Most of North America lost its hummingbirds weeks ago. In about fifteen states and provinces, some of them never leave.
The short version: the Pacific coast keeps Anna’s Hummingbirds year-round, as far north as British Columbia. The Gulf Coast and Florida keep hummingbirds through the winter, including western species that spend the season there instead of in Mexico. Southern Arizona keeps several species. Everywhere else in the United States and Canada, hummingbirds are gone by late fall and will not be back until spring.
Where hummingbirds stay through winter
The table below comes from our state-by-state dataset. Each row carries the source we used and how confident we are in it. Where the evidence describes a region rather than a single state, we say so instead of guessing.
| State / province | Where | Who stays | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| California | Statewide | Anna’s; Allen’s in the south | High |
| Florida | Statewide | Ruby-throated, increasingly year-round | High |
| Arizona | Southern counties | Black-chinned, Broad-tailed, Costa’s and others | High |
| Texas | South and coastal | Ruby-throated, Black-chinned, Buff-bellied, Rufous | High |
| Louisiana | Coastal | Ruby-throated, plus wintering Rufous and Black-chinned | High |
| Oregon | Lowlands | Anna’s | High |
| Washington | Lowlands | Anna’s | High |
| British Columbia | Coastal lowlands | Anna’s | High |
| North Carolina | Coastal | Ruby-throated | High |
| Alabama | Southern counties | Ruby-throated | High |
| Mississippi | Southern counties | Ruby-throated | High |
| Georgia | Southern counties | Ruby-throated | Medium |
| South Carolina | Coastal | Ruby-throated | Medium |
| New Mexico | Southern counties | Black-chinned, Broad-tailed | Medium — regional source only |
| Nevada | Southern tip | Anna’s, Black-chinned | Medium — regional source only |
Read the second column carefully, because it does most of the work. Only California, Florida and Arizona’s southern half hold hummingbirds across anything like a whole state. The rest are edges: the coastal strip of the Carolinas, the Gulf counties of Alabama and Mississippi, the lowlands west of the Cascades. A hundred miles inland or uphill from those lines, the birds are gone for the season. This is the same reason we split our state pages by region rather than giving one date for a whole state.
The other 43 states and provinces in our dataset have no regular wintering hummingbirds. Hawaii has none at all, at any season.
Why some of them stay
There are really two separate stories here.
On the Pacific coast, the story is Anna’s Hummingbird. Audubon documents Anna’s as present year-round north through British Columbia. An Anna’s in a Seattle or Vancouver garden in January is not a lost bird or a straggler. It lives there.
Along the Gulf Coast and in Florida, the story is different. Ruby-throated Hummingbirds, the species the whole eastern half of the country knows, increasingly stay the winter in Florida. Audubon notes that feeders on the Texas and Louisiana coast are visited in late winter and early spring. Those same states host western species through the winter — Rufous and Black-chinned among them — birds that nested in the Rockies or the Northwest and headed southeast rather than due south.
In southern Arizona it is mostly climate. Arizona has more hummingbird species than any other state, and the Southwest holds some of them all year.
If you still have a hummingbird
If you live in one of the places above, a winter hummingbird is ordinary and your feeder is doing useful work. Keep it clean, and keep the mix simple: one part white table sugar to four parts water, nothing else. No red dye, no honey, no sugar substitutes. That ratio is what the Smithsonian’s National Zoo recommends, and it is close to the sugar concentration of the flowers these birds feed on.
If you are not in one of those places and a hummingbird is still at your feeder in November or December, that is genuinely unusual — and worth recording. Report it to eBird so it enters the public record, and leave the feeder up.
The one thing not to do is take the feeder down to push the bird south. Migration runs on day length, not on whether your feeder is full. The Smithsonian’s National Zoo says plainly that leaving feeders up late in fall does not stop migration. A late bird on a cold morning is usually a traveler that needs the calories.
What this list is, and is not
These are patterns, not promises. Wintering ranges move from year to year, and both Florida and the Pacific Northwest appear to hold hummingbirds more consistently now than they once did. Two rows above, New Mexico and Nevada, come from regional descriptions rather than state-level sources, and we have marked them that way rather than dress them up. We will tighten them as we work through eBird’s state bar charts.
Sources
- National Audubon Society — year-round and seasonal hummingbird ranges, including Anna’s north to British Columbia and winter feeder use on the Gulf coast.
- Avian Report, drawing on Cornell Lab’s All About Birds, eBird and banding data — regional arrival and departure windows for the eastern United States.
- Smithsonian’s National Zoo — nectar ratio, and migration timing relative to feeders.
- Journey North — first-sighting records for western species.
Dataset compiled 19 October 2026. Where a cell had no source we trust, we mark it as needing validation rather than fill it in.
Keep reading
- Hummingbird Arrival Dates by State — when they come back, state by state.
- When Should You Take Down Your Hummingbird Feeder?
- How to Help Birds Through a Cold Snap