Time for Hummingbirds
A delightful spring means a return of some of our favorite visitors, the hummingbirds.
Nevermind the fact that we go through untold amounts of sugar in preparing a sugar water solution for our hummers. Nevermind the fact that walking onto the front porch during hummingbird migration season means that you could come away with a beak to the temple from the little creatures passionately darting about. We love our hummers and enjoy a large number of them visiting our feeders each year! One of our dreams is to one day see a hummingbird nest!
I set out our Folkmanis hummingbird finger puppet, and it didn’t take Doodlebug long to discover it! And then of course, we had to read one of our favorite books, Ruby Throat: The Story of a Hummingbird written and illustrated by Robert McClung.
“It was spring. The gnarled old apple tree by the pond was in full bloom. Hundreds of bees were gathering pollen and nectar from the blossoms. Their buzzing wings made a soft humming sound all around the tree.
A tiny bird was flying around the apple tree, too. He wasn’t much bigger than a bumblebee, but he flew lots faster. In the May sunshine his back sparkled green and gold. He was a ruby-throated hummingbird.”
Ohh we have the Ruby Throat book:) a beautiful book!
That does sound like a sweet book! We would love to find a nest too. My camera, o.k., I'm not fast enough to catch one of these lovely visitors in our backyard yet ; )
What a beautiful book! Our local library doesn't have it, I'll have to look for a copy online.
Have you seen any yet? We haven't, but I planted a couple of trumpet vines on my back fence this spring… hoping to attract more hummingbirds in the future!
Yep! We have seen a couple of hummingbirds at our feeder already. But our barn swallows (which we encourage because they take the insect population down so significantly) are nesting on our front porch again. We have three swallow nests so far and they're still building! Anyway, they keep sitting on the hummingbird feeder and I wonder if they're discouraging our little visitors? The hummers are QUITE bossy in the fall when they're migrating, and they'd have none of those barnswallow-sitting-on-their-feeder shenanigans then….but we don't have nearly the numbers now that we see in the fall (we could see over 20 hovering about one feeder at a time in the fall!!). Still, we do have some consistent visitors, and I think I'm thinking of moving the hummingbird feeder more into the garden and away from the porch…but we have so many birds in our garden I'm not sure that would discourage anything. 🙂
We're so excited – this weekend we saw a male and female Orchard Oriole in our little front garden pond!! What a treat!! We couldn't grab the camera in time though. 🙁
I know you guys have always tried to encourage hummingbird visitors, Angela! It seems like once we got a few visiting, more came! Here's hoping!
We love our hummingbirds too! My husband feels it is his responsibilty to keep them fed and happy. They have already emptied three feeders and are awaiting the first refill. 🙂
Hi Jen! We love hummingbirds here, but we don't see them often. We have a big shrub rose by our dining room window that they come to sometimes though.
I want to pass the “Versatile Blogger Award” on to you! The information is here at my blog –
http://www.academyofthegoodshepherd.blogspot.com/2012/05/my-first-blogger-award.html
Thanks, Jen. Always look forward to your posts!!! Lauren
Hi Jen 🙂 Reading through your post is like looking out onto my mom's front porch! She has an insane amount of hummingbirds! I'm so glad to learn of the Ruby Throat book! I just ordered it from the library! Thanks for sharing 🙂
Blessings, Lori