Zach Hutchinson is a wildlife biologist and Master Bander who will be leading the hummingbird banding station at Paintrock Canyon Ranch this summer. Based in Wyoming, Zach works with Audubon — the largest bird conservation organization in the world — where he helps protect bird populations at both local and global scales. With a background that spans reptiles, amphibians, mammals, and birds, Zach brings a wide-angle view of conservation science, but his true passion lies in helping people fall in love with birds.

We spoke with Zach about how he got started in ornithology (hint: it involves a crash course in birds and a borrowed kayak), why hummingbirds matter, and what he hopes people will take away from visiting the banding station.

Tell us about your background and your interest in birding. Where did that come from?

I studied wildlife biology at Northwest Missouri, and I didn't have an interest in birds at the time. Actually, my first interest was in herptiles – reptiles and amphibians. But I had an opportunity to go work as a kayaking guide in Galveston Bay, Texas, in my second-to-last year of school. They had two requirements: that you needed to know how to kayak and that you could identify coastal birds.

I had done neither growing up in landlocked Nebraska, so there was a two-week accelerated ornithology course that ended days before the internship would start. So I went and took a coastal ornithology course in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, and they had kayaks, so I taught myself to kayak and did a full semester's worth of ornithology in two weeks. It was every day from five to five, 12 hours of nonstop birds. And it was amazing. It was a natural skill that I didn't know I had.

And it just kept growing from there. When I got out of school, I actually didn't work with birds initially. I worked on the Gulf Coast, doing alligator conservation work. But working on the coast then led me to experience my first spring bird migrations. As the birds cross the Gulf and reach the Texas coast, there are millions of birds passing overhead, of hundreds of species. That’s where I really started to fall in love with birds and birding. 

Were there some specific species you remember seeing during your time on the Gulf Coast that stuck out to you?

All of the coastal birds were pretty impressive, the colorful neotropical migrants. Growing up in landlocked Nebraska, when you think of pink birds, you think of flamingos. And yet we have these roseate spoonbills with giant spoon-shaped beaks — brighter pink than any flamingo — living on the Gulf Coast. I remember I crawled across the marsh — just crawling through the nastiest, muckiest crud — so that I could creep up on a flock to take photos. I got some and I was really happy about that. So that was a pretty special moment. 

I was also with a group of friends doing the great Texas Birding Classic. We were on South Padre Island and experienced a fallout event that the locals there said they hadn’t seen one like it in maybe 50 years.

The birds and the timing of their migration lined up with a storm system that was crossing South Padre. When they hit a storm, they exhaust quickly and just fall out of the sky. So birds are just landing all around you throughout the day.

I remember we were crossing the causeway from the mainland to South Padre, and I looked up into the sky and against the clouds there was an orange tint to the sky. It wasn't the sun, it wasn't any human-made light. It was thousands of Orioles hitting the headwind and then starting to drop.

There were so many orioles. It was just like a haze of orange up in the sky. I have photos of a tree where they put out orange halves, because the orioles love the orange halves. So the tree has a bunch of orange halves, but then the rest of the tree, it just looks like it's an orange tree because there's so many orioles in it. It's just like the tree is made of orioles. 

What are you most excited about for this summer at the Paintrock hummingbird station?

What I love about working with hummingbirds is how much they challenge your expectations. They’re impossibly small – some of them weigh just a couple grams – but they’re tough. These birds migrate hundreds of miles, sometimes in less than 24 hours, crossing the Gulf of Mexico or climbing the spine of the Rockies just to reach their breeding grounds. And when they get here, they don’t rest long. The males immediately begin defending territory, and the females start building nests and raising chicks entirely on their own.

The broad-tailed hummingbirds we’ll be working with at Paintrock are a mountain species. If you’ve spent any time in the Rockies, you’ve probably heard them before you’ve seen them. Their high-pitched trill as they zoom past is pretty unmistakable. The Paintrock is near the northern edge of their breeding range, and that makes it a really important place to monitor. When birds are being pushed by climate shifts or habitat loss, it’s often the populations at the edges of their range that feel it first. Since there’s only one other site in Wyoming that works with the Hummingbird Monitoring Network, the Paintrock site will fill in a major data gap.

Banding hummingbirds is delicate work. Each bird gets a tiny, hand-cut aluminum band, so small it doesn’t even register on a gram scale. We measure their wings, check their body condition, assess fat stores and look for pollen. Over time, this data helps us understand big-picture trends, like how migration timing shifts, how site fidelity works, how long individuals live, and what pressures might be affecting population health. One broad-tailed female that was banded in Colorado lived to be at least 13 years old, which is incredible for a bird so small.

Most people never get to see a hummingbird up close, let alone hold one. So a lot of this work is not just science, it’s also a chance to tell a story about the resilience of these tiny animals and the importance of keeping even the smallest parts of our ecosystems intact.