Hummingbirds’ main foraging strategies are often presented dichotomously: territorialism (defending a small patch of flowers) or traplining (foraging over routine circuits of isolated patches). As such, traplining hummingbirds are largely considered nonterritorial. However, this dichotomy has been inconsistently defined within the behavioral literature; indeed, recent studies have challenged this binary approach entirely, and territorialism and traplining may comprise a continuum of strategies rather than mutually exclusive options. In the past, each behavior has been associated with distinct avenues of selection: trapliners maximizing foraging efficiency, and territorialists favoring speed and maneuverability for resource defense. These functions were primarily examined through wing disc loading (ratio of body weight to the circular area swept out by the wings, WDL) and predictive hovering costs, with trapliners characterized by low WDL and thus lower hovering costs. More recent studies, however, have dismantled these models when applied to hummingbird assemblages. Current technological advances have allowed for innovative, applied research on the biomechanics/energetics of hummingbird flight, such as allometric scaling relationships (e.g., wing area–flight performance) and the link between high burst lifting performance and territoriality. This work suggests there are biomechanical trade-offs to different strategies, yielding a foraging spectrum of divergent optima, towards either end of which birds have specialized. By interpreting foraging in the context of these optima, and combining these analyses with a field-validated behavioral lens, we may be able to clarify territorialism and traplining definitions, and explicitly characterize traplining behaviors of territorial individuals.