Hummingbirds

One good way to enjoy the company of hummingbirds is planting a hummingbird garden. In addition to providing them a natural diet, a hummer garden is an excellent way to attract birds to your nearby feeder: since hummingbirds feed by sight on regularly-followed routes - called traplining - their inquisitive nature will quickly lead them to investigate any possible new source of food. A hummer garden is also a great way to capture the birds on film or video, and makes a much nicer backdrop for your photos than the typical plastic feeder. If you plan carefully and select a variety of plants that flower at successively later dates, you will be rewarded with happy hummers throughout the season.

Using pesticides around hummingbird plants is a very bad idea. Killing garden pests will also eliminate the small insects hummingbirds rely upon for protein. In addition, hummers might directly ingest pesticides sprayed onto flowers, which could sicken or kill the birds. Remember: if you wouldn't eat it yourself, don't feed it to a hummingbird! (Well, maybe not the bugs...)

Since hummers, like most birds, have virtually no sense of smell, the flowers that attract them tend to have little or no fragrance, apparently directing their resources instead toward high visibility and nectar production. Note also that cultivated hybrids often make much less nectar than wild strains. While you should visit your local nursery for suggestions specific to your climate and area, here are some of the best plants to consider if you're planning a hummingbird garden:


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Plants to Attract and Feed Hummingbirds
Trees and Shrubs
Azalea
Butterfly Bush (Buddleia)
Cape Honeysuckle
Flame Acanthus
Flowering Quince
Lantana
Manzanita
Mimosa
Red Buckeye
Tree Tobacco
Turk's Cap
Weigela

Vines
Coral Honeysuckle
Cypress Vine
Morning Glory
Scarlet Runner Bean
Trumpet Creeper


Flowers
Some may be annuals or perennials depending on climate.

Perennials
Bee Balm (Monarda)
Canna
Cardinal Flower
Columbine
Coral Bells
Four O'Clocks
Foxglove
Hosta
Hummingbird Mint (Agastache)
Little Cigar
Lupine
Penstemon
Yucca

Annuals
Beard Tongue (and other penstemons)
Firespike
Fuchsia
Impatiens
Jacobiana
Jewelweed
Petunia
Various Salvia species
Shrimp Plant
NOTE: Japanese Honeysuckle attracts hummingbirds, too, but it's an invasive and troublesome exotic species that's no longer recommended.


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In addition to food sources, convenient perching opportunities will make your yard more hospitable to hummingbirds, since they spend around 80% of their time sitting on twigs, leaf stems, clotheslines, etc., between feeding forays and sorties against trespassing rivals.

Another way to get hummingbirds' attention is to festoon (be tasteful, now!) your feeder with red or orange surveyor's tape, available in hardware stores. It is thought that hummers are sensitive to ultraviolet light, which these fluorescent tapes reflect in abundance. Regardless, if you hang a feeder, sooner or later a hummingbird will come to investigate; it has been conjectured that, in a given year, not a square meter of the U.S. or southern Canada goes unchecked by hummers in their relentless quest for food.

Hummingbirds get the energy they need to maintain their astonishing metabolism primarily from flower nectar and the sugar water they find at feeders (here's the recipe). For protein and other nutrients, they also eat soft-bodied insects and spiders; I like Bob Sargent's perspective: "Hummers need nectar to power the bug eating machine that they are." Think of them as miniature flycatchers, and sugar is just the fuel for getting their real nourishment. You might try setting out some overripe fruit--banana peels are good--to attract flies for your hummers. If you have developed a particularly entertaining method of providing bugs for their dining pleasure, I'd be more than happy to publish it here. :-) Meanwhile, let's talk about nectar feeders, some of which are reviewed on another page.

Choosing a Feeder
There are many imaginatively-styled hummingbird feeders available today, and they're sold in stores ranging from birding shops and garden centers to discount marts, as well as by mail order. Most feeders are made of plastic, glass, and/or ceramics. Since feeders are much too recent a development for hummingbirds to recognize instinctively as food sources, they must learn to use them, which they do from watching other hummers and though their own natural inquisitiveness. If your birds seem to prefer one style feeder over another, it's probably a simple matter of familiarity. If you change feeders, they may not feed immediately from the new one, but they will adapt; it may help to hang the old feeder, empty, next to the new one.

