Hummingbirds

Hummingbird Migration: When They Arrive and Leave, by State

By Beak & Branch Editorial · Published August 19, 2026

If you want one number to hang your spring on: ruby-throated hummingbirds move north at an average of about 20 miles a day. The leading edge of that wave touches the Gulf Coast in late February, crosses the Ohio River around mid-April, and reaches the Canadian border in the second week of May. Eleven weeks, bottom of the map to the top, on a schedule regular enough that most years you can predict your own hummingbird feeder calendar to within a week.

That predictability is the useful part. Hummingbird migration isn’t a weather event that happens to you — it’s a latitude schedule with weather noise layered on top. Below is how the spring wave actually works, a state-by-state table of typical arrival and departure windows, why the fall exodus feels so abrupt, and the one myth that makes people take their feeders down too early.

The spring wave, and the crossing that starts it

Ruby-throated hummingbirds — the species roughly nine out of ten American backyards mean when they say “hummingbird” — spend the winter in southern Mexico and Central America. The northbound trip begins in late January and February, and the first leg is the famous one.

The Gulf crossing. Many ruby-throats stage on the Yucatán coast, gorge on insects and nectar until they’ve nearly doubled their body weight, then launch out over open water for roughly 500 miles of the Gulf of Mexico. It’s an 18-to-22-hour nonstop flight with no possibility of a rest stop, made by a bird that weighs about as much as a penny. Not every individual does it — a substantial share take the longer overland route around the western rim of the Gulf through Texas — but the water crossing is why the first arrivals along the Gulf Coast appear so suddenly, and so hungry.

Landfall, then a slow crawl north. Birds reach the Texas, Louisiana and Florida coasts from late February into mid-March. From there the pace drops to that ~20-mile-per-day average, because they’re not racing — they’re following the northward creep of early blooms and of insect emergence. In the earliest weeks that also means following yellow- bellied sapsuckers, whose drilled sap wells are a critical food source ahead of the first flowers.

Males go first. Adult males typically precede females by one to two weeks, staking out territory before the females arrive. The first hummingbird at your feeder in spring is almost always a male, and the yard often feels empty again for a fortnight afterward before things properly begin.

One thing worth knowing about any migration map, including the one below: the dates mark the front edge, not the bulk. Seeing “early April” for your state means a handful of scouts are possible then. The main population usually follows one to three weeks later.

Hummingbird arrival and departure, state by state

These are typical windows, not guarantees. Timing shifts with the year’s weather, and it shifts within a state too — southern Ohio runs two weeks ahead of the lakeshore, coastal Texas well ahead of the Panhandle, and mountain states can vary by a month between valley and high country. Treat your own latitude and elevation as the tiebreaker.

The fall departure, and why yours vanished in July

Fall is not one exit. It’s three, and the first one catches people out every single year.

Adult males leave first — and early. Their season’s work is done once mating is over, so adult male ruby-throats begin drifting south in late June and July in the northern states, with most gone by early August. Females and juveniles stay put. This is the single most common “where did my hummingbirds go?” scenario: the flashy red-throated bird you’d been watching all June disappears in midsummer while the plain-throated birds carry on, and it reads like abandonment. It’s just the schedule.

Females follow in August, once the last brood is independent.

Juveniles go last, through September. Young birds hatched that summer migrate weeks after the adults, without ever having made the trip — no guide, no parent, navigating on inherited instinct alone. The practical consequence: the hummingbirds crowding your feeder in September are often birds you have never met, including travellers from further north refuelling in your yard. September traffic can easily be the busiest of the year, which is exactly when many people have already put the feeder away.

Fall migration is also slower and more spread out than spring. Nobody is racing to claim territory, so departure windows run several weeks wide — August into September up north, September into October across the middle, and into late October or early November along the Gulf.

When to put feeders out — and when to take them down

Out: two weeks before your expected arrival date. Use the table above, subtract a fortnight, and hang the feeder then. A hummingbird arriving after a Gulf crossing or a long overland leg needs calories immediately, and the yards that get claimed are the ones already serving. Waiting until you see one means the scouts have already chosen someone else’s yard. A fresh batch of standard 4:1 nectar — four parts water to one part plain white sugar, no dye — is all it takes.

