stevenpiziks | Return of the Hummers

THE HUMMINGBIRDS ARE BACK!

A little context:

I've been putting out hummingbird feeders for years because I like watching hummingbirds. I've put them out at every house I've owned and always got some to show up.

Then we moved to our current house. I put out hummingbird feeders in the spring and watched hopefully. Nothing. Not a single hummingbird. The next year, I did the same thing and got the same result. And the next. I was seriously wondering what was wrong. There are plenty of trees and flowers around. We aren't close to anything that would scare hummingbirds away. I was unhappily stumped.

This year, Darwin suggested maybe the feeder was somehow the problem and getting a couple of different ones might get them to show up. We did this. One of them has a motion-activated camera on it, too.

I put them out. Nothing. This was over a month ago.

I was about to just toss the feeders and truly give up. I was reading on the back deck yesterday, though, and I heard a familiar deep buzzing sound. I glanced up. A female hummingbird was at one of the feeders. Yay!! She saw me looking at her and zipped away.

Today, I got an alert from the feeder cam. It had caught a short video of the same hummingbird. Yay!! I'm betting she has a nest in the area, too, so we'll get babies later.

Yay!!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I'm glad you got hummers.

I saw the first one a few days ago, here in central Illinois. It was poking around my irises. Fortunately I already had the barrel garden set up with hot-colored flowers, some of them trumpet-shaped.

Oh, nice! They'll love those.

I've noticed that hummingbirds like trumpet-shaped flowers well enough, but they will investigate pretty much anything. Mock orange, zinnias, tulips, whatever. So I just try to give them options.

Return of the Hummers

Yay!

Re: Yay!

Re: Yay!