Quick overview: Migration in the Pacific Northwest isn't one story — it's several birds arriving on different schedules into a place that has changed underneath them. Rufous Hummingbird shows up astonishingly early, from late February on the southern Oregon coast, and is largely gone by August. Anna's Hummingbird doesn't leave at all, which is recent: fifty years ago it wasn't here. What happens when a year-round resident meets an early-arriving migrant is the most interesting thing going on in this region, and you can watch it from your kitchen window.

Which Hummingbirds You'll See in the Pacific Northwest

Five species turn up here with any regularity, and two of them carry most of the story. Meet everyone first — the rest of this guide is about what happens when they share a landscape.

Anna's Hummingbird

The year-round resident, and the reason a hummingbird turns up at a snowy feeder in January. Males wear an iridescent rose-red crown and throat — a full-head shimmer no other North American hummingbird has, which can look nearly black until the light catches it. Anna's is also the most conspicuous singer in the family here, delivering a scratchy, buzzy song from an exposed perch. (Its desert cousin Costa's also learns and sings a song; Anna's is simply louder about it.) It doesn't migrate, it nests as early as February, and until about sixty years ago it wasn't in this region at all.

Rufous Hummingbird

The region's signature migrant, and its conservation priority. Males are bright coppery-orange and essentially unmistakable. Rufous breeds here in greater numbers than anywhere on Earth, arrives earlier than almost any migratory hummingbird in the country, and leaves again by midsummer. It also runs a clockwise loop rather than a straight line — north up the Pacific Coast in late winter, south down the Rocky Mountains from July — so the birds you greet in March aren't the ones you'd see departing in September. Famously pugnacious for its size.

Black-chinned Hummingbird

The dry-country specialist, holding the interior east of the Cascades. Males show a velvety black throat edged with a violet band that only flashes at the right angle — most of the time it just reads as dark. Seattle Audubon's BirdWeb calls it the least common of Washington's breeding hummingbirds, found through the steppe and Ponderosa pine zones with the highest densities around Spokane and the Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge. A spring-through-fall bird here, not a winter one.

Calliope Hummingbird

North America's smallest bird — and a genuine breeder here, which most regional accounts leave out. Males have a magenta gorget that splits into separate rays rather than forming a solid patch, flaring like whiskers when they display. Oregon Fish and Wildlife describes it as a common summer resident of the Blue and Wallowa Mountains and other high ranges east of the Cascade summit; it breeds in Washington's dry conifer forests east of the crest as well. Look for it in the mountains, not the lowlands.

Allen's Hummingbird

A coastal specialty that just reaches this region. ODFW calls it a fairly common spring and summer resident of the coastal fog belt as far north as Bandon. It looks a great deal like Rufous — for good reason, as you'll see below — and it matters more than its small numbers suggest: Allen's is a 2025 Red Alert Tipping Point species with a world range barely larger than the California coast, which makes that stretch of southern Oregon shoreline the northern tip of everything it has.

And occasionally

Broad-tailed Hummingbird reaches Oregon's eastern edges, though ODFW notes its breeding here has never been documented. Costa's is a very rare visitor to central and southwestern Oregon, sometimes lingering in the Rogue Valley. Neither is a bird you should expect, but both are worth a second look if something at your feeder seems off.

What's Actually Happening in This Region

Now the interesting part. Fifty years ago this region emptied of hummingbirds every winter — Anna's wasn't here, and Washington's first breeding record didn't come until 1976, from Tacoma. Today Anna's holds territory through January snow, and Rufous returns each spring to find the neighborhood already occupied.

That arrangement is genuinely new, nobody planned it, and it's still settling out. Here's how the year unfolds, who gets there first, who wins the arguments, and why one of these birds is quietly disappearing while the other thrives.

The Newcomer Who Never Left

Anna's expansion into this region is one of the best-documented range shifts in North American ornithology. A 2019 study by C. J. Battey in The American Naturalist traced it through a century of Christmas Bird Count records and found Pacific Northwest populations showing striking exponential growth after colonization in the 1960s and 70s — with northern birds delaying the start of nesting by at least 16 days to match a later spring.

What made it possible here wasn't eucalyptus, which is a California factor and doesn't grow in Washington. It was us. Greig, Wood and Bonter (2017, Proceedings of the Royal Society B), working from seventeen years of Project FeederWatch data, documented a winter range expansion of more than 700 kilometers northward in two decades. Anna's colonized colder places over time, was more likely to settle where housing density was higher, and was more likely to use feeders in the newly occupied range — with the expansion tracking a rising tendency among people to put nectar out at all.

