Surprising Compassion Among Hummingbirds

My husband shot this video today in our home.  Wanted to share its beauty.

This hummer got accidentally trapped in a window in our house. The other hummer kept hovering outside the glass, trying to help the trapped one. She just wouldn’t leave!

Of course we rescued the trapped bird just after the video ends. The other bird was sitting from a tree not 10 feet away, watching anxiously the whole time.

These are both adult females. The trapped bird is a little smaller than the outside bird, so she could have been born last spring–ages ago in hummingbird time. The outside bird is probably older. Related? Don’t know–there are a lot of them around.

Such compassion is surprising. They may seem sweet, but hummingbirds are ferocious individualists. They compete for *everything* and dog fight hundreds of times a day to keep others from the food sources.