Best Laid Plans

The best laid plans so often lay an egg, don't they?  Several weeks ago, the hummingbirds arrived to my garden, resulting in a massive increase in the amount of time I spend staring out the window at the feeder, enjoying their grace and acrobatic flight.  My hummingbirds often seem to arrive late in the summer, coinciding with the bloom of the blue sage on the prairie and in my garden, and this year was no exception.  My only regret as I watch the hummingbirds has always been that I don't have the proper long-range camera equipment to get a decent picture.




Wait a minute!  I've got a game camera in my garden that's pretty good at candid photographs of impromptu garden visitors!  Why haven't I trained it on the hummingbird feeder?  I'll bet that I get thousands of great hummingbird pictures in just a few days!  Imagine my excitement as I set up the camera just a few feet away from the feeder below my bedroom window.  Imagine my anticipation as I witnessed (from the window) hummingbird after hummingbird visiting the feeder, right under the "nose" of the camera.

Alas and curses.  My execution of an excellent plan had a few flaws, not the least of which was that a game camera is not made for close-up photography.  I knew that the near focus was probably farther back then I wanted, but I was too lazy to search for the pamphlet to tell me the correct focal length of the lens, so I guessed.  I guessed wrong and placed the camera too close and thus got a number of semi-blurry photographs.



You also likely already have realized that the birds in these pictures are not hummingbirds. It seems that I also experienced the minor problem that hummingbirds don't seem to be either large enough or warm-bodied enough to trigger the game camera.  Despite the frequent visits of hummingbirds to my feeder that I was witnessing with my own eyes, all I captured over two weeks was these repeated visits of American Goldfinches (probably females or males in non-breeding plumage) to my feeder, visits that I never witness in person.  On the chance that this particular question keeps you up at night, you should know that I have decent evidence that the Goldfinches were not just perching on the feeder, but they were occasionally sipping the droplets of feeder juice spilled by tipping the feeder with their weight.  Who knew?

In two weeks, I collected 50 pictures of drab Goldfinches (why couldn't there been at least a few golden-yellow males in breeding plumange) and, finally, a single blurry picture of a Ruby-Throated hummingbird.   The latter was way too late and way too unimpressive for me to get excited about.  All I really gained from this experiment was a good excuse to give to Mrs. ProfessorRoush when I drop a wad of cash on a new digital camera and a big long-range lens.

As a consequence of my failures, I've moved the camera back to other parts of the garden, where it can document more exciting discoveries than the syrup-pirating drab Goldfinches.  The photograph below was taken just before I moved the camera from its original spot and it is remarkable for two reasons;  First, the presence of the coyote, captured at 9:58 a.m. in my garden.  Coyotes are supposed to be primarily nocturnal, a fact that I can confirm since they frequently awaken me by howling at night.  Second, please observe the date and the temperature printed on the photo.  Who has ever heard of Kansas being 63 degrees at 10:00 a.m. on the 8th of August?  Now there's an oddity worth documenting! 

Hummer Time

My gardening year is now complete because the hummingbirds have finally appeared at my feeder.  I don't know how it is in other parts of the Midwest, but here in Kansas, I go through a distinct pattern every year taking care of the hummers and I generally feel a little slighted by them in the late spring and summer.

I always watch a migration website carefully in the spring and put out my feeder just after they are sighted in Wichita. Then I spend the months of May, June, and July, waiting, filling the feeder, watching the ants and the wind empty the feeder (liquid doesn't stay long in a feeder that is blown horizontally by the wind), cleaning the feeder, and refilling the feeder.  It is a never ending cycle.  But for at least the last five years, I haven't seen any hummingbirds until early August.  Maybe they head for town first and around August people tire of feeding them in town so they have to look around more.  Maybe the nectar opportunities in the rest of my garden are better in May, June and July and so they don't have to resort to the artificial stuff where I'm more likely to spot them. Perhaps they visit me now because they're storing up for the fall migration and I provide them ready, rich food. Maybe they have a betting pool to see how long the stupid gardener will keep at the fruitless endeavor of filling the feeder.

Regardless, just about the time I stop paying attention to the feeder, when the hot weather breaks, I almost always suddenly spy one exploring the feeder, as I did early this week on a cool morning.  I immediately filled the empty feeder, and now, once again, I have a pair of Ruby-Throated hummers darting in every few minutes. The Ruby-Throated Hummingbird (Archilochus colubris) is the only hummer I've seen in this area and its migration route comes right through the center of Kansas. The male, pictured above where you can see a hint of his deep-red throat, actually spends most of his time sitting on top of the feeder stand, guarding the feeder and all he surveys. He is not very chivalrous, as is the nature of his species after mating, because he regularly chases the female away.  Ruby-Throated hummingbird males are not committed spouses, so after quick courtship and copulation on the ground (something they have in common with humans), the males don't stick around to provide a stable living for the family (okay, perhaps another thing in common with an increasing percentage of humans). It's the female who builds the nest and raises the young.  The female of the pair, pictured at left, scurries in and out when the male is gone and I probably should follow her to see if she has had a nest somewhere nearby.  By now, any nest should be empty, but it is possible she has been hanging around all summer spending most of her time at my honeysuckle and salvia and has raised a brood here.

I'm not current on my slang or rap music, but as opposed to "hammer time," "hummer time" sounds, and is,  quite a bit nicer (no jokes here, please).  I certainly appreciate the visits to my garden from the hummingbirds, however late they may be, for the lightness and cheerfulness of their presence.  They're about as close to being real garden fairies as I'm ever actually going to see.