August flower gardens in Maine are exquisite kaleidoscopes of color and texture. They are also strong lures for nectar loving insects and, of course, hummingbirds. We have written in this column in past years about those wonderful imitators of hummingbirds, the hummingbird or clearwing moths, that are at their peak in August.

Many a backyard observer has been initially fooled into thinking they were seeing a new or rare species of hummingbird at first sight of one of these amazing creatures.

Hummingbirds are, of course, much larger, green backed, and have a long, thin bill. Now that the young have left the nests, gardens everywhere are often filled with numbers of adult and young hummingbirds.

The identification of hummingbirds in Maine and throughout the eastern United States is rendered quite easy by the fact that only a single species of hummingbird nests in our region, the ruby-throated hummingbird. Despite the name, the females and immatures do not have a ruby-throat so that people sometimes are confused and begin looking through the North American field guide where they see the 18 species of hummingbird that can occur in the western U.S. Or, if one looks even further south, the more than 300 species that occur throughout the Americas.

Almost always one can be sure that the hummingbird you see in your backyard here in Maine is a ruby-throated hummingbird.

Now comes the big caveat: very rarely there have been other hummingbird species that have shown up in Maine. This even includes one, the green violetear, whose breeding range is entirely south of the border, extending from Mexico south into South America!

One of these was discovered on Mount Desert Island in August of 2007. There have also been records of rufous hummingbird and calliope hummingbird in Maine over the years.

In fact, there has been what some would describe as a trend across the eastern U.S. as a whole wherein hummingbird species from the western U.S. or from further south, have been found with increasing frequency in out-of-range locations. We well remember a winter visit we took to a backyard in upstate New York when we lived in Ithaca to see a frigid Anna’s Hummingbird trying to survive there instead of along the Pacific Coast where all the other Anna’s hummingbirds were at the time. And there were those calliope hummingbirds that we enjoyed watching in a New York City park one late fall. They should have been in Mexico!

So enjoy watching all those pollinators in your backyard gardens this fall including the hummingbirds. But if one of them looks really weird, take a picture!