It's Fattening Up Time!

We had a great time at the Hummingbird Festival in Sedona, followed by the Southwest Wings Birding Festival in Sierra Vista, AZ. It's always great to see old friends and repeat customers. Plus we had some quality sight-seeing in-between shows. And lucky for us, we have a wonderful neighbor who took care of our hummers and orioles while we were away. Most of the orioles have already departed, but the hummers are fattening up for their journey south and the feeder activity is positively crazy!

Until we need to gear up for our holiday-shopping shows in Arkansas, Tennessee, and Missouri, we'll take care of personal business and enjoy our hummers until they leave. Hopefully the bander will get back while we still have a ton of hummers!!!

Hummingbird fact for today: Most ruby-throated hummingbirds winter between southern Mexico and northern Panama. Since hummingbirds lead solitary lives and neither live nor migrate in flocks, an individual bird may spend the winter anywhere in this range where the habitat is favorable, but probably returns to the same location each winter.

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.