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Hummingbird at my Feeder
allen griggs
Member Posts: 35,614 ✭✭✭✭
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We have a lot of hummingbirds around the house but I've never snapped any photos quite that good.
Hummingbirds are so much fun to watch. Amazing little creatures.
🇺🇲 "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." - Thomas Jefferson 🇺🇲
Fill it and they will come. We are filling the two bottles in front daily. Between 20 and 30 birds at times.
Today we bought our first feeder since we lived in Columbia SC in the early 1980's.
It's pretty hot here in far North Central Texas.........so we'll see.......
Through the year we go through 4 cups a day on the bay window. Now we’re going through 8 to 9 cups a day. They’re fattening up getting ready to head south. I always figured after September 20th their pretty much gone around here in western Illinois. I always hate to see them go because that means we are headed back toward the dark side of the moon again. Winter.
We have 3 feeders that I keep filling up daily. At first, there were only 4-5 birds visiting our first feeder. Now there are at least 20 fighting for a place to sip the sugar water. I'll keep them as happy as I can until they move on.
I hung the feeder up a month ago. There are only 2 birds at the feeder, and they are always fighting.
Following ya'lls advice I will make up a quart of sugar water tomorrow and dump out the old water and replenish.
ps What kind of hummingbird is this?
Where you live, ruby throated hummer. You may see black chinned in the next few years. Females are more difficult to id. The colors on both sexes are structural, not pigment, so the light needs to be hitting them at the right angle to see the colors.
You guys are lucky to have these beautiful birds flying around your houses. In central Fla. we have love bugs visit us twice a year. A menace to our windshields.😣
Nice pics, Allen. I need to clean our feeder tomorrow too.
I just watched nephew hang both feeders on my Blink cameras
Our black-chinned marvels won't allow another bird at the feeder, unless it's a mate or their own young. How they tell is beyond me. The male will perch a few yards away, and will dogfight any bird that tries to feed. Viciously.
Their season is winding down again, sadly. They always leave right about the first full moon in September, and that's two weeks from now. There'll be migrators refueling after that, but by mid-October, they'll all be gone. Some of the ones passing through will be Rufous or Broad-tailed hummies but our summer families are always black-chinned.
A little clarity,,,,,,,,
My wife planted a flower in a pot that hangs from a rod just outside of the back porch. Every time we sit down to eat we get a Hummingbird show. they have been coming ever since we moved here back in 2002. Fun to watch.
Joe
Interesting note about the birds color Dale! I recently learned about this while watching a Blue Jay up close that turned gray before my eyes when the sun suddenly disappeared behind a dark cloud.
I have seen flashes of red on this guy's throat, and then he turns a bit and the red is gone and his throat looks grey. Weird. Can't get a photo of the red.
I mixed up a batch of sugar water according to y'alls instructions. One cup of water and one cup of sugar boiled for one minute. Then added 3 more cups of water.
In these pics I was using store [Lowes] bought sugar water, it claimed to be just sugar and water with no additives and no color. $4 for a quart. Expensive!
I dumped that Lowes stuff out yesterday and refilled with the home made. The birds like the home made stuff better.
I knew they would.
The flashes of red indicate it is a male. And that effect is the structural color. It only shows when the right color of light is reflected to your eye. Change the angle and the color, which really is not there, disappears. You oughta see some of the tropical hummers!
Only get the ruby throats here, eastern nc. Although we did get what I think was a Rufus who was lost a few years ago. 0
Rufus do turn up in strange places when they migrate. Going north, they fly along the west coast and we almost never see them in NM. Coming south they range much further east, and we see them beginning in the end of July. I assume because of the location of food resources at that time of year.
Black chinned hummers have always been western birds, but in the last decade or so, they started appearing on the Gulf Coast, sometimes staying all year (we have a few hummers here who stay all year, and some people keep feeders out year 'round.) It is likely they will begin moving further north in the next several years.
We have 13 "flowers" available on three feeders, and right now there are over 25 birds trying to feed on them. The wife brought home 10 pounds of sugar this morning so we can keep up with them. Fascinating little suckers!
Do very many, or any, show up when it gets to be 113 degrees outside??🤔
Any help is appreciated.
They gotta try to make a living too. Desert floor temps can hit 140, and there are hummingbirds. Nectar becomes even more critical at those temps.
