Taking the ‘hmmm’ out of hummingbird feeders

It’s springtime, and hummingbirds are showing off their new plumage, replete with vibrant, iridescent colors. While Anna’s hummingbirds can be found year round in the Willamette Valley, migratory Rufous hummingbirds are arriving now to spend the summer raising their young.

If you’ve heard a short chirping sound, not unlike the sound a smoke alarm makes when it needs a new battery, you may have been lucky enough to hear the courtship noises a male Anna’s hummingbird makes with its tail feathers as it rises 100 feet or more in the air and makes a 50-mile-per-hour dive downward. As it abruptly turns skyward at the end of its dive, the outer tail feathers vibrate like the reed in a clarinet, making a short but loud “chip” noise.

With a little preparation, you can attract these jewels of the bird world to your yard for photographing and viewing.

Hummingbirds readily visit flowers with throated blossoms where they sip nectar, an important source of food. They also eat small insects and sip tree sap flowing from holes drilled by woodpeckers.

Honeysuckle, red-flowering currant, nasturtiums, salvia, crocosmia, bee balm, bleeding heart, trumpet vine, penstemon, petunias, zinnias, fuchsia, red hot poker, verbena and native red columbine are all plants favored by hummers. Providing blossoms from spring to fall makes it easier for hummingbirds to get the nectar they need. It has been said that it takes 5,000 visits to a nectar-producing flower to raise one baby hummingbird.

It is easy to supplement hummingbird diets by putting up a feeder provisioned with sugar water. By following a few steps, you can be sure your feeders remain clean and do not harbor diseases that might harm the birds.

The feeder

If you are not dedicated to keeping feeders clean, it is best not to get started. Feeders that have blackened spots in the feeding ports should be discarded, as the black spots are mold build up.

Commercial feeders that open for easy cleaning are the best. Bottles with necks are hard to clean. Flat dishes with snap on-tops that come apart readily can be washed in hot soapy water or on the top rack of the dishwasher. Feeders should be washed and refilled with fresh, clean sugar water every two to three days. Mold, bacteria and dead insects will contaminate feeders quickly in warm summer weather leading to illness and possibly death of birds eating dirty sugar water.

Hummingbirds readily seek out red and pink feeders that mimic the flowers they naturally visit.

Some feeders come with built-in perches, although this is not required for the birds to successfully use a feeder.

What to feed?

To make hummingbird food, mix one part white table sugar to four parts water and let it dissolve. Boiling the sugar water will speed the dissolving process and ensure that no disease-causing organisms remain in the water. This mixture can be stored in the refrigerator in a clean glass jar for several days. Do not use food coloring in the water. Do not use brown sugar, turbinato sugar or “raw” sugar, all containing iron that will kill hummingbirds over time. Do not use honey, as it contains microorganisms that cause rapid spoilage.

While sugar water gives hummingbirds high-energy food, they get the rest of their nutrients by eating insects.

How many feeders?

Sometimes one aggressive male hummingbird will fiercely guard one feeder, running off all other birds. By staging several feeders on more than one side of the house, you can successfully attract more hummingbirds.

Having three feeders for each feeding station allows for backups: one hanging outside filled with sugar water, one in the dishwasher and one in the cupboard ready to fill in a hurry. This strategy also works for winter feeding when feeders ice up over night. You can hang a new feeder at dawn and bring the frozen one inside to thaw.

Unwanted insect visitors

Ants will eventually swarm into feeders if precautions are not taken. Many hanging feeders have a moat where the hanger attaches to the container. By filling the moat with water or cooking oil, you can prevent ants from gaining access to the syrup.

Feeders that sit directly on a firm surface can be placed in a shallow dish of water that will deter crawling insects.

Bees and wasps also will be attracted to sugar water, especially late in the year when their usual food sources are hard to find. One strategy is to place a dinner plate filled with sugar water at a distance from the hummingbird feeder. The insects will flock to this easier food source and leave the bird feeder alone.

Taking photographs

Getting hummingbird photos is not as hard as it might seem. A “photo studio” can be easily created with a feeder, a camera with manual focus and a tripod.

Set yourself up comfortably in a chair near a feeder placed in front of a pleasing background. Photographing in good light with the sun at your back makes the colors of the bird stand out. By blocking all but one feeding port, you can predict where the hummingbird will be.

With the camera on a tripod, select the manual focus option on your camera. Program the camera to take as many frames per second as the camera allows or select video. Some newer cameras with 4K video allow you to capture one or more still images from a video.

Install a fresh battery and high-capacity, class-10 memory card. The higher capacity SD card, the faster the response time of the camera and the less lag time writing the photos to the card.

Prefocus on the feeder, and take a few practice shots. I suggest a shutter speed of 1/1000 second or faster. Set an aperture with enough depth of field to capture the whole bird, such as f 7. Set the iso on automatic. Choose the white balance that matches the weather conditions (i.e. cloudy, sunny or just set on automatic). Because you are using a tripod, turn off any vibration-reduction option you might have either in the camera or the lens. Once you have the exposure correct, leave the camera on, manually focused on the feeder, and wait for the hummingbird to appear. Then snap as many photos as you can.

Instead of using a commercial feeder, try placing sugar water in a throated flower. You can attract the hummingbird to repeatedly visit a flower for a more natural-looking shot. Nasturtiums, honeysuckle and columbine work well for this. Clip a few flower stems and place them in a vase. Place the vase in front of a natural background. Add sugar water to a single flower throat, and manually prefocus your camera on this flower, leaving enough surrounding space to capture the hummingbird in the image.

When the hummingbird finds the flower, you will be all set to capture the image of a lifetime!