Hummingbird’s surprise copycat
Gardens are abuzz with the humming of one of nature’s most confounding creatures.
Out of nowhere these Unfathomable Flying Objects materialise, all beady eyes and pulsating wings as they sip nectar from delicate flowers with their “beaks”.
Little wonder that anyone witnessing these incredible aerobatics believes they have encountered the most accomplished of all avian flying machines – the hummingbird.
Persuading friends that they haven’t actually seen the world’s smallest yet most technically advanced bird hovering this side of the Atlantic has been a challenge these past weeks.
Instead, they have seen one of the natural world’s finest examples of convergent evolution – when animals independently evolve similar traits – in the shape of the hummingbird hawkmoth.
Anyone who has spied a hummingbird buzzing through the canopy of a Brazilian rainforest or drinking from a sugar-water feeder on a Texan porch, and then returned to Britain to see the hawkmoth, will attest to the remarkable similarities between bird and bug. Indeed, the first time I saw a diminutive tufted coquette hummingbird in the gardens of a Trinidad nature reserve, I was convinced it was a hawkmoth. There was little difference in size and the bird’s most striking field mark on show was a white band across the rump, a feature shared by the insect.
How the moth and bird can look similar illustrates the way animals can adapt to look like each other if they have similar lifestyles. Think of penguins in Antarctica and the guillemots of the Arctic.
This summer has been a boom time for hummingbird hawkmoths from southern climes. Members of the British Trust for Ornithology’s Garden Birdwatch scheme have recorded a near five-fold increase above the annual average.
So what did we call hummingbird hawkmoths before the first naturalists arrived in the Americas? A delve into the writings of Virginia Woolf shows how she came across the moths while holidaying in Cornwall, where their zigzag hovering flights earned them the traditional name of the merrylee-dance-a-pole.
This moth illustrates how animals can adapt to look like each other