Down: two weeks after your last sighting. Not on a calendar date. Keep one clean feeder going a fortnight past the last bird you saw, changing the nectar on the usual care schedule, and you’ll catch stragglers and late-passing northern migrants for whom your feeder may be the only reliable sugar for miles.

And the myth that has to die: leaving your feeder up does not keep hummingbirds from migrating. Migration is triggered by photoperiod — the shortening of daylight after the solstice — and the hormonal changes that follow it, not by whether food is available. A healthy hummingbird will leave a full feeder on schedule. It’s fixed biology, and it does not negotiate with sugar water. The only birds that linger are ones that were going to linger anyway (sick, injured, or genuinely off-course vagrants), and for those a feeder is a lifeline rather than a trap.

While we’re clearing out folklore: hummingbirds do not ride on the backs of geese. Charming image, entirely fictional — the two species don’t share a route, a schedule, or an altitude.

If ants find the feeder during the long autumn wait, a water-filled ant moat solves it without chemicals, and a leak-resistant saucer-style feeder makes the whole late-season stretch lower-maintenance.

The West runs on completely different rules

If you’re west of the Rockies, most of the above is the wrong species and the wrong calendar.

Anna’s hummingbird barely migrates at all. This is the genuinely useful surprise for Pacific coast readers: Anna’s is a year-round resident from Baja through California, Oregon, Washington and into coastal British Columbia — a range it expanded northward over the last several decades on the back of suburban ornamental plantings and feeders. There is no arrival date and no departure date. If you live in Seattle or the Bay Area, your “migration question” is really a winter feeding question: keeping nectar liquid through a cold snap, not knowing when to hang the feeder.

Rufous makes a giant clockwise loop. It runs north up the Pacific coast in late winter and early spring — Washington and British Columbia by April and May — then turns around remarkably early and comes south down the spine of the Rockies from July onward, timed to mountain wildflower bloom. A Rufous in your Colorado or Montana yard in early August isn’t late for summer; it’s already migrating.

The rest of the western cast: Black-chinned across the Southwest and Great Basin from March–April to September; Broad-tailed in the mountain West from April to early September; Calliope — North America’s smallest bird — in western mountains April to May, mostly gone by August; Allen’s up the California coast startlingly early, some back by January. Costa’s and Broad-billed hold parts of the desert Southwest year-round.

Frequently asked questions

When do hummingbirds migrate? Spring migration runs late January through mid-May, with ruby-throats reaching the Gulf Coast in late February and March and the northern states and Canada in early to mid-May. Fall migration runs from late June (adult males in the north) through October, with most of the continent emptying out between mid-August and late September.

When do hummingbirds come back in spring? Match it to your latitude: late February to mid-March on the Gulf Coast, late March to early April across the mid-South, mid to late April through the lower Midwest and mid-Atlantic, and early May for the northern tier and New England. The table above gives state-level windows.

Is there a live hummingbird migration map? Yes — several organisations publish crowd-sourced maps updated daily each spring from first-sighting reports submitted by the public, alongside eBird’s abundance animations built from millions of checklists. They’re excellent for watching the wave approach your state in real time; just remember they plot first sightings, so the leading edge always runs ahead of the main arrival.

Do hummingbirds come back to the same feeder? They do, and it’s one of the genuinely charming facts in backyard birding. Hummingbirds have strong site fidelity — individuals return to the same breeding territory, and often the same yard and the same feeder location, year after year, sometimes after a multi-thousand-mile round trip. Reports of birds hovering where a feeder used to hang are common enough to be a running joke among people who moved theirs. It’s a real argument for hanging yours in the same spot each spring.

Does leaving my feeder up delay migration? No. Departure is driven by day length and internal hormonal rhythm, not food supply. A feeder left up simply feeds late travellers passing through. Leaving it out two weeks past your last sighting is the recommended practice, not a risk.

Timing windows compiled from published migration-tracking data and regional ornithological guidance, including crowd-sourced first-sighting maps and long-run banding and checklist records. Windows are typical ranges and vary year to year with weather, latitude and elevation. Last reviewed August 2026.