Karen Gleason
delriomagnoliafan@gmail.com
During the summer months, hummingbirds are common residents of Del Rio, but as soon as the weather turns cooler, most of these tiny, feathered jewels head south for the winter.
In late November 2020, though, Ronald Rames noticed hummingbirds at a feeder outside a neighbor’s home.
Ronald is a resident of South Dakota, but he spends about half the year in Del Rio in a small, but comfortable, mobile home in the Hidden Valley RV Park at the end of Bolner Lane in south Del Rio.
Ron decided to hang a feeder outside his own home to see if he could entice any of the neighborhood hummingbirds for a visit. He set the feeder up close to a window so he could see the birds more closely and perhaps snap some photos.
Incredibly, over the course of the next month, not one, but three species of hummingbird visited.
Ron called me to let me know about his finds, and on Jan. 2, I was able to see a male Anna’s Hummingbird outside his home.
The male Anna’s is absolutely gorgeous, with feathers on its forehead and throat that flash iridescent rose-red in proper light.
The Anna’s was a life bird for me, and I want to thank Ron for sharing it with me.
I have always been fascinated by the names of things, and when I saw the Anna’s Hummingbird outside Ron’s motor home, I began wondering about its name. Who was Anna, and why was this tiny bird named for her?
I learned that Anna’s Hummingbird was named for the 19th Century Italian duchess Anna de Belle Messina. The duchess served as Mistress of the Robes to the Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III.
Anna was the wife of Francois Victor Messena, who was an amateur ornithologist, who had a specimen collection that contained more than 10,000 individual birds (Ugh!). One of those specimens was an unidentified hummingbird.
Through her husband, Anna met René-Primevere Lesson, a surgeon and naturalist who left France in 1882 to travel and explore South America and the Pacific coast of what is now California. When he returned home, he began cataloging the specimens he’d gathered during his travels.
Among the specimens was a hummingbird identical to the one in Messena’s collection, so Lesson decided to name the little bird after Messena’s wife, Anna.
Anna’s Hummingbird has also been chosen as the official bird of the city of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
