You surely know the amazing flight of hummingbirds, don‘t you? Some of you maybe even from the wild, many most probably from documentaries. They only live in the Americas.

As nature has it, however, there are birds elsewhere in the world that specialise in feeding on nectar. They are just not called hummingbirds. Sunbirds and honeyeaters is their name in places like Africa, Asia, and Australia.

So what about Europe?

We have…..  guess what? Yessa, an insect 🤩. Unbelievably similar to a hummingbird this beautiful butterfly flies from flower to flower and dips its up to 3 cm (!!!) long sucker into the calyx of the flowers.

It is such a spectacle. The only way to really grasp what I am so fascinated about is to actually watch the Hummingbird hawk-moth feed :0). Its latin name is Macroglossum stellatarum and German speaker may know it by Taubenschwänzchen.

Feel free to watch it again and again ;-)! And I keep my fingers crossed that we encounter all those nectar-feeding animals – there are a bunch of others like fruit-bats – in the wild from time to time.

Which animal that visits flowers do you love most?