Uploaded April 2012 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago

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These aren't your average sweet little birdies! Both male and female hummingbirds of some species are quite aggressive, territorial, and vigorously defend their food sources against intruders.

NOTE: This is natural hummingbird behavior, and was NOT encouraged in any way. These birds constantly fight with each other over natural nactar sources, as well as feeders. It doesn't matter how many feeders or natural food sources are available - one bird will try to establish as large of a territory as it can, and dominate as every food source with in it. Also note that 99% of hummindbird fights are simply one bird chasing another away without any contact whatsoever. Once in a while, one bird with "stand up" to the attacker, resulting in a fight where contact is made. It took many weeks of filming 100+ clips per day just to get these few shots.

On the positive side , those long, sharp bills may look like formidable stabbing weapons, but the birds' head, neck and body weight just don't pack enough strength or mass to do much damage, so fights typically involve only weak biting and poking with the bill, and grabbing with the feet - with insufficient force to even pull out feathers or break skin. In 20+ years of observing hummingbird fights, I have never seen a bird get injured in a fight... just lots of bruised birdy egos.

All of the birds shown here are Allen's Hummingbirds. Males have lots of tan/rusty plummage and a bright red irridescent throat patch (called a "gorget") while the females are more green and white with only a spotted throat patch and a few irridescent red feathers.

The slow motion footage was filmed with a Casio Exilim EX-F1 Pro at 300 frames per second and upscaled to 720p, resulting in a 10x slower than real life playback. Real-time scenes were filmed with a Canon HF100 HD camcorder at 30fps.

The soundtrack is "Jaws2" and "Prophet" from the "Random" CD by Technician (yours truly), album and single tracks available on iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/album/random/id416812703 full artist discography and CDs available at HTTP://technician.jcmdi.com

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Full length individual stock footage clips from this video and more may be found on the JcmdiStockFootage channel.

Be sure and see our hummingbird rearing documentary too: jcmdi.com/hummer/index.html

Enjoy the show!