Effects of Daily Temperature Changes on Broad-Tailed Hummingbird Foraging Patterns

Abstract

Climate change threatens the close relationship between wildflowers and the hummingbirds that pollinate them, both through gradual warming that shifts and misaligns their phenologies, and also potentially through increasingly erratic day-to-day temperature changes, a phenomenon especially apparent at high altitudes. We investigate how these temperature changes affect the flower visitation rate of broad-tailed hummingbirds (Selasphorus platycercus) in high-elevation Gothic, Colorado, where a significant portion of the birds’ marginal energy budget is spent on thermoregulation. We hypothesize that on days much colder than average, hummingbird visitation will increase as the birds have higher energy demands to thermoregulate. Using hummingbird visitation data collected on cameras around Gothic from 2018-2022 and temperature highs and lows recorded in Gothic weather data from 2016-2022, we calculate visitation deviation from the average on a given day, plotting it against temperature deviation from the average on the same day to explore the relationship between the two variables. We found that there was no evidence of a relationship between short-term temperature changes and hummingbird visitation rate. Temperature did not seem to have an effect on foraging patterns for male or female Broad-tailed hummingbirds in Gothic from 2018 to 2022.

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