Bob the hummingbird was stranded in snowy Nebraska. How he made a new home in Arizona

Back in October, a Nebraska woman named Jennifer Munson noticed a hummingbird in her yard. At first, she didn’t think much of it — ruby-throated hummingbirds are native to the region, and Jennifer figured that’s what this bird was.

But after a few weeks of watching the bird return to her yard over and over again, she wanted to know more about it — so she took a picture of it and sent it to an ornithologically inclined friend.

That’s when she discovered the bird was actually a Costa’s hummingbird.

Costa’s hummingbirds are native to the Southwest and northwest Mexico — which meant this little guy was a long way from home. So Munson decided to see if she could help him get back to where he came from — and Tucson journalist Henry Brean wrote about what happened next.

Brean joined The Show with the rest of this remarkable story.

Full conversation

SAM DINGMAN: So, Henry, this hummingbird was lucky that it found its way to Jennifer's yard for a number of reasons, not least of which is that Jennifer and her husband gave it a very clever name.

HENRY BREAN: Yes, that's right. They named it … Bob Costas, after the famous sportscaster was what they came up with for the bird. And people have been calling it Bob ever since.

DINGMAN: Yes, Bob Costas, the Costa’s hummingbird. Fantastic. So Bob kind of became a local celebrity in the birdwatching community there in Nebraska, right?

BREAN: Yeah. So word got out pretty quickly that she had this rare bird in her yard. And she said hundreds of people, over a two-week period, descended on her house.

And they were all very polite, but they showed up with giant telephoto lenses and parabolic antennas to try and catch Bob's song and record it. And she said they hung out pretty much all day long …

DINGMAN: So when we last left Bob, he had become a local celebrity there in Nebraska. People were lining up on the streets to take photographs of him.

And one of my favorite details from the piece you wrote about this is that people were so appreciative of Jennifer and her husband caring for Bob that they started leaving these little gifts.

BREAN: Yeah, some of the birders that she invited into her yard to come take a look at this rare bird actually sent her presents afterwards. They sent her a jar of honey or homemade jam, a photo album of some of the photos they took of Bob, stuff like that, and some original artwork even. It was very touching to her. I could tell when I talked to her.

DINGMAN: Yes. And speaking of it being touching, she also told you that Bob arrived at a kind of sensitive moment in her life, right?

BREAN: Yeah. She lost her father rather suddenly in April. She described him as her best friend. And she was, was pretty depressed about it. She said she hadn't even really been maintaining her backyard garden, which sounded like it was pretty important to her.

So she said some of the hummingbird-friendly plants she had had sort of gone crazy in her backyard because she just wasn't maintaining things. And apparently Bob found the flowers and really liked it.

DINGMAN: So Bob really makes a big impact on Jennifer's life. But Nebraska being Nebraska, winter arrives and it gets really cold. And Bob, being a Southwestern bird by nature, is not built for that.

So tell us what Jennifer decided to do.

BREAN: Yeah, she began to get concerned that he wasn't flying south for the winter. And it got down into the teens in Nebraska. Hummingbird feeders were freezing solid and the flowers were wiped out by the frost.

And she decided she needed to get him out of town. So she and a friend worked to get him captured and turned over to a rescue.

DINGMAN: And so she ends up contacting a rescue organization in Tucson, right. And they come up with this plan to take Bob on a road trip.

BREAN: Right. So she turns, see, they capture Bob, and she turns him over to a rescue in Nebraska, in Omaha. And the woman who runs that that organization gets in the car with Bob and a couple of other wayward animals from the area, and she goes on a road trip, dropping off wayward animals along the way.

She stopped in Texas, she stopped in Phoenix with a bat, and she brought Bob to Tucson.

DINGMAN: And how did Bob do on the trip?

BREAN: She said that the woman that drove Bob across the country said that he was very animated throughout most of the trip, that he was making a lot of noise and buzzing around in his little cage. In fact, she was a little worried about him, she told me.

But it turned out he was doing just fine. He was kind of ready to go. He was tired of being cooped up and wanted to get back out into nature.

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DINGMAN: Another kind of amazing detail from your piece on this, Henry, is that, if I'm not mistaken, as Bob approached the border here in Arizona, or maybe it was New Mexico, he started kind of buzzing. Almost like he knew that he was getting close to home.

BREAN: Yeah, that's how she described it for me. I guess it's hard to know what was going through Bob's mind. But, yeah, she said he definitely started changing. His behavior sort of changed as she drove from Texas into New Mexico. Almost as if he knew he was getting close to home.

DINGMAN: So this woman who drove Bob south, her name is Laura Stassny, she drops Bob off at the home of a bird rehabilitator in Tucson named Julia Lehman. What happens next?

BREAN: Julia Lehman works with a group called Southern Arizona Hummingbird Rescue. And she hangs on to Bob for a couple of days.

First she has him inside her house in his cage, and then she brings him outside to sort of get him used to Tucson weather and the sounds he's going to hear. And she said he, he was very active. And then when she took him outside, he got very still and seemed to be sort of taking in the sounds of other hummingbirds that were buzzing around in her backyard.

DINGMAN: That is really remarkable. I mean, again, to your point, we can't know what was going on in Bob's head. But one of the things that's so lovely about your piece are these little moments where it certainly seems like Bob is so aware of the changes that are happening in his immediate surroundings.

BREAN: Yeah, I was lucky enough to get to be there when they actually opened his cage door to let him out back into the wild. And he was in a cage underneath this giant palo verde tree. And in the palo verde tree, there were other Costa’s hummingbirds like him. And they were flying around and buzzing and doing that hummingbirds do.

And occasionally they'd fly down by his cage, and he would light up and fly over by them sort of in the territorial way that hummingbirds do. So he was definitely aware of the other hummingbirds and eager to get out there and join them. It seemed to, anyway.

DINGMAN: So just about 30 seconds left here. Henry, do we know how Bob ended up in Nebraska?

BREAN: We don't. There are some theories about whether, a couple of the people I talk to tell me that when things like this happen with animals that wander off, it's often juveniles, and it's often juvenile males that get into these predicaments that end off way off course.

I don't know if it was his first migration, and maybe that's just where he ended up. There's a possibility he may have been born somewhere up there out of range and was maybe trying to find his way back. There's just no way to know.

DINGMAN: Interesting. Well, he did find his way back, eventually. With the help of some friendly, ornithologically-inclined folks. That is Henry Brean, a reporter in Tucson who wrote about Bob for the Arizona Daily Star.