New 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.

Lead researcher Shayne Halter, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of New Mexico Department of Biology, said the findings are an early step in better understanding how hummingbirds use their energy during migration and how that might be impacted by …