Humming Along

"Mel! Come look!" My husband was standing at the curtained window, waving excitedly. "They're back!" I tiptoed up behind him and peered around his arm. A flash of green and white streaked across the window and then vanished into the trees. "Did you see?" he grinned. "The hummers are back!"

A visit from one of these tiny jeweled birds is the highlight of our day. Although we love our goldfinches and cardinals (and all the other birds), there's something very compelling about these tiny aerial acrobats. Because we're on the edge of their range, we don't see them year round. It's always an event when they show up in our yard. For the first year, Bruce hopefully hung up feeders and watched for the little birds but either there wasn't enough in our neighborhood to interest them or they didn't recognize the feeders as "Humans Being Helpful" because we saw no hummers at all.

Then came fall. The bright red feeder had hung neglected throughout the spring and summer; a bright red, purposeless globe lurking like a strawberry moon over the patio. Then one day, as we were walking in with the groceries, we heard a tiny little whistling hum and a flash of green darted by. As we stood, astonished, a ruby throated hummingbird buzzed up to the feeder and investigated it. He perched long enough to eye us accusingly and stare pointedly at the empty feeder (it's amazing how a bird that's a mere three inches long can guilt-trip two full-sized adult humans). Then he darted off.

We made record time getting to the kitchen, only to discover that we couldn't find the recipe for hummingbird nectar. Was it four cups of sugar or one cup of sugar? Too much of the wrong ingredient and the hummingbird would shun our welcome.

After several false starts, we located a suitable recipe and mixed up the simple syrup. We filled the globe and waited, breathlessly. Perhaps the little bird understood all the activity, for after a quarter hour he came back to the feeder, sipped, and decided that he liked what we were offering and stayed for dinner.

There are about 350 species of hummingbirds in the Americas, including the very tiny "bee hummingbird" of Cuba which is a mere half inch long and often mistaken for a moth. Although we think of them as nectar-eaters, hummingbirds are also insectivores, with 10% or more of their diet made up of the tiniest of insects. According to some reports, the adults feed the babies exclusively on a diet of insects. The little bird is kept busy just trying to stay up with its nutritional needs. According to one report, it takes an average of 5,000 flowers to feed one hummingbird for one day.

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