As the tiny creature ricocheted around the netting, Bella Eskelin, 13, reached her hand inside the trap and delicately closed her fingers.

For a moment, she and the hummingbird became still.

She felt its heart beat, like a tiny motor, in her palm.

"It's just like fishing," said her father, Todd Eskelin, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist at the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge. Using fishing line, they lowered a net over a traditional feeder to collect hummingbirds.

"You're waiting, waiting, waiting. And oh! Here comes a bird," he said.

The rufous hummingbird in his daughter's hand was an adult female that weighed less than a nickel. It had recently arrived in the Portage area, at the northwestern extent of its range, to breed. In just a few short weeks, the hummingbirds would disappear, leaving Alaska on a nearly 4,000-mile migration to Mexico.

Exactly which route these birds take is unknown. A radio tag, powered by two tiny solar panels hardly larger than a grain of rice, will give hummingbird researchers in Alaska and the Lower 48 the opportunity to trace their path for the first time.

Eskelin spent the morning of June 24 tagging hummingbirds at the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center in Portage. Using crowdsourced data, the transmitters the hummingbirds carry are logging GPS coordinates as the birds prepare to head south.

Wildlife biologists like Eskelin hope their route is a window into why many hummingbirds aren't returning to the places they were born. Rufous hummingbird populations have declined by 60% since the 1990s, he said.

The birds, which many times are captured with their bills and foreheads caked in pollen, play a role in the essential life stage of flowering plants.

The hummingbirds stay at work during Alaska's cold, wet springs, when insects are still dormant. Their arrival aligns with the early blooming season of native blueberry and salmonberry bushes.

As the climate shifts, rufous hummingbirds push their own boundaries and may eventually move farther north to breed, said Kyle Shepard, a co-founder of the Banding Coalition of the Americas. The coalition is a partner in an international program called HumTrack studying hummingbird migration with new technology.

"I guess Alaska was the Last Frontier for a long time, and in some ways really still is," Shepard said. He trained Eskelin on how to safely attach the transmitters and assisted on the banding project this summer. "It's the same thing for the birds."

Eskelin gently turned the hummingbird over and around in his fingers as he took measurements of its beak and tail. Flipping the bird onto its belly, he attached a tiny silver band with a code to its foot that will act as its identification number.

The hope is once it's released, the hummingbird is caught again elsewhere, giving biologists another snapshot of its life, Shepard said. Through banding, hummingbird researchers can record point-to-point migration distance. Everything in between is a "big question mark," he said.

This summer, Eskelin added a step to his banding routine that may yield some new answers. Using a dab of gel super glue, he attached an ultralight radio tag to the back of the female rufous hummingbird.

Created by a company called Cellular Tracking Technologies, the $200 trackers are designed for studying some of the world's smallest migratory species, including monarch butterflies. The technology took nearly a decade to develop as East Coast scientists attempted what seemed to be an impossible task: building a transmitter light enough for a butterfly to carry.

The hummingbird project is a kind of gamble with the natural world. Because the tag is merely glued to its feathers, the hummingbird, if it so chooses, can reach back and pluck it right off, Eskelin said. The hope is some of the birds are too distracted by the daily tasks at hand — feeding, raising young and migrating — to notice.

Eskelin and Shepard are hopeful the radio tags will help them map hummingbird stopover sites. Similar to a gas station, Shepard said, birds rest and refuel in these areas during migration. It's these habitats that need to be conserved to prevent further species decline, Shepard said.

While using the technology for the first time last spring, Shepard followed a bird from Alabama north until he lost him in the wilderness near Juneau.

"Now I have to do southbound," Shepard said.

As long as there is enough light to power the solar panel, the transmitter sends out a ping every few seconds. If a device that has Bluetooth and location services turned on, like a smartphone, happens to pick up the signal, it will send a GPS data point to a hummingbird tracker database.

With a mixture of nerves and excitement, Shepard said he refreshes the portal regularly. On June 29, one of their hummingbirds pinged a boat just north of Glacier Island in Prince William Sound. Another bird flew a mountain route to Seward and then returned to the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center before they lost its signal.

"We have no idea where these birds are going to go until they get there and actually ping," he said. "I'm sitting on pins and needles, waiting."

A rare bird

Eskelin relies on muscle memory when a hummingbird is in his hands. He is quick, but methodical, and can sense when a bird begins to show signs of stress.

Eskelin "got hooked" on birds about halfway through college and started working at the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge in 2001. Over the course of his career, he estimated he's banded 30,000 songbirds. From chickadees to kinglets and warblers, he became accustomed to handling small birds.

Yet adapting his skills to the scale of a hummingbird still took practice, Eskelin said. In 2018, he became one of only three people federally permitted to band hummingbirds in the state. He described his mentor, Idaho-based master bander Fred Bassett, as someone with a stern attention to detail who used rambling stories to explain his meticulous processes.

Eskelin conducted a pilot banding session at the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center in 2020. He found the property abundant with hummingbirds since staff had put out feeders year after year. He returned for a full season in 2021.

While the public had shown limited interest in other declining species on the Kenai Peninsula, the hummingbirds had their attention. The crowds grew as Eskelin worked.

Each person found themselves drawn to hummingbirds for different reasons. One individual loved their airborne antics, he said. Another person said hummingbirds had the same personality as his father, who had died five years prior.

One day, when a hummingbird showed up, that person saw it as a sign of his father.

"Everyone has their own (reason), but it's emotional, you know?" Eskelin said.

Eskelin has banded just over 80 hummingbirds so far this season. Five of those birds had been banded in previous years and had returned to Alaska.

A partner on the research project, the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center led a private fundraising campaign that covered the cost of the 50 transmitters Eskelin and Shepard are deploying this season. According to the center's Director of Education Lily Grbavach, the organization raised nearly $12,000 from hummingbird enthusiasts around the country.

After securing the transmitter, Eskelin placed the hummingbird in his daughter Bella's outstretched palm. It sat completely still, not realizing its moment to escape had finally arrived. Bella gave her hand a slight shake, and in a blur of sound and color, it took off.

Squinting toward the sky, Bella kept an eye on the bird, pointing, until it became too far away for Todd to see. He took his glasses off, placing them on the picnic table among his instruments, and went inside to warm his hands.

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