#ornithophily
LightNews LightNews
scottzona.bsky.social
When we talk about bird pollination (ornithophily) in eastern North America, we’re talking about one species of hummingbird, but western N. America has many more species, including this one, Calypte anna, pollinating Salvia spathacea 📷: Erica Fleniken CCBYNC4 #ornithophily #Salvia #Botany 🌾🧪🌱
Photo of a greenish hummingbird with a dark gullet probing the red tubular flowers of a salvia.
September 21, 2026 at 11:00 AM
benbreitenfeld.bsky.social
#flowers #botany #pollination #ornithophily
sherilwilliamson.bsky.social Sheri L. Williamson 🪶🌎🧪🌺 @sherilwilliamson.bsky.social · Jul 4
A lot of us are craving positive posts today, so here are a few of the many gorgeous wildflowers I saw on a recent trip to central Oregon. IDs in the alt text. The first three are pollinated by hummingbirds. 🪶 #flowers #botany #pollination #ornithophily
A complex flowerhead of Giant Red Paintbrush, Castilleja miniata, with narrow chartreuse flower tubes surrounded by coral red bracts. Three orange trumpet-shaped flowers of Orange Honeysuckle, Lonicera ciliosa, growing out of the center of a bipointed leaf. A single flower of Western Columbine, Aquilegia formosa. The downward-facing red and yellow flower with long yellow stamens is carried above the plant's foliage on thin stalks. Twinflower, Linnea borealis, growing on a mossy bank. It has oval bright green leaves and pale pink trumpet-shaped flowers hanging in pairs from thin forked stalks. On the right side of the plant, an olive brown Pacific Banana Slug, Ariolimax columbianus, crawls up the mosses. Twinflower was the favorite plant of 18th-century Swedish biologist Carl von Linné, for whom the genus was named.
July 5, 2025 at 9:54 AM
scottzona.bsky.social
Strelitzia nicolai is bird-pollinated in an unusual way. Perching birds, like this Cape weaver (Ploceus capensis), pick up the pollen on their feet! 📷: Andrew Core CCBYNC4. #Strelitziaceae #Botany 🌾🧪🌱

Want more #ornithophily? Prof. Jeff Ollerton wrote an excellent book about it.
A plate of two photos showing a yellowish bird perched on the flower of a Strelitzia. The bird’s feet are clasping the flower and exposing the anthers.
September 26, 2026 at 11:09 AM
scottzona.bsky.social
The black honeyeater (Sugomel nigrum) is a member of the Meliphagidae, a family of 189 species in Australia, New Guinea & the Pacific Islands. They are excellent pollinators. 📷: on Grevillea decora, Arthur Chapman CCBYNCSA4 #ornithophily #Botany 🌾🧪🌱
Photo of a black and white bird perched on an inflorescence and probing the red flowers. Pollen is visible on the bird’s head.
September 24, 2026 at 11:19 AM
scottzona.bsky.social
Nectar chemistry & floral shape are important adaptations to bird pollination. Some plants add another assurance: viscin threads that stick pollen together & attach to feathers. Here’s the pollen of Delonix regia demonstrating viscin’s role. #Fabaceae #ornithophily #Botany 🌾🧪🌱
Close-up photo of a feather drawing away from a stamen with a pollen-laden anther. The pollen is clumped together by threads of viscin. Photo by Scott Zona CC BY-NC 2.0.
September 25, 2026 at 11:44 AM
scottzona.bsky.social
Leonotis has bright, nectar-rich, tubular flowers that are sunbird favs. Pollen is placed on the top of the head. When cultivated in the Americas, hummingbirds visit & pollinate the flowers in the same way (but hovering). 📷: Nectarinia famosa by Ruperl CCBYNC4 #ornithophily #Botany 🌾🧪🌱
Photo of a metallic blue-green bird perching on the bare, erect stems between the dense verticillasters of orange, tubular flowers. The bird is inserting its beak into a flower.
September 23, 2026 at 4:30 PM
scottzona.bsky.social
Hummingbirds have a special talent: the ability to hover. They can access flowers that have no perch or landing pad. It makes for photogenic feeding! 📷: Sappho sparganurus on Iochroma (or relative) by Naturalist Tours CC0 #ornithophily #Salvia #Botany 🌾🧪🌱
Photo of a colorful (green, orange and black) hummingbird feeding from pendulous, tubular blue flowers. The photo catches the bird with its beak pointing straight up and its wings outstretched. The broad, long tail is pointing downward.
September 22, 2026 at 11:00 AM
scottzona.bsky.social
Sunbirds (Nectariniidae) are Old World passerines that are species-rich in southern Africa. They need sturdy perches from which to feed. This is Cinnyris chalybeus ssp. chalybeus visiting the flowers of Leonotis sp. (Lamiaceae). 📷: Fiona Hellmann CCBYNC4 #ornithophily #Botany 🌾🧪🌱
Photo of a metallic blue-green bird perching on the bare, erect stems between the dense verticillasters of orange, tubular flowers. The bird is inserting its beak into a flower.
September 23, 2026 at 11:00 AM
scottzona.bsky.social
Zosterops is a genus of over 100 spp native to Africa, Asia, Australia & Pacific Islands. They are known as white-eyes & pollinate many plants whose flowers are not necessarily red and tubular. 📷: Zosterops virens ssp capensis on Cunonia capensis by Gigi Laidler CCBYNC4 #ornithophily #Botany 🌾🧪🌱
Photo of a greenish bird with a bright white circle around its eye. The bird is partially obscured by the inflorescences it is visiting. The spikes of flowers have dense, white stamens.
September 22, 2026 at 4:57 PM
bou.org.uk
Ornithophily in the trumpet creeper (Campsis radicans) | doi.org/10.1002/ece3... | Ecology and Evolution | #ornithology
September 12, 2024 at 6:45 AM
scottzona.bsky.social
Most of the 375 hummingbird spp. are found in the American Tropics. Their taste in flowers is the same as in the US: nectar-rich, tubular flowers, often red. #ornithophily #Botany 🌾🧪🌱
1. Aglaiocercus kingii on Fuchsia Derek Spencer CCBY4
2. Saucerottia cyanura on Megaskepasma Marc Gonger CCBYNC4
Photo of a metallic green hummingbird with an extraordinarily long tail visiting the purple and red flower of a hybrid fuchsia. Photo of a metallic green, blue and orange hummingbird visiting white flowers surrounded by bright red bracts.
September 21, 2026 at 4:57 PM
noethematt.bsky.social
Look, it's a-me, pretending to be @adlewis.bsky.social, presenting Ornithophily: Graphic Medicine in Our Age of Alienation at Graphic Medicine Europe!

