The Bold and the Beautiful

Huge numbers of hummingbirds are heading south right now.

(Listen to the radio version here.)

Ruby-throated Hummingbirds are suddenly everywhere in my neck of the woods. Several are visiting my feeders, but they’re getting only a fraction of their calories there, spending most of their feeding time at nectar-producing plants. Beebalm is extremely important for them, flowering at exactly the time when hummers are starting to pack on calories for migration.

I have a small stand of beebalm in my yard, and when I pay attention, it usually takes less than a minute before a hummingbird appears. A few gardeners in my neighborhood have more beebalm than I do along with other native flowers—their yards are constantly abuzz with hummingbirds feeding and chasing one another.

Even with such an abundance of natural food, hummingbirds come to feeders a lot, so it’s our duty to keep the feeders clean and the sugar water fresh. Sugar water starts fermenting the moment we mix it. The process is slow at first, but long before the water starts clouding or we see yucky black stuff in the feeder, the sugar water may have fermented enough to cause liver damage, and the process goes much faster the warmer the temperature.

I change my sugar water every three days when the daily high temps are in the 60s or low 70s, every two days when highs are above 75º, and every day when they’re in the mid-80s or higher. During hot spells, never make the sugar water stronger than ¼ cup of sugar per cup of water, which makes the sweet fluid about the average concentration of nectar. When we start getting nights in the lower 50s and 40s, especially during rainy periods, it’s okay to make the sugar water stronger, up to about 1/3 cup of sugar per cup of water. During very hot, dry spells, using just 1/5 cup of sugar per cup of water can be a good idea, especially if it’s hard for your hummingbirds to find fresh drinking water. (It takes water to metabolize sugar.) Never EVER use food coloring, and don’t use store-bought hummingbird mixtures if they have food coloring in them—it’s not healthy for hummingbirds, and there’s evidence that it may be outright dangerous.

Change sugar water and clean the feeder often.
Make mixture between 1/5 and 1/3 cup of sugar per cup of water.
Never EVER use food coloring.

Adult male hummingbirds don’t help with nesting at all, so as soon as the females lose interest in mating, the males get ready to head out. Many of the ones that nested in my neck of the woods are gone already; most of the ones I’m seeing now arrived here from further north, and within a week or so, virtually all of them will be gone.

As adult females replenish their bodies after producing and doing all the work raising and educating their young, they move on, too.

That leaves the young birds on their own, a clever evolutionary strategy to ensure that even with more and more flowers closing up shop for the season, there will be enough food for them to build up their bodies before they migrate.

Young hummingbirds know instinctively how and where to migrate, but unlike Olympic or Grandma’s Marathon runners who must run their big race on the scheduled date, each hummingbird has the luxury of setting off exactly when its body is in ideal condition. Most of them will be gone by Labor Day, though as with many natural phenomena, climate change has affected the timing. Females can start a first nest earlier, making a second nest and, rarely, even a third nest possible within that longer breeding season. This extends the migration period for them and the males interested in mating with them along with those later-hatching chicks. There is usually still plenty of natural food for them, at least until the first killing frost, but our feeders provide a welcome caloric boost. The old myth that we must bring in our hummingbird feeders by Labor Day makes even less sense nowadays.

Intriguingly, when vagrant hummingbirds appear out of range in the Upper Midwest, it’s often during fall migration, and when we see a hummingbird up here after mid-September, there’s a pretty good chance that it could be an outlier, so we should look at it carefully and try to get photos.

Of course, as the vast majority of hummingbirds disappear, it’s easy to slack off on feeder maintenance, but it’s the height of rudeness to invite guests and then serve up a toxic dinner. Do it right or don’t do it at all.