Our birds: Anna’s Hummingbird
On the first of April we first saw this little bird at our hummingbird feeder! We couldn’t believe that one had actually come, and even less that she (the little purple patch under the chin shows it is a female – the male is much more showy!) could have any other source of food at that time with it being so cold still. That must have been pretty close to the truth, because for the first couple of weeks she visited nearly every 30 minutes during the day. As the weather got warmer, she visited less frequently – in the morning and evenings (I guess flowers were available during the daytime), and since about mid may we’ve not seen her at all any more… either the flowers are in such abundance that they don’t need supplemental food any more, or they’ve migrated farther North for breeding. In any case, I still regularly refill the feeder with fresh sugar water (3:1 or 4:1 water to sugar), and hope that she’ll come back again before she moves South in the autumn again.
The coolest thing about the humming birds is the way they fly. Not only that they can hover on the spot (humming like a big bumble bee), but when she came or left it was like a cartoon character with seeming short sightedness and a rocket in her ass: she’d zoom off, pause, rotate in the air (looking which direction to go?), then shoot off again curving around obstacles as no other bird can.
Once we were eating dinner out on the balcony, and she came just a foot or two above our heads, only noticeable by the soft buzz of her wings and the breeze.
Tags: anna's hummingbird, balcony, bird feeder, feeder, hummingbird