📷 Ebru Ustundag and María José Mompeán Mejías
September 10, 2026 at 1:16 PM
sherilwilliamson.bsky.social
A lot of us are craving positive posts today, so here are a few of the many gorgeous wildflowers I saw on a recent trip to central Oregon. IDs in the alt text. The first three are pollinated by hummingbirds. 🪶 #flowers #botany #pollination #ornithophily
A complex flowerhead of Giant Red Paintbrush, Castilleja miniata, with narrow chartreuse flower tubes surrounded by coral red bracts. Three orange trumpet-shaped flowers of Orange Honeysuckle, Lonicera ciliosa, growing out of the center of a bipointed leaf. A single flower of Western Columbine, Aquilegia formosa. The downward-facing red and yellow flower with long yellow stamens is carried above the plant's foliage on thin stalks. Twinflower, Linnea borealis, growing on a mossy bank. It has oval bright green leaves and pale pink trumpet-shaped flowers hanging in pairs from thin forked stalks. On the right side of the plant, an olive brown Pacific Banana Slug, Ariolimax columbianus, crawls up the mosses. Twinflower was the favorite plant of 18th-century Swedish biologist Carl von Linné, for whom the genus was named.
July 4, 2025 at 8:15 PM
scottzona.bsky.social
It’s not hard to guess the pollinators of many tropical #Gesneriaceae. Nectar-rich, unscented, red or orange flowers in the Neotropics are most likely pollinated by #hummingbirds. Here’s Seemannia sylvatica. #TropicalBotany #ornithophily #gesneriad #Botany #PlantScience 🌾🧪🌱
Photo of a leafy shoot with several solitary flowers on long peduncles. The flowers are brilliant orange and tubular. The interior of the floral tube is yellow with orange speckles. Photo by Scott Zona CC BY-NC 2.0.
August 20, 2024 at 9:15 PM
scottzona.bsky.social
Here’s another epiphytic Columnea (#Gesneriaceae) that uses red spots on its leaf undersides to attract hummingbirds to its small, non-showy flowers. This is Columnea cruenta of Panama. 📷: Dick Culbert CCBY2 #TropicalBotany #pollination #ornithophily #gesneriad #Botany #PlantScience 🌾🧪🌱
Photo of the underside of a shoot with alternate, distichous leaves. The leaves are elongate, obovate, and have dark red spots of color across the surface of the lamina. The tips and the margins of the leaves are also red.
August 21, 2024 at 4:06 PM
drbioblogo.bsky.social
▪️ Muy interesante paper que detalla el tema de aves polinizadoras:
Bird-pollinated flowers in an evolutionary and molecular context
doi.org/10.1093/jxb/...

