I think the hummingbirds are trying to avoid me. Just to mess with me a bit.
I put my feeder out last week. We were coming up on Mothers’ Day so it was time. Hummingbirds had been spotted in the province, so they were around. I hadn’t seen any, but I had seen reports.
I had not been told by the birds it was time to get the feeder out. That does tend to happen. There seems to be one bird in particular that hangs around my feeder that will tell me about the state of the feeder. He will come by and hover about a foot and a half in front of my face and stay there for several seconds. He does this if the feeder is not up, if it is empty, or if it should be dumped and filled with fresh food. He has appointed himself Guardian of the Hum Food around my place and he is not to be ignored.
I mean, he has a big pointy thing on the front of his face and seems like the type that would be willing to give me a firm but gentle tap in the middle of my forehead as a reminder. So I tend to listen to him.
Really, I’m not sure this is always the same bird, since it has been ongoing for a few years. There really should be a requirement for wildlife to wear name tags, just so we can tell one from another.
Anyway, late last week I dug out the feeder, gave it a good rinse (it had been washed well in the fall) and put all the pieces back together. I mixed up some food and hung out the feeder. And I watched. And watched.
It usually doesn’t take them long. They generally find the feeder pretty quick. After all, when you have just flown thousands of miles and have arrived at your destination to find limited food resources, you will take notice if there is food just hanging there. Or so I thought.
But I saw no hummingbirds. I saw no hummingbirds the following day. The next day, again, there were no hummingbirds. Strange. They don’t tend to take that long to show up. Maybe they hadn’t arrived yet.
But later that day, as I was walking around the yard, I heard a buzzing sound coming from a rhododendron that is in bloom. It was a hummingbird.
So they were back. They just had better things to eat. Why eat hamburger when the bush around the corner is serving steak?
But they’re back. And the feeder is ready when they are.
