Hummingbird Hawk-moth

It shares a remarkable number of features with hummingbirds, all of which evolved independently through convergent evolution because both animals make a living hovering at flowers to drink nectar. The hawk-moth hovers with an audible hum, holding its body still in the air while its wings beat too fast to see clearly, it feeds through a long extendable proboscis without landing, it darts quickly and directly between flowers, and the fanned tuft of scales at the tip of its abdomen looks strikingly like a small bird's spread tail. Combined with its habit of flying in bright daylight, these traits mean people across Europe and Asia regularly and confidently report seeing a hummingbird, even in regions where hummingbirds have never lived.

Its wings beat at roughly 70 to 80 beats per second while hovering, fast enough that they appear as a blur to the human eye and produce the distinctive humming sound that contributes to the hummingbird impression. This very high wingbeat frequency, unusual even among the fast-flying hawk-moth family, is what allows the moth to hold an almost perfectly stationary position in the air in front of a flower, making constant tiny adjustments to counter air movement, while it carefully inserts its proboscis into the flower's nectar tube and drinks.

Yes, and the hummingbird hawk-moth is a well-studied example. Controlled experiments have demonstrated that it can learn to associate particular flower colours and shapes with a nectar reward, can distinguish between rewarding and unrewarding flower types, and can remember the locations of productive flowers well enough to return to them on repeated foraging trips, a behaviour known as trap-lining. This capacity for learning and spatial memory, while far simpler than a vertebrate's, is more sophisticated than many people expect from an insect and helps the moth forage efficiently across a patchy landscape of flowers.

Yes. Its core breeding range covers southern Europe, North Africa, and much of Asia, and each year large numbers migrate northward in spring and summer. Historically these northern migrants mostly failed to survive the winter, but as average temperatures have risen, the moth has increasingly been recorded breeding further north and successfully overwintering in places such as southern Britain, where it was once only an occasional summer visitor. Sightings in northern Europe have become markedly more frequent over recent decades, and the species is often cited as a visible example of an insect expanding its range in response to a warming climate.