academic.oup.com/jxb/article/...
Bird-pollinated flowers in an evolutionary and molecular context
Abstract. Evolutionary shifts to bird pollination (ornithophily) have occurred independently in many lineages of flowering plants. This shift affects many
doi.org
May 20, 2025 at 7:30 PM
scottzona.bsky.social
Columnea consanguinea (#Gesneriaceae) has small, yellow flowers in the leaf axils. Not showy. Instead, it attracts hummingbird pollinators with bright red spots on leaf undersides. It’s one of several epiphytic Columnea spp. to do so. #TropicalBotany #ornithophily #gesneriad #Botany #PlantScience 🌾🧪
Photo of the underside of a shoot with alternate, distichous leaves. The leaves are elongate, obovate, and have paired, bright red blotches of color. Photo by Scott Zona CC BY-NC 2.0.
August 21, 2024 at 11:05 AM
scottzona.bsky.social
Aeschynanthus longicaulis (#Gesneriaceae) is an epiphyte from s. China through SE Asia & the Malaysian Peninsula. The tubular, green flowers are nectar-rich & bird-pollinated (but not by hummingbirds, which are American). #TropicalBotany #ornithophily #gesneriad #Botany #PlantScience 🌾🧪
Cose-up photo of a leafy shoot bearing a single flower. The leaves have reddish undersides and petioles. The flower has narrow, subulate, red sepals and a green, tubular corolla. The stamens and stigma are exserted. Photo by Scott Zona CC BY-NC 2.0.
August 22, 2024 at 11:05 AM
phillipcrymble.bsky.social
For father's day this year, a poem I wrote for my son when he was little. Many thanks to the folks at the INDEX press for printing it as a letterpress broadsheet in 2024.
NORTH AMERICAN BIRDS A world is firstly made of names and labels - what the nascent heart is desperate to possess. For you, my son, the chickadees and finches at the feeding table - nesting in the eaves and calling each to each atop our backyard maple-filled the empty spaces in your head. Next came the illustrations - colour plates you memorized by rote the simple work of saying like a spell - a song of invocation. All winter long our little house made warm by ornithophily - a reverence of words - the age-old human dream of flight. These days toy trucks and robots dance like planets in your mind. Bird boy, must you leave so soon sit down with me and stay a while. -Phillip Crymble
June 15, 2025 at 2:41 PM
1rinto2rin.bsky.social
05月04日（東京）SUPER COMIC CITY 32-day2-
スーパー・ネクスト・オペレーション
東7_L53a / ガラス温室

連絡が遅れまして大変申し訳ありません！
合同サークル「ガラス温室」のお品書きとサンプルです。
※「ornithophily」はコピー本です。

当日はよろしくお願いします。
May 3, 2025 at 8:08 AM
sherilwilliamson.bsky.social
Darkness, shmarkness. The shorter days of fall signal the Thanksgiving cactus (Schlumbergera truncata) that it's time for a glow up.

Its wild relatives are epiphytes endemic to the mountains of southeastern Brazil where they provide nectar for hummingbirds. 🌱🪶 #garden #ornithophily
A tropical cactus with long, drooping branches composed of a series of flat "joints" with coarsely toothed edges. Most ofvthe longer branches are tipped with elongated, bilaterally symmetrical flowers whose petals are deep pink at the tips fading to white at the base. The plant is in a cylindrical terra cotta pot on a bed of gravel in a dark glazed saucer resting on a wooden shelf in front of a light-colored wall. A closeup of the cactus flowers in side view showing their elongated reproductive structures adapted for pollination by hummingbirds.
November 15, 2025 at 5:46 PM
kaylafiskbirds.bsky.social
A while ago I tried starting a YouTube channel, imposter syndrome hit and haven’t worked on it. But now I’m back! I’m also a bit late for pollinator week but feel free to check out my video on birds as pollinators!

#birds #birding #birdwatching #nature

m.youtube.com/watch?v=nICj...
Ornithophily: All about birds as pollinators
YouTube video by Kayla Fisk
m.youtube.com
June 25, 2025 at 12:19 PM
josephwb.bsky.social
Ornithophily originated at least 47 million years ago. <a href="http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/5/20140223.abstract?etoc" class="hover:underline text-blue-600 dark:text-sky-400 no-card-link" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-link="bsky">http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/5/20140223.abstract?etoc #fossil #pollination
November 7, 2024 at 11:04 PM