Peter Thoem caught images of these beautiful birds at a visit to Princess Point last month: a Ruby-Throated Hummingbird and a Scarlet Tanager. In his blog post for these particular sightings (on his My Bird of The Day website), Thoem noted that the male Ruby-Throated Hummingbird was displaying its courtship flight, something he had previously only read about. It performed “relatively shallow U-shaped dives” to impress its prospective mate, Thoem reported, before “he retired to a perch to see whether she was impressed.”
The same day, Thoem happened upon a male Scarlet Tanager, in full breeding plumage. Thoem says that although these birds are “almost common in the hardwood forests around here,” they are not seen all that often because they tend to reside “high in the canopy levels of those woodlands.”
