Turek developed an early affection for birds as a child, sparked by the chirping of the pet parrot that lived in her family’s home in the Philadelphia suburbs. But wild birds didn’t capture her attention until she was 30, after completing an anesthesiology residency and moving to Colorado. One afternoon, while Turek was eating on the patio of a restaurant, a ray of rainbow glitter caught his eye. Turek’s first hummingbird was sipping from flowers in a hanging flower basket – possibly broad-tailed, but he then lacked the expertise to identify it. She continued to watch in fascination until the bird disappeared from her sight. “I was thrilled by it,” she says.
After that initial encounter, Turek was hooked. When she moved to Los Angeles in 1987, she was delighted to see hummingbirds visiting the plants on her property and decided to hang a feeder of her own. Anna and Alan’s hummingbirds were two of the most frequent feeders, glowing in brilliant shades of green, pink and orange. As more hummers arrived, he put out more food. “I hung another feeder and that turned into four, then turned into six, until I had hummingbird feeders all over the house,” she says. “I’ll sit by the window and wait for them to come.”
When she finally moved into her own home in Studio City, things really got out of control. There, her flowers and 16 feeders overlooked Laurel Canyon from a third-floor balcony, offering an irresistible buffet to every passing person. Depending on the season, she used 50 to 90 pounds of sugar per week to keep the feeders stocked with homemade juice, serving hundreds of hungry birds daily.
Inspired by Cornell Lab of Ornithology bird cams and the social media accounts of wildlife photographers, Turek decided to share his enthusiastic guests with the world. Soon after, Hummingbird Spot was born. He launched a YouTube channel in 2016 to livestream his Studio City feeds and purchased a professional camera, despite having no formal photography background. Each day, she practiced photographing hummers on her balcony, and learned to capture candid shots despite their constant motion. “At first, I only took photos 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 you bought at 7-Eleven.”
After taking thousands of photographs of his regular visitors, Turek wanted a new challenge. The trip to Arizona added a few species to his growing portfolio, but with only 15 types of hummingbirds regularly found in the United States, he soon realized he would have to head south to Central and South America to capture the full spectrum of the family’s beauty and behavior.
A partnership takes flight
In the summer of 2018, Turek took his first international trip to Honduras, where a tour company called Peaks & Peaks advertised adventures for hummingbird photographers. On the 10-day trip, she was thrilled to encounter lots of new hummingbirds: a shimmering Honduras emerald flying through forest thickets, a dusky blue-crowned hummingbird draped in subtle iridescent hues, and a sparkling-tailed hummingbird with a bright sapphire throat, among others. But the most important introduction was to photographer William Orellana, who guided him across the country.
A conversation about the Marvelous Spatulatail, the subject of a video narrated by David Attenborough that Turek had “seen a hundred times”, changed everything. Turek wanted to see the small bird with its two especially long tail feathers ending in disc-like “rackets”, and Orellana knew of a guide in Peru who could help. But Turek, who was in her late 60s at the time, was hesitant to travel alone with people she didn’t know. She felt safe and comfortable with Orellana – so much so that she asked her to move in with her. He immediately agreed and became her regular traveling companion, and is now a Hummingbird Spot employee as well as the owner of Beaks & Peaks. “I felt like I’d been training my whole life to get that request of his,” Orellana says.
To find the Marvelous Spatuletail, Turek and Orellana traveled on foot through Peru’s Huambo Reserve, stopping in front of five nectar feeders known to attract this species. They were prepared to return the next day, and the day after that, if the bird did not show up. But it appeared after only three minutes, glowing white, green, blue and bronze. Turek says, “I could only hear David Attenborough’s voice in my head. I started crying.” “Somewhere on that trip, it clicked: This is what I want to do. I want to take pictures of them all.”
Turek, who wears wide-frame glasses and always has a charming smile, has since been documenting her adventures on the Hummingbird Spot channel and website. His photographs and videos introduce new audiences, especially those in the United States, to the diverse world of hummingbirds. So far, he has detected 276 species, including the rare and elusive hummer, which required him and Orellana to trek through remote tropical forests and climb over cloud-covered mountains.
Long roads to rare discoveries
Some of Turek’s most impressive observations come from Colombia’s Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains, where hummingbirds and other wildlife are losing their habitat to agricultural expansion, logging and mining. She and Orellana crossed the mountains in 2020 to find the rare, critically endangered blue-bearded helmetcrest, which can only be found at elevations above 10,000 feet. The team faced cold nights and difficult climbing, but Turek’s enthusiasm outweighed the exhaustion. At the summit, they were rewarded by a male helmetcrest that stood for hours – a sight witnessed today by perhaps 100 people and even fewer photographed. “Sometimes it takes a lot of work and research to find a hummingbird, but it’s very gratifying when we do,” Orellana says.
Turek returned to the mountain range in 2024 to find and film the Santa Marta sabrewing, a spiny hummingbird once feared extinct. Ahead of its rediscovery in 2022, the sabrewing was listed as one of the top 10 most wanted species by Search for Lost Birds, a collaboration of the American Bird Conservancy (ABC), re:Wild and BirdLife International, which calls on the global birding community to search for birds seen without documentation for at least a decade. With the help of ABC’s local partners, Turek captured some of the first high-quality video footage of the species and used his online platform to highlight local conservation and research efforts.
“She’s raising awareness of the fact that there are all kinds of hummingbirds out there, and a lot of them face significant challenges,” says Alice Madar, executive director of the International Hummingbird Society, on whose board of directors Turek serves. “These hummingbirds are all over America, and they need help.”
While photographing the Santa Marta Sabrewing, Turek learned of another species on the lost bird list – one awaiting rediscovery. John Mittermeier, ABC’s director of lost bird searches, and Dan Labine, ABC’s vice president of endangered species, were part of the team that joined Turek in Colombia. Upon discovering his ambitious quest to photograph every hummingbird species, they told him about the Vilcabamba Inca, a bird lost to science for nearly six decades.
Turek was up to the challenge. In August 2024, amid dense vegetation and hazy mist in the Vilcabamba Mountains of south-central Peru, she and Orellana captured the first photographs and video of the Vilcabamba Inca. Their encounter with the large, straight-billed hummingbird was fleeting – but it was enough to confirm the bird’s rediscovered status.
After retiring last December, Turek returned to her childhood home in Pennsylvania. It had to close its Studio City feeders, but Hummingbird Spot’s bird cam offering has expanded, streaming to other feeders in California, Peru and Ecuador. Turek is working hard to attract ruby-throated hummingbirds – the only American species breeding east of the Mississippi – to the suburbs, and her mission to photograph every hummingbird species has become a full-time project. Turek doesn’t have a target end date, but with plans for upcoming trips to Mexico, Panama, Costa Rica, Colombia and Peru, he hopes to reach 300 species in 2026.
“That’s what keeps me young. It keeps me alive, and it keeps me in shape,” says Turek. “I hope I’m inspiring some older people to get off the couch and chase their dreams.”
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