The edge is still moving. BirdWeb records breeding through the southeastern Puget Sound lowlands, with non-breeding birds now in Columbia Basin riparian areas. East of the mountains, the North Central Washington Audubon Society has documented Anna's present year-round and breeding — and their community-science data was substantial enough to prompt a revision of the published range map.

Who Wins at the Feeder

Hummingbirds fight over food constantly, and researchers have measured it. Miller and colleagues (2017, Behavioral Ecology) built a continental dominance hierarchy from 7,685 recorded interspecific squabbles among 136 bird species at feeders. The hierarchy was largely predicted by body mass — bigger usually wins — but hummingbirds were a striking exception. As the Cornell Lab summary puts it, they "punched above their weight." A three-gram bird routinely displaces species many times its size.

Within that, Rufous tends to dominate Anna's. Cornell describes Rufous as relentless attackers at flowers and feeders, going after — if not always defeating — hummingbirds double their weight, with all ages and both sexes aggressive even during brief one- to two-week migration stopovers. The classic study behind this, Kodric-Brown and Brown (1978, Ecology), showed Rufous defending feeding territories while migrating — not just on breeding grounds.

One honest caveat. You'll read that Rufous is the most aggressive hummingbird in North America. The dominance study doesn't quite establish that — its own author noted there were too few Rufous observations at winter feeders to pin down an exact rank. What the research supports is narrower and still remarkable: hummingbirds as a group vastly outfight their size, and Rufous tends to come out ahead of Anna's.

The Resident and the Traveler

Put those two facts together and you get the question this region is currently answering in real time.

Before the 1960s, a Rufous arriving in March met an empty landscape. Today it arrives into territory a resident Anna's has held since the previous summer — a bird that nested in February, knows every feeder on the block, and isn't going anywhere. In most territorial animals, getting there first is worth something. Rufous, meanwhile, brings the better fighting reputation.

So who actually wins?

Nobody has measured it yet. We looked. There's excellent research on Anna's expansion and excellent research on hummingbird dominance, but no study we could find directly tests whether resident Anna's affects where, when, or how successfully Rufous settles in the Pacific Northwest. It's a genuinely open question — one of those cases where backyard birders are watching something the literature hasn't caught up to.

What we can say is that this arrangement is new, that it now covers the whole region, and that it didn't exist within living memory. If you keep a feeder and notice who displaces whom in March, you're observing an interaction that has only been possible for about sixty years.

The Bird That Feeds the Early Arrivals

Rufous reaching the southern Oregon coast in late February raises an obvious problem: what does a nectar specialist eat before anything blooms?

The answer is sap, and a woodpecker does the work. Red-breasted Sapsuckers drill orderly rows of wells in alder, birch, and willow, and hummingbirds follow them. Cornell Lab states it plainly: hummingbirds "often make use of sapsucker wells and may rely on them if they arrive before flowers bloom," and Rufous "often nest near sapwells and may follow a sapsucker around during the day to feed on fresh wells." Birds of the World describes the two as closely associated ecologically, the hummingbird placing its nest near active wells and shadowing the sapsucker through its daily rounds.

This isn't a minor detail. Miller and Nero (1983, Canadian Journal of Zoology) argued that the spring arrival dates and northern breeding limits of Rufous and Ruby-throated Hummingbirds are set by this relationship — that sapsucker sap is what lets a hummingbird exist that far north that early. A 2025 study in Ecology and Evolution put modern tools on the question — camera traps and environmental DNA at sapsucker wells in the Colorado Rockies, where Red-naped and Williamson’s Sapsuckers do the drilling — and confirmed both breeding Broad-tailed and migrating Rufous Hummingbirds feeding there. The species doing the work differs by region; the relationship does not.

So the earliest hummingbird arrival on the continent is underwritten by a woodpecker. If you have alders with neat rows of holes in them, leave them alone — that's a feeding station that predates yours by a few million years.

Why Rufous and Allen's Look Identical

North America's breeding hummingbirds all belong to one recent radiation — the "bee hummingbirds," a group that reached this continent late and diversified fast. Licona-Vera and Ornelas (2017, BMC Evolutionary Biology) date their arrival in western North America to the end of the Miocene, with long-distance migration evolving independently four separate times. Anna's and Costa's are sister species in the genus Calypte. Rufous, Allen's, Calliope, and Broad-tailed all sit in Selasphorus.

Rufous and Allen's are close enough that in southern Oregon and northern California they interbreed. Myers and colleagues (2019, The Auk) documented a hybrid zone stretching more than 300 kilometers along the Pacific coast and 90 kilometers inland, with males shifting gradually from Rufous-like in the north to Allen's-like in the south. Females and immatures are essentially indistinguishable in the field; even in the hand, the reliable mark is the shape of the second tail feather.

