Ruby-throated Hummingbird - Diet

Diet

Nectar from flowers and flowering trees, as well as small insects and spiders, are its main food. Although hummingbirds are well-known to feed on nectar, small arthropods are also an important part of adult hummingbirds' diet. Arthropods appear to be the main source of protein, minerals, vitamins, providing a protein source since. Their diet may also occasionally include tree sap taken from sapsucker wells. Hummingbirds show a slight preference for red, tubular flowers as a nectar source. The birds feed from flowers using a long extendendable tongue, and catch insects on the wing or glean them from flowers, leaves, bark, and even from spider's webs.

Young birds are fed insects for protein since nectar is an insufficient source of protein for the growing birds.

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