Familiar Studies of Wild Birds 



while hovering at the edge of the nest, or 

 again she may alight, and with quick dabs of 

 her beak thrust food into the throats of her 

 progeny. The diet of humming birds regu- 

 larly consists of honey and insects gathered 

 from flowers, but they are also very fond of 

 sap. At a place on one of the roads where 

 vehicles had scraped bark from some bush-wil- 

 lows causing sap to flow, I found numerous 

 hummers gathered to drink as it collected. 



Among the many interesting characteristics 

 of the broad-tailed humming birds, a habit that 

 I witnessed frequently was that of darting 

 perpendicularly upward to a height of fifty 

 or one hundred feet, and then shooting down 

 at great speed, producing a loud buzzing 

 which reached a climax as the bird swerved 

 when five or six feet from the ground. As 

 far as could be observed, this performance was 

 indulged in for the benefit of another hummer. 

 Its purpose I was unable to discover, if it had 



