Plate 47 – Ruby-throated Hummingbird

During his exploration of the coast of Texas in the spring of 1837, John James Audubon watched the Ruby-throated hummingbird “in crowds.” For Birds of America, Audubon fills the page with hummingbirds crowding around the tendrils, leaves, and flaming red flowers of the Trumpet vine. The Ruby-throated hummingbird is especially partial to the Trumpet vine for the nectar that the flowers produce. Audubon notes on one occasion seeing as many as “twenty or thirty young [Ruby-throated] Humming-birds resort to a group of trumpet-flowers.” Audubon was so inspired by the Ruby-throated hummingbird to wonder: “where is the person… who, on observing this glittering fragment of the rainbow, would not pause, admire, and instantly turn his mind with reverence toward the Almighty Creator, the wonders of whose hand we at every step discover and of whose sublime conceptions we everywhere observe the manifestations in his admirable system of creation?”