‘Metabolic knife edge’: Study offers insight into hummingbirds’ hibernation-like rest [Video]

Powered by nectar and a metabolic marvel, migratory hummingbirds travel thousands of kilometres each year, breeding in places like British Columbia before making the journey as far away as Mexico to avoid the winter cold.

To make it there, hummingbirds sometimes enter a short-term hibernation of sorts, slowing their respiratory, heart and metabolic rates for several hours at a time to a point where some birds have been mistaken for dead.

But rather than killing them, the process known as torpor allows the tiny hummingbirds to conserve enough energy to survive between meals.

New research is providing insight into when torpor happens in some varieties of hummingbirds common to B.C.

WATCH | Victoria man documents over 100 hummingbirds: Get up close and real personal with some hummingbirds of the West Coast. One Victoria man has documented over a 120 hummingbird nests in his own backyard. Watch The Bird in My Backyard on CBC Gem.

Lead researcher Shayne Halter, …