All eyes and cameras were riveted on the sword-billed hummingbird as Kathy and I led people on a bird tour in Ecuador. The one-of-a-kind hummingbird swooped among flowers and feeders like a ...

Sometimes nature surprises us with extraordinary products of evolution. One prime example is the extraordinary sword-billed hummingbird (Ensifera ensifera). These relatively small birds have carved a ...

With their elongated bills and specially adapted tongues, hummingbirds are built to extract nectar from flowers. As new research shows, however, some hummingbirds from South America have evolved beaks ...

ANCHORAGE — Biologist Colleen Handel saw her first black-capped chickadee with the heartrending disorder in 1998. The tiny birds showed up at birdfeeders in Alaska’s largest city with freakishly long ...

Look at a bird’s beak to see what family the bird belongs to and the kind of food it eats. Seeing a bird with a long, needlelike beak would tell us it’s in the hummingbird family that probes flowers ...