reported to the permitting agencies.

Wilson says working as a wildlife rehabilitator means learning to live with loss. “There are some tough ones. I cry a lot,” she says. “But the good definitely outweighs the bad.”

Beaks to feed

Jones joined the new rescue group after moving to Tucson from the San Diego area about 18 months ago, bringing with her more than 20 years of hummingbird experience.

She says she went to a wildlife rehabilitation facility in Southern California one day to drop off a baby dove that had been caught by her brother’s cat, and the woman at the front desk talked her into becoming a volunteer.

“That’s how it started,” Jones says. “They put me in charge of the babies.”

At the time, she was working for a very understanding manufacturing business that let her bring her young hummingbirds to the office and stow them in cages under her desk so she could feed them throughout the day using food she kept in her own small fridge.

She even mixed her own formula back then, which involved catching and grinding up fruit flies to provide the birds with one of their favorite natural sources of protein.

“That blender was a separate blender I didn’t use for anything else,” Jones says with a laugh.

She still works for the same company, but her job is remote now, which means she can keep earning a paycheck and feeding her hummingbirds all from the comfort of home.

By sometime next year, Southern Arizona Hummingbird Rescue hopes to open a headquarters somewhere in Tucson.

According to Jones, the plan is for the place to serve as a rehab facility, an educational center and a residence for her, with an aviary out back so the hummingbirds can be kept at one location throughout their recovery. That way, she says, there will always be someone around to look after their feisty little patients.

But why go to all this trouble to try to save a few individual birds? After all, hummingbirds seem to be everywhere in Tucson and none of the species found in North America are threatened or endangered.

The answer is simple as far as Jones is concerned. “Why not?” she says. “It’s a rough life out there (for hummingbirds), and we cause a lot of their problems. Why not help them out?”