Bird Longevity

By Iain MacLeod on Friday, July 25, 2003.

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If you think you have been seeing the same birds at your feeder every year, you are probably right. Scientist are learning more about the longevity of birds and thier feeding patterns.

July 25, 2003: Bird Longevity

Welcome to Something Wild! I'm Iain MacLeod from the Audubon Society of New Hampshire.

I always know when it is time to put my hummingbird feeder out because in mid May a male hummingbird flies to where the feeder always hangs. He stares at the empty space until I get that feeder out A.S.A.P.

Clearly, this bird ate at my feeder the previous summer. But how many of the birds in our backyards were there the last year?

Quite a few, it seems. Many birds, we now know, have a tendency to return to the same breeding place year after year. And all the bird banding that has been going on is yielding some interesting information on how long birds live. It turns out that some of our more familiar birds can live fifteen or twenty years, or even longer.

Take the American Robin: the longevity record is 13 years, eleven months. For the cardinal, it's fifteen years, nine months.

The Mourning Dove comes in as one of the top ten longest-lived birds of any kind, with a record of 31 years, four months.

Even that pushy Ruby-throated Hummingbird that gives me the evil eye every spring could be the same bird. The longevity record for them is ten years, two months. Unbelievable, when you think about those tiny wings beating at 60 beats a second for ten years and the fact that these little dynamos migrate 1000 miles each year.

So it is possible-even likely-that the birds in your yard are the same birds that were there last year. Or maybe they were hatched and raised in your area. So you can greet your returning birds as old friends, because there's a good chance they are.

Something Wild is a joint production of the Audubon Society of New
Hampshire, New Hampshire Public Radio, and the Society for the
Protection of New Hampshire Forests. For Something Wild, I'm Iain
MacLeod.

If you have a natural history question that you would like answered on Something Wild, email us at somethingwild@ nhpr.org.