The Rufous Hummingbird and the Flowering Red Currant: A Native Partnership Worth Celebrating
If you’ve been out walking in North Saanich this spring, you may have already spotted the flowering red currant (Ribes sanguineum) in bloom. This beautiful native shrub puts on one of the earliest and most striking floral displays of the season, with brilliant pink-red blossoms emerging in early March just as the rufous hummingbird arrives back from its wintering grounds in Mexico. After travelling over 6,000 kilometres north, these tiny birds arrive hungry and ready to breed, and those bell-shaped currant flowers are perfectly timed to fuel them on arrival. If you were lucky enough to catch a flash of rusty-orange darting through a currant bush this spring, that’s exactly what was happening.
The bad news is that rufous hummingbird populations have been declining since the 1970s, largely due to habitat loss on their breeding grounds, and every garden in North Saanich can play a small but meaningful role in turning that around. The good news is that planting a flowering red currant is one of the easiest things you can do. These shrubs are drought-tolerant once established, grow quickly, and support a wide range of native pollinators beyond just hummingbirds. Now is a great time to start thinking ahead: fall is the ideal planting season, and both Russell Nursery on Wain Road and Satinflower Nurseries on Lochside Drive in Central Saanich carry them. File this one away for September and give next spring’s hummingbirds something to come home to.
Sources:
https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Rufous_Hummingbird/lifehistory
