There must have been a burst of migration that afternoon last week. I took the empty feeder inside to clean and fill it, and when I came out they mobbed me as I neared the hook, darting at the red base even as I carried it upside down. There was a similar frenzy at both main feeders yesterday, all day and especially in the evening. It had been cold, overcast, and rainy all day with a little burst of hail. With the blossom schedule all screwed up from the couple of exceptional freezes in the last month, and the general upheaval of climate chaos, the ancestral nectar sources for all kinds of pollinators are out of sync with migrations. This is one of the main reasons I commit to feeding hummingbirds. I figure we owe them.
Black-chinned hummingbirds are usually the first to arrive at Mirador, and for years have consistently shown up around April 25. This year they arrived a couple of weeks early. As soon as I heard one I went inside and mixed food with one cup of boiling water and one-quarter cup of white granulated sugar. This is the best approximation we can make for them. Honey, or any other kind of sugar, is NOT HEALTHY for them. Take my word, or look it up in a reputable bird resource. These are tiny creatures with fast metabolisms who are very susceptible to pathogens. Cornell Lab of Ornithology, my go-to for all bird questions, says this about hummingbird food:
“Food coloring is unnecessary; table sugar is the best choice. Change the water before it grows cloudy or discolored and remember that during hot weather, sugar water ferments rapidly to produce toxic alcohol. During hot spells, change your hummingbird water daily or at most every two days. Your feeders will attract far more hummingbirds if you also grow appropriate flowers attractive to them.”
And this about the Black-chinneds specifically:
“The Black-chinned Hummingbird’s tongue has two grooves; nectar moves through these via capillary action, and then the bird retracts the tongue and squeezes the nectar into the mouth. It extends the tongue through the nearly closed bill at a rate of about 13–17 licks per second, and consumes an average of 0.61 milliliters (about one-fiftieth of a fluid ounce) in a single meal. In cold weather, may eat three times its body weight in nectar in one day. They can survive without nectar when insects are plentiful….. At rest, heart beats an average of 480 beats per minute. On cold nights they go into torpor, and the heart rate drops to 45–180 beats per minute. Breathing rate when resting is 245 breaths per minute at 91 degrees Fahrenheit; this rises to 420 breaths per minute when temperature drops to 55 degrees Fahrenheit. Torpid hummingbirds breathe sporadically…. A Black-chinned Hummingbird’s eggs are about the size of a coffee bean. The nest, made of plant down and spider and insect silk, expands as the babies grow.”
The next hummer to arrive is the Broad-tailed hummingbird.
“A jewel of high mountain meadows, male Broad-tailed Hummingbirds fill the summer air with loud, metallic trills as they fly. They breed at elevations up to 10,500 feet, where nighttime temperatures regularly plunge below freezing. To make it through a cold night, they slow their heart rate and drop their body temperature, entering a state of torpor. As soon as the sun comes up, displaying males show off their rose-magenta throats while performing spectacular dives. After attracting a mate, females raise the young on their own.”
You can hear the male Broad-tailed’s trill amid the buzz of all the wings, and catch a glimpse of their magenta throat feathers. This video is from that frenzied afternoon last week. For the last couple of hours before dark yesterday there were well over a dozen birds at each of the two main feeders. I’m grateful that some of them moved on with a more temperate day today.
So I checked with Dr. David Inouye about my hummer feeder protocol, and was glad to know I’m doing everything right. And maybe more meticulously than is strictly necessary, but I don’t want to take any chances. Here’s what I do:
- Keep the feeders sparkling clean! Early in the season I don’t fill them completely, so that the food doesn’t sit around and ferment or grow cloudy. I prefer clear glass feeders with reservoirs that come apart completely so that I can thoroughly clean them with hot water and various sized bottle brushes. David said if you see anything questionable, scrub with a mild bleach solution or a little detergent and rinse thoroughly, and let dry completely before refilling.
- Soap can leave a harmful film. Audubon Society recommends soaking feeders with mold or mildew in a vinegar solution. But you should never let them get that far! Even the tiniest bit of visible black on the glass or the portals signifies a potentially deadly threat.
- Boil tap water for a couple of minutes.
