Copyright © 2006 LeAnn Spencer. All rights reserved.
We added a new phrase to our vocabulary this summer: “Hummingbird alert!” we’d call to each other whenever we spotted one whizzing over our deck or hovering by a feeder. As the aerial displays and the distinctive hummingbird tchip-tchip calls became more frequent, so did our own calls. As far as we could tell, two pairs of hummingbirds were vying for our airspace; we were doing everything we could to keep track of them.
It wasn’t always this way. Last year, we put out our first liquid feeder – a garish, oversized strawberry that I filled with a special concoction. Powdered nectar, it was called, and it came in a sealed packet that we ripped open and mixed like Kool-Aide. Supposedly, it was chock-ful of nutrients especially good for hummingbirds in a pinkish-red color that coincidentally coordinated with our strawberry and flavored the way they like.
They didn’t. That feeder hung there looking for all the world like the tasteless, plastic eyesore that it was. Turned out that the ruby-throated beauties frequenting our yard preferred old-fashioned sugar water. The recipe: About two or three parts water to one part sugar, stir together in a pan, boil for about a minute to make sure the sugar granules dissolve, cool and serve. The birds loved it.
The ruby-throated hummingbird is the only specimen that breeds east of the Mississippi, according to “Hummingbirds of North America,” from the Peterson Field Guides series. Archilochus colubris shouldarrive in our northern Illinois region sometime in mid-May, though we don’t seem to notice them in our yard until the end of May or early June. While for us a hummingbird sighting is cause for excitement, Peterson notes that the ruby-throated hummer is just one of 17 species known in North America, and those species account for just 5 percent of world total.
This spring we celebrated our newfound expertise in hummingbird cuisine with the purchase of a football-sized, hibiscus-shaped feeder. We hung the hot pink hibiscus in the maple tree about 10 feet from our deck. It gave us a good view of the air shows that took place typically in the long summer afternoons just before dusk. Occasionally, I broke out the binoculars in order to get a close-up view of the tiny helicopters as they flew straight at the feeder, poked their long beaks into the feeder holes and then, amazingly, flew backwards before making another run at the juice bar.
Back and forth, around and around they went, from the honeysuckle vine to the butterfly bush to the monarda to one tacky feeder or the other, stoking up fuel from our buffet of native -- and plastic -- plants. After a bit, they would soar into the big maple tree where they roosted and spied on each other – and us.
Early in the summer we annoyed them by sitting in the beat-up Adirondack chairs under “their” maple tree, and they buzzed us like tiny fighter planes. If we looked up, they shot away as if to say: “Catch me if you can!” Even when they weren’t trying to shoo us away with threatening low-altitude flights, we could still hear their mosquito-like drone up in the tree and tchip-tchip call. It drove us crazy trying to figure out what these tiny winged creatures were doing, what they were saying. On days when we didn’t hear them, we worried and wondered where they were. Had they been fatally ensnared in the prickly burdock weed in nearby fields or become the neighbor cat’s appetizer? When we did hear them, we’d smile, content that they were there.
Eventually, as their courage grew, they ignored us on their way to the feeders. I remember my first gasp of awe as one confident, buff-colored female folded her blur of wings onto her back, clutched the rung of the hibiscus feeder with tiny feet and took a long drink. Her feet serving as a sort of fulcrum, her entire body bobbed back and forth in a pumping action and vaguely reminded me of a woodpecker.
Every now and then, the peacock-hued males squared off in an aerial battle, chattering and scolding in a dispute over territory before one of them would bob and weave like a drunken sailor and zoom off into the distance. As summer wore on, they took turns sparring with sugar-loving bees and wasps for space at the feeder.
At less than 4 inches in length from beak to tail, hummingbirds are hard to spot when they are zipping through the atmosphere. One afternoon, I mistakenly took a suspended dragonfly for a hummingbird. No wonder! The birds are tiny enough to fit inside a swan-sized bird band. Another day something flew into my window; it was smaller than a regular sized bird, but was it a hummingbird or a large bee or other insect? I ran outside to check but found no carcass on the ground. Gradually, we got better at spotting and identifying the little birds, often able to catch quick glimpses of them out of the corner of an eye.
By Labor Day, I realized that the hummingbirds would soon be leaving to begin their long migration to the tropics. Reading Peterson, I learned that the males set out first, then the females, then the adolescents, and it occurred to me that I had not seen any males for the last few days. Maybe they had already gone? Had the others? Even so, I filled the feeders one more time with the special sugar brew and crossed my fingers.