The water is as important to them as the nectar. They need lots of both when it's hot. Hummies run at warp speed - their hearts beat 2,000 times per minute. They go into a dormant state at night, or they'd starve to death by morning. When awake, they have to feed every few minutes. They get all their protein from insects, which they catch in midair.
Hummies can perch, but they cannot walk even a step. To move anywhere, they have to fly.
They are one of the most fascinating birds. Right now when changing the feeders it’s like walk through a swarm of bees, but with out getting stung. Lol
You are right about going dormant, have had the weather change for the cooler at night, and found them on the ground in the morning. I thought they had died, but when the next day got warmer they would come around.
On my buck list is to find a nest and watch them hatch and learn to fly.
@allen griggs : what did you use to get those pictures? I've been trying for days to get a picture of our humming birds by using my phone and all I have are pictures of the flowers to show for it.
🇺🇲 "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." - Thomas Jefferson 🇺🇲
I read 2,000 beats per minute somewhere, but I'll defer to any real ornithologist's statement.
As to photos, it is best to use a real camera. Shutter speed at its highest, open aperture, manual focus, and set for rapid fire.
How did you take a picture of your camera with out using the camera???lol
That's easy. You focus on the table, set the selftimer, snap the shutter, and then set the camera down. 🙄
You can set that Nikon on "electric motor drive" and it shoots five pics per second.
I sit out there on my porch for an hour or so, reading my book The Guns of August. I got the camera all focused, set at 200 mm, which is 4X. I have the camera in my lap. I have done this five times in the past 2 weeks, total of 6 hours or so, I have taken over 80 pics and these are the 2 best. Very hard to get a good pic of these little birds.
I have the shutter speed at 1/500.
For a long time, I tried to get good shots of them, also. Camera on tripod, pre-focused, shutter at 1/1000, etc...only to have the birds shy away from the feeder as long as I was there. Got a few as they came in and hovered a bit before scramming, but the time involved was more than the reward of only half-good photos. Soon gave up.
I cheated and took the picture from inside the house looking out.
Rocky, you will have much better results when in manual mode, if the ISO was increased significantly which demands a faster shutter speed, the aperture stopped down (a higher number) which greatly increases your DOF (1/3 in front and 2/3 in the rear rule). And focus on the perch portion of the feeder, the DOF will take care of being in focus.
Thinking outside the box, you could invent a vehicle run by a thousand hummingbirds and only have to keep your tank full of sugar water.
Giving those "Greenies" some more fodder to throw our way! 😲
The box I was thinking out of was once full of animal crackers! 😁
Yeah....I don't have one of those. 😞
Nice gear!
🇺🇲 "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." - Thomas Jefferson 🇺🇲
Great pic waltermoe.
I don't blame you for giving up Rocky. I took 80 pics in 6 hours, in half of them there is no bird! Some pics just a tailfeather.
They are elusive and mysterious animals.
Y'all are saying they perch on a branch for the night and go into some kind of hibernation. I never heard of such a thing among birds.
Yes, they do. Have to or they'd be dead in the morning. It's called torpor. It's not a true hibernation, just an almost complete slowdown of their metabolism.
That's why it is almost criminal when people take down their feeders this time of year to "force" the birds to migrate. What they are doing is taking away their critical fuel supply. It's like somebody emptying your car's gas tank before you evacuate from a fire or hurricane.
Much of photograhy is about the editing. Even with the ever handy phone I keep about one out of five or 6 shots. Easy edit with digital.
These birds are about to leave my feeder, to fly to Mexico and Central America. The shortest route is to fly over the Gulf of Mexico. About 800 miles of open water.
Do the little mites fly over the Gulf, or do they fly the much longer land route?
They fly over the Gulf, non-stop. But if they have headwinds, many of them die. There was a big Texas storm this Spring that may have killed millions of Gulf-crossing birds of all kinds.
I have two birds left, both females. They're black-chinned hummies and I just saw both of them at my back yard feeder - and naturally, they fought. Males left with the full moon on Labor Day. I've seen a migrator or two who obviously did not know the neighborhood because they acted like my feeders were new-found treats.
BTW, it is once again time to remind people to leave their feeders up. Taking them down to "force them to leave" just makes it more likely that they won't survive the trip. Let them fill their tanks.