- While it boils, I put ¾ cup white table sugar in a quart mason jar, using a metal canning funnel. Then I fill the jar to the shoulder with boiling water (also via the metal funnel). This results in the right 1:4 sugar water ratio, roughly ¼ cup sugar for each cup of water, and fills the jar.
- I stir with a dedicated sterling silver spoon until the sugar has thoroughly dissolved. Silver is said to have antimicrobial properties. It can’t hurt. I don’t wash the spoon with soap but rinse it afterwards in very hot water, and then stand it spoon-side up in a pint mason jar where I also keep the bottle brushes, brush side up.
- Let cool completely. If I’m not going to use it the same day, I refrigerate it, but so far this season I’ve been making just enough to fill the feeders daily, a couple of them twice, so I just leave it on the counter with a lid on.
- Bring in the empty feeder, rinse all parts thoroughly with very hot tap water, and brush all parts every other day. As summer heats up I may end up brushing every day. Yes, it takes some time, but they’re worth it.
- Fill the feeder partly or completely, depending on how fast they’re drinking it, and hang it again.
- Make sure the ant traps have water in them. This time of year ants aren’t an issue, but later in the summer they’ll climb up, down, and into the feeders, sometimes even clogging the holes. It’s better for everyone if a few of them drown in water while the rest are deterred by the obstacle.
- Sit outside and enjoy!
- Repeat as necessary.
- I leave the feeders up in autumn until roughly a week goes by without seeing a hummingbird, and even then I keep an empty on hand for awhile and a cup of fresh nectar in the fridge for any stragglers. I also make sure that I have nectar flowers blooming all through the fall. One year in October there was a little tired hummingbird sitting on the stem of an Agastache sipping from a flower.
- At the end of the season, I disassemble all the feeders and soak them in a 10% bleach solution for awhile, then rinse with clean water and let them dry completely. Then I box them all up and store them for next year.
- Have I forgotten anything?
The cloudy glass at the top of this feeder is simply condensate after the hot water rinse and nectar refill that just happened. Some experts recommend letting the feeders dry completely before refilling, but honestly, even as obsessive as I am, I don’t have time for that!
No AI was used in making this post! Rebecca Solnit wrote recently, “‘The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.’ ― Hannah Arendt, and people who share AI slop are those ideal subjects. You all have the capacity to not do this. To choose to value the distinction and not to help break it down.”
Caveat: exactly when to take down feeders is an art as well as a science; some people in the far north take them down at the first hard frost, or even earlier. This may be where the Myth originates. Places with year round hummingbirds obviously don’t need to stop feeding at all. I could send you straight to 
Tending hummingbirds demands dedication. When you put out a feeder you initiate a real relationship with a particular population of little beings, the closest thing to fairies in our remaining wild world. Connie and John used to feed hundreds of hummingbirds of four species just a few miles south and a thousand feet higher than I live here. They were committed. They brewed gallons of fresh nectar a day, and their feeders never had a chance to get cloudy or moldy. The sound was amazing! They moved to Wisconsin.
You almost never see a hummingbird sitting still to feed. This little one was crashing about in the flowers all morning, clinging to stems while trying to feed, and tangling in the potted plants, most unusual behavior. Was she too young? Or too weak, or injured, or what? 
Another hummingbird kept diving at her, and I first thought it was the usual mine!mine!-aggression they all display while protecting a food source or territory. But the struggling bird didn’t seem to mind the other one, and when I followed them into the honeysuckle (with binoculars) it looked as though the strong bird was trying to feed the weak one. Were they migrating together?
Everywhere she flew this other bird followed, at times flying up underneath her as though for support or encouragement. Something was very wrong. It looked like the little slow one had a tuft of feathers sticking out where there shouldn’t be one, as though she might have an injury. It’s possible that this bird was snagged by a cat claw, or perhaps hit a window, or was in some other way compromised. 
It was one of those heart-wrenching moments when you wish there was something you could do but you know there’s not. Though she was flying badly she was still too fast for me to catch. And if I had, what then? So I left her to her fate, which I suspect was to be brought to my doorstep the next day, intact though darkly damp from cat saliva. I feel bad about that. These are the complex paradoxes that keep us dancing on our ethical toes.