Any feeder can attract hummers, so perhaps the most important design feature to look for is ease of disassembly and cleaning. In this respect, the basin-style feeders are much, much better than the inverted-bottle types. I recommend the HummZinger and similar well-designed basin feeders for their ruggedness as well as their ease of maintenance. Hummingbirds will come to any feeder that holds fresh syrup, so you might as well buy one that's easy for you to keep up - if it's easy, you're more likely to do it faithfully, and that's important.

Should you buy a feeder with perches? Many photographers prefer not to use perches, because they can get better pictures of hovering birds. But hummers live at the edges of their energy envelopes, and perching saves a lot of calories. Consider that when hummingbirds feed from natural flowers, they spend very little time at any one blossom; on the other hand, they may drink from one feeder port until they are satiated, and hovering is considerably more tiring to them than normal flight. Give them a break, and provide a place for them to rest. After all, many hummingbirds spend around 80% of their time perching anyway, on twigs and leaf stems.


Location, Location, Location

Some people feel that a hummingbird feeder should not be placed close to a window unless there's a drawn curtain or blind behind it, to avoid injury from striking the glass. Other ways to alert birds that the window is not a clear flyway are to add cutouts of predatory birds, windsocks, or decorative flags (on the outside). I've never had a hummer strike my windows (although a few have been pushed bodily into the glass by aggressive territory defenders), and I have mini-blinds that seem to be a good deterrent even when tilted open.


Filling the Feeder
The sugar water we use to fill hummingbird feeders is only a supplement to the birds' natural diet. It's not necessary to buy a commercial "nectar" mix that includes additional vitamins, protein, or other substances, because the birds get all they need from the flower nectar and insects they consume. All they want from us is the quick energy they get from ordinary white cane sugar. It's just fuel for chasing bugs, and causes no known health problems in hummingbirds, whose metabolism is significantly different from humans'.


Please, do not put honey, Jell-O, brown sugar, fruit, or red food coloring in your feeder! Honey ferments rapidly when diluted with water and can kill hummingbirds. The effects of red dye have not been not scientifically tested, and it is not necessary to color the water to attract birds to your feeder. Further, there are unverified reports that red dye can cause tumors in hummingbirds; this may or may not be true, but why take the chance?


Here's the recipe for artificial nectar (syrup):
Use one part ordinary white cane sugar to four parts water.


It's not necessary to boil the water. The microorganisms that cause fermentation don't come from the water; they are transported to the feeder on hummingbird bills.


Store unused syrup in the refrigerator for up to two weeks.

This mixture approximates the average sucrose content (about 21%) of the flowers favored by North American hummingbirds, without being so sweet it attracts too many insects.

Any syrup solution will spoil rapidly in warm weather and especially in direct sunlight, so strict maintenance is required (see below).

Feeder Maintenance

Cleaning

Every filling, flush the feeder with hot tap water; a bottle brush can be very helpful. Do not use soap - hummers apparently don't like the taste, but bleach will remove it if you have this problem. Visually inspect the entire feeder for black mold; a bleach soak is the best way to remove mold. Discard any unconsumed sugar water - if the birds are not emptying your feeder between cleanings, just partially refill it. If the sugar solution in your feeder turns cloudy, it's spoiled and needs to be replaced When the temperature is over 80 degrees (F), clean and refill every three or four days. Over 90°F, it might spoil in two days.

At least once a month, clean the feeder thoroughly with a solution of 1/4 cup bleach to one gallon of water. Soak the feeder in this solution for one hour, then clean with a bottle brush. Rinse well with running water and refill. Any remaining traces of bleach will be neutralized by reacting with the fresh syrup, and there's no need to air dry before refilling. Bleach is both safe and very effective.


When to Take Down the Feeder
Hummingbirds will not delay migration if a feeder is present; they are driven by forces more powerful than hunger. If you live in the southeastern U.S., leaving a feeder up might attract one of the western hummers that visit the region in small numbers every winter. The Pacific coast of the U.S. (and extreme southwestern Canada) has a population of non-migratory Anna's Hummingbirds; if a feeder is maintained over the winter, hummers will visit it year-round. Some other locations near the Mexican border also have winter populations of several hummingbird species