LOTS of Hummers Here!

We were thrilled last week to have Veronica Mecko from the Missouri River Bird Observatory spend a couple of hours on our porch banding hummingbirds. She banded 7 in just a couple of hours, with the largest weighing in at 4 grams! We set one of her two mesh traps on an Ozarklake feeder and one on one of those ugly imported feeders. We're happy to report that all 7 of the birds were caught on the Ozarklake feeder!

Getting ready to head to Sedona for the Hummingbird Festival and then Southwest Wings Summer Birding Festival in Sierra Vista. So we're switching from our feeders (Ozarklake feeders) to the imported kind for the convenience of our birdsitter on a rainy day. They don't seem to be having any trouble adapting. And there's a couple more feeders on the back deck just as active as these. We're leaving 50 lbs. of sugar for and hope it is enough to last until we get home (2 weeks).

Hummingbird fact for today: The ruby-throated hummingbird has only approximately 940 feathers on its entire body.

Handfeeding Hummmingbirds

I make one style of hummingbird feeder that utilizes small nectar tubes. There's a hole in the red rubber cap and the hummer sticks in his bill to get the nectar much as he does at nectar flowers. The small tubes don't hold a lot, but that is good because hopefully it will all get consumed before the nectar starts to go bad. We keep a soup mug of extra filled tubes in the fridge and Terrie just pops in a full one as needed.

The tubes have an added bonus - after the hummers learn that the tubes contain food, they don't much care what is holding them. Pretty much on a daily basis, Terrie will go out and move the tube-feeder so that the hummers can't see it. Then she holds a filled tube in her hand near the spot where the hummers are used to feeding from the tubes. In just a few minutes, she's hand-feeding a hummer! She took this picture herself with her phone as she was feeding them today. This is really getting up close and personal with them!

Hummingbird fact for today: Sedona, AZ, will be the location of the first hummingbird festival by The Hummingbird Society. The festival is the first weekend in August. Check it out!