Hummingbirds hybridize unusually often for birds. Clark, Rankin and Rudeen (2021, Ornithology) went through nearly a million banding records and found roughly one hybrid per thousand birds banded where multiple species breed together — almost all of them west of the Mississippi. Useful to know when a bird at your feeder refuses to match the field guide.

Why Rufous Is Losing Ground Here

The harder half of this region's story is that its signature migrant is in trouble. English and colleagues (2021, Scientific Reports) found Rufous down roughly 65% between 1970 and 2019, with the rate of decline accelerating over the last decade. Narrowing to this region and the recent past makes it starker still: modelling Breeding Bird Survey routes across the Pacific Northwest, Jefferys and colleagues (2024, Avian Conservation and Ecology) estimated a further decline of roughly 43% between 2006 and 2021, steepest along the coast.

The cause is counterintuitive, and specific to these forests. Rufous isn't declining because the timber is being cut. It's declining, in large part, because it isn't.

That same 2024 study mapped 36 years of breeding-habitat change and found the problem hiding in plain sight. Rufous needs open habitat — forest gaps, shrubby early-successional growth, the flower-rich tangle that follows fire or logging. Most of the habitat decline happened in areas of stable forest cover, where satellites detect no change at all because nothing was removed. Two forces are closing those gaps from opposite directions: intensive industrial forestry that uses herbicides to suppress the shrubby, flowering understory in favor of conifer crop trees, and decades of fire suppression — compounded by the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan's limits on federal clearcutting — that let previously open stands mature into dense closed canopy.

The authors are careful on one point, and so are we: their results do not suggest old-growth forest is poor hummingbird habitat. The problem is the loss of light gaps and flowers in between.

That mechanism belongs to these forests, which is why it lives here. For the species-level picture — full population figures, conservation status, and what the decline looks like across the whole clockwise loop — see the Rufous Hummingbird guide.

Migration Timing by Sub-Region

Pop's tip: Watch the handoff. In April and May you may have Rufous and Anna's on the same feeder, arguing. By August the Rufous are gone and the Anna's has the place to itself until next spring. Two feeders spaced well apart will get you more birds than one contested feeder ever will.

Where These Birds Go

Anna's mostly doesn't go anywhere — one of the only non-migratory hummingbirds in North America. Some birds shift upslope after breeding and drop back down for winter, but there's no long journey. The Pacific Northwest, together with coastal British Columbia, is the northern limit of year-round hummingbird residency on Earth.

Rufous does the opposite, and does it harder than nearly any bird its size: north up the coast in late winter, breeding as far as south-central Alaska, then south through the Rockies from July. Coastal Washington and Oregon get the northbound rush and very little of the return — that leg belongs to the Mountain West.

Should I Take My Feeder Down in Fall?

In most of this region, no — and that genuinely departs from the standard advice.

Where Anna's is resident, there isn't a "take it down" season. Many Pacific Northwest birders run feeders continuously, pausing only to clean. In the coldest weeks, a heated feeder, a brooder lamp, or bringing the feeder in overnight and setting it back out before dawn will keep nectar liquid when the birds most need it.

The old worry that a feeder will strand a migrant doesn't hold up. Fall departure in migratory hummingbirds runs on day length and the hormonal cascade that follows, not on whether your feeder is full. Rufous will leave in July whatever you do.

How to Help Hummingbirds Through This Region

• Run your feeder year-round where Anna's is resident, and clean it on schedule — a neglected feeder serving a resident population does more harm than no feeder at all
• Space multiple feeders out of sight of each other. Given how hard these birds fight over food, one feeder means one dominant bird and a lot of chasing; several spread around the yard means more birds actually feeding
• Plan for freezing nights. Heaters and lamps keep nectar from freezing but can't thaw a feeder that's already solid — leave the heat on overnight or swap in a fresh feeder before dawn
• Plant early. Red-flowering currant is one of the most valuable plants for a Pacific Northwest hummingbird garden — it blooms right when Anna's is nesting and the first Rufous arrive
• Leave the sapsucker wells alone. Rows of small holes in your alders or cottonwoods are feeding early Rufous long before your flowers open
• Keep some structure open and shrubby. The habitat Rufous is losing across this region is exactly the sunny, flower-rich, tangled edge a tidy yard tends to eliminate
• Skip the insecticide. Insects supply protein that nectar can't, and nesting females hunt them heavily while feeding chicks

Timing shifts by state: attracting hummingbirds in Oregon means being ready for late-February Rufous on the south coast, while hummingbird feeding in Washington turns on keeping nectar liquid through a real winter for resident Anna's.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do hummingbirds migrate away from the Pacific Northwest in winter?

