This hummingbird mom made the coolest and driest crib on the block.
A conservationist in Paraguay recently snapped some amazing photos of a hummingbird who built a nest with a roof on the top.
Hummingbird mothers carry strong parental instincts, especially considering that the father isn’t in the picture. He leaves almost immediately after he mates with her… go figure.
So, if she’s on her own, she might as well build a nest as cozy as possible for her and her chicks.
That’s exactly what conservationist Bianca Caroline Soares discovered when she was observing one mother’s hummingbird nests in her area.
“I saw five hummingbird nests that day, but this was the most ingenious,” Soares said.
When she went to check on the nest weeks after she discovered it, she noticed something moving around in the nest.
“She had two hummingbird babies,” she exclaimed.
When these baby chicks grow up they’ll play an important role in pollinating flowering plants that are hard to reach.
They have the ability to fly high in the air, where oxygen levels are low, reaching upwards to 4,000 meters high.
Their ability to soar high in the air enables them to pollinate plants that cannot be reached by other birds.
Some of these high altitude flowering plants may not exists without hummingbirds.
Soares hopes that by sharing her story people will become more aware of just how important hummingbirds are for the ecosystem.
In order to protect them, she recommends gardeners and farmers put a bird feeder in a shaded on their property.
Supplementing their diet with nectar ensures they won’t fly off to a potentially more dangerous area, where nectar-producing flowers are in short supply.
Since these birds are essential for pollination, most gardeners should want to keep them happy and healthy.