Seven years ago, anesthesiologist and budding photographer Carole Turek embarked on a seemingly impossible quest to photograph every hummingbird species in the world—all 366 of them. Now 75 years old and entering retirement, Turek has just 90 species left on her list. And what began as a personal obsession has garnered the attention and praise of researchers, conservationists, and legions of fans through her popular YouTube channel and website, Hummingbird Spot.
Turek developed an early affection for birds as a child, sparked by the chatter of pet parakeets that filled her family’s home in the Philadelphia suburbs. But it wasn’t until she was in her 30s, after completing an anesthesiology residency and moving to Colorado, that wild birds grabbed her attention. One afternoon, while Turek dined on a restaurant patio, a flash of iridescence caught her eye. Sipping from the blossoms of a hanging flower basket was Turek’s first hummingbird—possibly a Broad-tailed, but she lacked the expertise to identify it then. She watched, spellbound, until the bird zipped out of sight. “I was fascinated with it,” she says.
After that initial encounter, Turek was hooked. When she moved to Los Angeles in 1987, she was delighted to find hummingbirds visiting the plants on her property and decided to hang a feeder of her own. Anna’s and Allen’s Hummingbirds were two of the most frequent diners, shining brilliant shades of green, pink, and orange. As more hummers arrived, she put out more food. “I hung another feeder, and that turned into four, then six, until I had hummingbird feeders all over the house,” she says. “I would sit by the window and wait for them to come.”
Things really got out of hand when she eventually settled into her home in Studio City. There, her flowers and 16 feeders overlooked Laurel Canyon from a third-floor balcony, offering an irresistible buffet for every passing hummer. Depending on the season, she went through 50 to 90 pounds of sugar per week to keep the feeders brimming with homemade nectar, serving hundreds of hungry birds daily.
Depending on the season, she went through 50 to 90 pounds of sugar per week to keep the feeders brimming with homemade nectar.
Inspired by Cornell Lab of Ornithology bird cams and the social media accounts of wildlife photographers, Turek decided to share her spirited guests with the world. Shortly thereafter, Hummingbird Spot was born. She launched the YouTube channel in 2016 to livestream her Studio City feeders and purchased a professional camera, despite having no formal photography background. Each day, she practiced photographing the hummers on her balcony, learning to capture crisp visuals despite their constant movement. At first, “I only took pictures on the automatic setting,” she says. “I didn’t know anything about ISO or aperture. I grew up in the era of little box cameras that you bought at 7-Eleven.”
After snapping tens of thousands of photos of her regular visitors, Turek craved a new challenge. A trip to Arizona added a few species to her growing portfolio, but with only 15 types of hummingbirds regularly found in the United States, she soon realized she’d have to head further south to Central and South America to capture the family’s full spectrum of beauty and behavior.
A Partnership Takes Flight
In the summer of 2018, Turek made her first-ever international trip to Honduras, where a tour company called Beaks and Peaks advertised adventures for hummingbird photographers. On the 10-day trip, she was thrilled to encounter a bounty of new hummers: a shimmering Honduran Emerald flitting through forest scrub, a dusky Azure-crowned Hummingbird cloaked in subtle iridescence, and a Sparkling-tailed Hummingbird with a gleaming sapphire throat, among others. But the most important introduction was to William Orellana, the photographer who guided her through the country.
A conversation about the Marvelous Spatuletail, the subject of a David Attenborough-narrated video that Turek had watched “a hundred times over,” changed everything. Turek wanted to see the tiny bird with two especially lengthy tail feathers ending in disc-like “rackets,” and Orellana knew of a guide in Peru who could help. But Turek, then in her late 60s, was hesitant to travel by herself with people that she didn’t know. She felt safe and comfortable with Orellana—so much so that she asked him to accompany her. He readily agreed and became her regular travel companion, and is now a Hummingbird Spot employee as well as the owner of Beaks and Peaks. “I felt like I was training all my life to receive that request from her,” Orellana says.
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