Not all of them. Anna's Hummingbird is a year-round resident through the western lowlands and, increasingly, parts of eastern Washington. Rufous, Black-chinned, and Calliope are true migrants and do leave.

When do Rufous Hummingbirds arrive in the Pacific Northwest?

As early as late February on the southern Oregon coast, mid-to-late March around Portland, and late March into April in Puget Sound — among the earliest hummingbird arrivals anywhere in the country. They're largely gone again by August.

Which hummingbird is more aggressive, Anna's or Rufous?

Rufous tends to dominate Anna's. Research published in Behavioral Ecology in 2017 built a dominance hierarchy from thousands of feeder squabbles and found hummingbirds as a group punch far above their weight — a three-gram bird will displace species many times its size. You'll often read that Rufous is the most aggressive hummingbird in North America; that specific ranking isn't firmly established, but its reputation for picking fights is well earned.

Does the resident Anna's push out arriving Rufous?

Nobody knows yet, and that's the honest answer. Anna's holding year-round territory here is new — it didn't happen before the 1960s — and no study we could find has directly tested whether it affects where or how successfully Rufous settles. It's an open question you can watch play out at your own feeder each spring.

What do Rufous Hummingbirds eat when they arrive before flowers bloom?

Tree sap, mostly. Red-breasted Sapsuckers drill rows of wells in alder and birch, and Rufous follow them — nesting near active wells and shadowing the woodpecker through the day. Researchers have argued this relationship is part of what sets how early and how far north these hummingbirds can go.

Why can't I tell some of these hummingbirds apart?

Because several are very closely related. Rufous and Allen's interbreed across a hybrid zone stretching more than 300 kilometers along the southern Oregon and northern California coast; females and immatures are essentially identical in the field. Hummingbirds hybridize more often than most birds — roughly one in a thousand banded birds where several species breed together.

Should I keep my feeder up all winter?

Yes, wherever Anna's is resident, which is most of the western lowlands and a growing share of eastern Washington. Plan for freezing — a heated feeder or a pre-dawn swap keeps nectar available on the nights it matters most.

Why is Rufous declining if the forests are still here?

Because Rufous needs forest openings — shrubby, flower-rich early growth. A 2024 study found most habitat loss happened in areas of stable forest cover where nothing was cut: intensive forestry suppresses the flowering understory with herbicides, and fire suppression lets open stands mature into closed canopy. The gaps are closing even where the forest looks unchanged.

How We Know This

Migration timing and species status draw on Cornell Lab's All About Birds, Seattle Audubon's BirdWeb, and the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. The Anna's expansion comes from Battey (2019, The American Naturalist) and Greig, Wood & Bonter (2017, Proceedings of the Royal Society B), with eastern Washington status from the North Central Washington Audubon Society. Dominance findings come from Miller et al. (2017, Behavioral Ecology) and Kodric-Brown & Brown (1978, Ecology). The sapsucker relationship comes from All About Birds, Miller & Nero (1983, Canadian Journal of Zoology), and Clawges et al. (2025, Ecology and Evolution). Evolutionary relationships come from Licona-Vera & Ornelas (2017, BMC Evolutionary Biology) and McGuire et al. (2014, Current Biology); the hybrid zone from Myers et al. (2019, The Auk) and hybridization rates from Clark, Rankin & Rudeen (2021, Ornithology). Population trends come from English et al. (2021, Scientific Reports) and habitat findings from Jefferys et al. (2024, Avian Conservation and Ecology).

Key Takeaways

• Five hummingbirds occur here regularly — Anna's, Rufous, Black-chinned, Calliope, and Allen's — with Anna's and Rufous carrying most of the region's story
• Rufous arrives astonishingly early, late February on the southern Oregon coast, and is largely gone by August
• Anna's doesn't migrate at all here, and that's recent: the first Washington breeding record was 1976, and the expansion tracks feeders and urban habitat rather than eucalyptus
• The two now overlap every spring, an arrangement that didn't exist sixty years ago — and whether the resident affects the migrant is a genuinely open scientific question
• Hummingbirds fight far above their weight class; Rufous tends to dominate Anna's, though the "most aggressive in North America" label is looser than it sounds
• The earliest Rufous survive on sap wells drilled by Red-breasted Sapsuckers, a relationship researchers think helps set how far north hummingbirds can go
• Rufous and Allen's interbreed across a 300-kilometer hybrid zone in southern Oregon, which is why some birds simply won't match the field guide
• Rufous has declined roughly 65% since 1970, driven by the loss of open, shrubby forest habitat — most of it in stands where no trees were cut at all

At Pop's Birding, we believe every backyard — big or small — has room for a little more wonder. Explore our feeders, nectars, swings, and wildflower seed blends to start building your own hummingbird sanctuary today.