Sweet Hummingbird
Hummingbirds are small quick flying animals, birds. In Mindo there are also some species of hummingbirds. But as they drink nectar of flowers in the forest, they don’t show up in town. Well, that’s logic.
But humans intelligence is overwhelmingly great, so there are a lot of hostels giving sugar water in fake flowers to the birds to make them show up in the hostels so the tourists can take pictures. My hostel unfortunately also had sugar water, but I forgot to take a picture.

I don’t know if the sugar water is harmful to the birds, in a “nutritional” way. But what is for sure is that it keeps the population of hummingbirds artificially high and makes them dependent from it. As a hummingbird has to drink nectar of over 500 to 2000 blossoms a day. Many accommodations use 5-10kg sugar a day for the hummingbirds, which equals food for 500 to 1500 hummingbirds. Would they forget it on one single day, it would mean the death for many hummingbirds, as they would not have enough energy to find enough blossoms in the huge forest in such a short time.
(Freely resumed and translated from a german text in the Ecuador Guidebook of Michael Müller Verlag, Original by: Volker Feser and Prof. Dr. Gerhard Spitzer.)

