300 Foot Hummingbird Crop Circle, Wiltshire, England

When the Mrs and I lived on the Oregon coast we got to know hummingbirds intimately because we were on the migration flyway, and enticed a number of them to stick around. We lived in a rural house surrounded by forest and put up three big feeders with six stations apiece, and even that wasn't enough with the numbers of birds that stayed in the area and nested in the woods. We went through almost a hundred pounds of sugar every year.
They must have regarded us as giant, low vibration sloths. If I took down a feeder to clean and replace the mix, they'd buzz the nail it hung from with a WTF insistance and as soon as they's see me carry their missing feeder outside they'd be on it before I had a chance to hang it up. Running water fascinated them. Standing in the garden hosing the plants they'd hover inches from the stream. They liked to play games with us, I swear, sort of like "I got your number you ponderous bastard". They zipped my ears too many times to remember as I walked around, probably intimidation. We had so many that if you walked away from the house and looked back at the feeders they resembled beehives.
This was the west coast so they were Rufous hummers, very truculent and combative. Because of the dense population they were constantly displaying and fighting. I'd wake up at first light with a rolling hummingbird roar coming from the feeders. We lived there before digital cameras were available so I don't have good pictures or video, but it was pretty much like this:



I had cats so the inevitable happened on occasion. It was absolutely incredible to pick their tiny bodies up and feel how utterly weightless and ethereal they seemed. But assuming they're physically frail because of how inconsequential they seem in death is a huge mistake - gram for gram they're probably the toughest sons of bitches on the planet.

Their hearts beat about 500 times a minute, and as a matter of fact they have the highest metabolism rate of any animal on earth but can live up to 12 years. We knew we got the same birds back in late winter, sometimes with snow on the ground, when they'd buzz the nail the feeder hung from the year before.

No other bird can fly forward, backward, sideways, up or down and hover.

Usual flight speed for hummingbirds is about 25 miles per hour, but they've been clocked at speeds in excess of fifty miles per hour during their courtship dives.

They average about 3 grams but will attack any other bird that gets into their territory.

Their wings normally beat about 60-80 times per second but during those courtship displays can furiously beat over 200.

Some species migrate over 2000 miles from central america to Canada, including a non stop 500 mile flight over the Gulf of Mexico.

It's no wonder the ancients carved a pictogram of a hummingbird in the Nazca desert in Peru.