Hummingbird in Santa Barbara sipping nectar from the violet flowers called Pride of Madeira.Amy Katz/ZUMA

This story was originally published by Vox.com and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Hummingbirds run on sugar.

Sweet nectar powers their tiny, furious bodies and super-fast wings, which beat as many as 80 to 90 times per second. And luckily for them, they don’t seem to get diabetes, even though they have extremely high blood glucose levels.

In the wild, hummingbirds, the smallest birds in the world, get their sugar from wildflowers, such as honeysuckle, lilies, and bee balm. But following the sweeping destruction of native prairies, forests, and wetlands over the last century, these fluttering jewels have had a more difficult time finding their glucose fix. Warming linked to climate change is also making flowers bloom earlier and changing the range of some hummingbird species, making it even harder for the birds to feed.

While humans are, of course, responsible for these impacts, some wildlife lovers are also trying to help—by........

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