Photo Courtesy of Jean Potter Although hummingbirds migrate back to the region in the spring, their hosts will need to provide a welcoming environment to keep these tiny birds buzzing around the yard all summer.
Now that the hummingbirds have returned to the region, it’s important to know how to attract them and meet their needs. Like most living creatures, hummingbirds require three crucial things — shelter, water and food. A yard with evergreen trees or a thick hedge can provide perfect nighttime roosts for a hummingbird. Other types of trees and shrubs also offer potential nesting locations for female hummingbirds.
Hummingbirds, like all birds, need water. Hummingbirds can get a lot of their water in their diet, but they still need water for bathing. Birds bathe to keep their feathers in good condition. For hummingbirds, which are wizard aerialists among birds, it is even more crucial that their feathers are in good shape. A fountain, trickling waterfall or even a well-timed lawn sprinkler are almost magnetic in their attraction for hummingbirds, which are usually too small to bathe in a regular bird bath.
Keeping visiting ruby-throated hummingbirds can be as simple as planting an abundance of the flowers they love, but offering multiple sugar water feeders also helps. Keep the sugar water mix at a four parts water to one part sugar ratio. Don’t offer honey in your feeders. When mixed with water, it can spoil and spread fungal diseases. There’s also no need to use a solution with any sort of red dye. Studies have indicated that such dyes could have adverse effects on hummer health. Remember that hummingbirds don’t subsist on sugar water alone. They also eat numerous tiny insects and spiders to obtain the protein they need for their dietary needs, so don’t use insecticides near feeders or flowers that hummers are likely to visit.
Photo by Bryan Stevens By now, female Ruby-throated Hummingbirds are getting ready to build nests and raise young.
Follow these basic instructions and the hummingbirds will reward you with hours of enchanting entertainment this summer.
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I received even more notifications on the return of these tiny winged gems. Here are a few other shared observations:
» Harold Randolph spotted his first hummingbird in 2016 on Monday, April 11, near Marion, North Carolina, at Lake James. He sent me an email to report the happy fact.
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» Philip Laws in Unicoi County reported on Facebook that he saw his first spring hummingbird on April 11.
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» Betty Poole asked her daughter to email me to report that she saw her first hummingbird of spring on Wednesday, April 13.
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» Steve Meigs, who lives at an elevation of 2,800 feet in Limestone Cove’s Foxhound Hills community near Unicoi, reported that his first hummingbird arrived April 14 at 11:30 a.m. “That’s a few days earlier than the last few years,” he noted on his Facebook comment.
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» John and Patsy Brenner welcomed back their first hummingbird on Monday, April 18. “I believe it was the ruby-throated, but all I really saw was the flash of green,” John wrote in an email. The Brenners live in Meade Meadows in Abingdon, Virginia. “We are on the seventh fairway of the golf course just across from the Creeper Trail,” he wrote. “We are new subdivision so around the houses there are only small trees. I have nesting bluebirds and tree swallows in a free-standing bird house.”
He also reported other daily sightings, including brown-headed cowbirds, doves, finches, cardinals, red-winged blackbirds, sparrows, robins, starlings and downy woodpeckers.
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» Judy Brown, who lives in Damascus, Virginia, notified me that she saw her first hummingbird of the season on Monday, April 18.
Photo by Bryan Stevens Flowers and sugar water feeders are just two ways to attract hummingbirds to your yard.
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» Mary Beierle of the Stoney Creek community in Elizabethton, Tennessee, welcomed her first spring hummingbird at 6:13 p.m. on Monday, April 18.
“I am so happy!” Mary wrote in an email. “They are very late this year compared to other recent years. This morning there were two hummers and I’m pretty sure they are a male and a female. I have a friend in Jonesborough, Tennessee, who
had his first hummingbird the day before, around 9 in the morning.”
Mary was thrilled by their return. “Spring is finally officially here, in my opinion,” she noted.
» Eddie and Delores Phipps of Bluff City, Tennessee, shared that their first sighting also took place on Monday, April 18. They had been out of town for the weekend, so they speculated that the hummingbirds might have showed up a day or two earlier.
Constance Tate’s first sighting of a spring hummingbird involved not one, but two, birds. “There were two of them at the feeder at 3 p.m. on April 19,” she wrote in an email. Constance lives in Bristol, Tennessee, near Steele Creek.
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» Emory & Henry professor Steven Hopp sent me an email about his first hummer sighting on April 20. “I saw my first hummingbird this morning, when it went directly to the empty hummingbird feeder from last year,” he wrote. “I suppose that tells me she was a returning bird.”
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» Helen Whited informed me that hummers arrived at her home in Richlands, Virginia, on Tuesday, April 19.
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» Phyllis Moore of Bristol, Virginia, notified me by Facebook that she saw her first hummingbird of spring around 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, April 20.
“My first hummingbird just buzzed past my window where I hang my feeder,” reported Patricia Werth in an email. “I guess I better get busy.” Patricia’s sighting occurred at 6:05 p.m. on Wednesday, April 20.
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» Nancy Vernon of Bristol was very excited when she spotted two hummingbirds at her feeder today at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, April 20, in Bristol. “They are very small,” she said, adding that the sighing involved a male and female pair.
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» Thia Montgomery, who lives in Blountville, Tennessee, reported that her first hummingbird arrived at about 2 p.m. on April 20. “I have three large terra-cotta pots with flowers, and each has a small shepherd’s hook sunk into it with a hummingbird feeder hung on each hook,” she wrote. “As I was watering the flowers in the pots, the hummingbird buzzed me, so I left off watering so he could have a drink.”
The insistent hummingbird — a male —was the first she had seen this year, although she has had her feeders out since the last week of March.
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» Cecilia Murrell of Abingdon,Virginia, has four feeders available for the hummingbirds, but the first one to show up on Thursday, April 21, fed at the nearly empty feeder. “Maybe he has visited me before,” she wrote in an email.
Photo by Donna Rea This was the first hummingbird to visit the Rea residence in 2016.
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» Donna Rea shared on Facebook that hummingbirds had returned to her home in the Rock Creek community of Erwin.
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» James Noel Smith reported on Facebook on April 26 that hummingbirds are back at his home in Unicoi.
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