Two days ago, just before we closed for the night, the WRC received two of our smallest admits of the year – infant Ruby-throated Hummingbirds! They had fallen from their nest and amazingly, someone spotted them on the ground. It is always best to replace baby birds into their nest, but the rescuer was unable to locate the nest so did the next best thing and brought the birds to us.

Baby hummingbirds need to be fed every 15 minutes for 14 hours a day. These two are about 10 days old, and have only just recently opened their eyes. We are currently feeding them a juvenile hummingbird formula with some insects added for extra protein, which is important for feather development in infants. We’ve also ordered some special hand-feeding formula to be shipped overnight from a rehabilitator in California who specializes in hummingbirds. It is the same food that the San Diego zoo uses for all their exotic hummingbirds and is due to arrive sometime today. (What a kind donation!) I’m happy to report that these little babies are doing very well.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 2nd, 2010 at 8:36 am and is filed under Nursery News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.