I’m being boycotted by a tiny animal that weighs less than a marshmallow.
All of “my” hummingbirds that have graced my backyard feeders for the past three years are noticeably absent this year. Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t that I’m not offering the same amenities that were there before. In fact, there’s more now! I added a sixth feeder, craft services now has fruit flies and sheep wool for nest-building. I mean, my deck is decked out. So WTF?
I have theories. Four of them, actually. Some more realistic than others, but a bruised ego can tend to exaggerate reality.
First theory is that I was late and I missed them. In March I always start lurking the Hummingbird Migration Map to see where there have been sightings. As they creep north and closer to me, I bring my feeders out of storage, make sure they’re clean, and map out which feeder to put where on my deck and patio. I agonize over it and start scheduling days to put out the feeders way too early. Well, “too early” according to my husband.
He thinks I’m ridiculous how I stress about their arrival and swears that I’m planning too early. He’s been right though in that I want to put feeders out at the end of March, but he tells me to wait until mid-April. This year we had the same conversation and I DID wait until mid-April even though the Migration Map showed sightings in areas two states north of me! I put my feeders out well after there was a sighting in the town next to ours. And I think I missed them.
Hummingbirds will usually return to where they were born and I’m fairly certain that my resident birds had become parents at least twice in the previous years given the sudden increase in numbers halfway through the season. So even if some of the parents don’t make it back, I should still have the offspring, right? My worry is that they DID come back to my yard, saw there were no feeders, and moved on.
Second theory is the disruption of the routine. As I said, I increased the amount of feeders by one. But not only that, I completely changed the arrangement of the feeders. Given that they can return to the place they were born, they could certainly remember the location of their favorite feeder, right? And if they came back to see that it wasn’t where they remembered it to be, they gave up and went somewhere else. Silly, but a possibility.
Third theory is stage fright. As I just mentioned, I moved the locations of the feeders, but also their proximity to each other. Previously, each feeder was about 3 feet away from another feeder. This year, I grouped them all together with each feeder being less than 3 feet from each other. Some within 15″ of another feeder.
I did this with the intention of setting up a livestreaming camera to have a constant hummingbird cam on this site and YouTube. I wanted most of the feeders in the frame, and still have the focus close enough to actually SEE each bird, and not just a blur of activity. I never got the camera set up (yet!) due to technical logistics, so I know that it wasn’t literal stage fright.
Maybe they heard about the Avian Flu making a reappearance and thought it would be unsafe to visit feeders so close to each other. But in my defense, the second an infected bird drinks from a feeder, any subsequent bird that drinks from the feeder will likely acquire the flu (don’t worry, I’m getting to the “in my defense” part!).
However, I had read in multiple sources that hummingbirds don’t like to associate closely with other birds, specifically birds of other species. So their elitism seems to have helped them prevent succumbing to the Avian Flu. (Even though it wasn’t initially on my list and it’s not high on the probability scale, we can consider this a tentative theory #3.5 as to why I don’t have birds this season.)
The fourth theory is one I don’t like to think about. These birds migrate thousands of miles each year. Depending on their starting location, it can take two weeks for them to get back down to Mexico or even South Americal! If they cross the Gulf of Mexico, they’d have to fly for at least 18 hours straight to get to dry land.
Besides exhaustion, there’s the horrible possibility of becoming a snack for any of the creatures they encounter on this trip. I don’t like to think about it, but even my back yard is a haven for many birds of prey, vultures, foxes, and roaming house cats. And that’s less than an acre of space! Consider the miles and miles of that sort of thing that they have to navigate every autumn just to get back down to Mexico. And then do it all over again in the spring to come back up!
So while I DO see birds this season, they’re not “my” birds and there are only two, maybe three, individuals that I see on a “regular” basis. I’m used to looking out my window and if I can’t see a bird at one feed, I know that there’s likely one or two a another feeder that’s not within my line of sight. This year, I’m lucky if I catch more than one sighting per day!
I will say that lately I HAVE been seeing birds a little more frequently, and I can say with a little more certainty that there are more than two individuals. So perhaps someone was lucky enough to lay eggs and raise them to fledging and that “extra bird” I’m seeing is one of the offspring that decided to stick around.
Because I am still refilling the feeders. There aren’t as many of them now. I only have three feeders out mostly because if only two or three birds are visiting them on the rare occasion, they won’t need as many feeders and not as much syrup per feeder. This makes easier for me to keep them clean and filled. Sugar ain’t cheap nowadays and my time is also a precious commodity.
No promises, but I am considering at least attempting to get the livestream up in a week. Just to finalize the process so that I won’t be struggling with it as much next year. Because I KNOW I’ll have birds next year. I’m calling it now!!!!