06/17/2026
Hundreds of hummingbirds visit the BlackBerry Inn Yosemite each summer.
They are serious travelers.
On January 13, 2010, a bird ba**er named Fred Dietrich caught a one-year-old female rufous hummingbird in a backyard in Tallahassee, Florida, and fitted a band the size of a grain of rice to her leg. The band read H82779.
On June 28 of the same year, a biologist named Kate McLaughlin caught the same bird in a mist net at Chenega Bay, Alaska, a village of fewer than a hundred people on Prince William Sound, 75 miles southeast of Anchorage. The bird had flown at least 3,500 miles in under six months. It was the longest documented hummingbird migration in history.
A rufous hummingbird weighs roughly three grams. That is the weight of a penny. The band Dietrich placed on her leg was one-sixteenth of an inch wide by a quarter of an inch long. The bird that carried it from the Florida Panhandle to Prince William Sound was about one-third the weight of a chickadee and shorter than a human thumb.
McLaughlin had been running the hummingbird banding station at Chenega Bay since 2007. She had banded over 900 birds. She had recaptured 79 of them over the years. Every single one had been a bird she had originally banded herself at the same station, returning in subsequent seasons.
H82779 was the first bird wearing another researcher's band she had ever caught. She examined the band repeatedly to make sure she had recorded the number correctly. She weighed the bird at 4.1 grams, heavier than normal, meaning it was already putting on fat for the return trip south. She placed a dot of white nontoxic paint on its head so she would not accidentally catch it again, and released it.
When she announced the recapture on a banding email list, Dietrich replied immediately with the details from Florida. The minimum straight-line distance between Tallahassee and Chenega Bay is approximately 3,500 miles. The previous record for a documented hummingbird migration was roughly 2,200 miles, set by a rufous banded in Lafayette, Louisiana, that was found dead on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. H82779 beat the record by over 1,300 miles and was alive and gaining weight when she did it.
The rufous hummingbird has the northernmost breeding range of any hummingbird in the world. It nests from Oregon to southeast Alaska, feeds through the summer, and migrates south in the fall. The route is not a straight line. Rufous hummingbirds fly north along the Pacific Coast in spring, then swing inland and follow the Rocky Mountain corridor south in fall, chasing wildflower blooms at progressively lower elevations.
If H82779 followed this elliptical route instead of flying a direct line, her one-way trip from Florida to Alaska was closer to 4,330 miles. A round trip would have been approximately 8,840 miles. On a bird that weighs a penny.
For decades, hummingbirds found wintering in the southeastern United States were assumed to be lost. Banders and ornithologists described them as disoriented strays that had missed their migration window and were doomed to die in an unfamiliar climate. The banding data proved the opposite.
The birds in Florida backyards in January were not lost. They were exactly where they intended to be, occupying a winter range that nobody had recognized because nobody had been banding them. Dietrich and other members of the Hummer/Bird Study Group fitted bands to winter hummingbirds across the Gulf states and waited for the returns. H82779 was one of those returns, except she returned to a banding station 3,500 miles away in a Native Alaskan village on Prince William Sound.
McLaughlin told Alaska Fish and Game that the benefit of the migration must be tremendous for the birds to make the trip. They spend a handful of weeks in Alaska, breed, raise a clutch, and leave. The entire reason a three-gram bird crosses a continent twice a year is compressed into a few weeks of Alaskan summer on a coastline where daylight lasts twenty hours and the insect bloom is intense enough to fuel a round trip that would cross eleven states in a straight line.
H82779 was released at Chenega Bay on June 28 with a dot of white paint on her head and 4.1 grams of body weight she had built from insects and nectar along a migration route that stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of Alaska. She was not seen again by researchers. She did not need to be. The band on her leg had already proved what it was designed to prove: that a bird the weight of a penny, carrying a band the size of a grain of rice, can fly from a backyard in Tallahassee to a fishing village in Prince William Sound in a single season, and arrive heavy enough to do it again.
Source: Alaska Department of Fish and Game, "Long-Distance Hummingbird Sheds Light on Migration." Kate McLaughlin, Chenega Bay banding station. Fred Dietrich, Hummer/Bird Study Group. BirdWatching Magazine, October 2010.
