Subject: Hummingbird feeding?
Date: May 23 17:07:48 2004
From: jvbonham at msn.com - jvbonham at msn.com


Last night we noticed the first Rufous male that we have seen for about two months here. There had been a terrible wind storm followed by a rain storm that was so bad that cars were pulling off onto the shoulder of I-5 just after we got onto it.

When we were watching for our late-feeding Rufous female hummingbird, we kept watching just to watch the on coming dusk, and were most surprised to shortly afterwards see a Rufous male. It was about 8:45pm. Granted, there aren't a lot of hummers here, but I have been watching them long enough to note what is the common feeding time for each bird at our feeders. This male really surprised us. He circled the feeder twice, trying the syrup in each of the "flowers", picked out his favorite, the first one, of course, that he had come to. He ate like he was starved to death the first time, then circled around and came back five times, making it a total of six times that he came to the feeder within ten minutes time. I counted up to 63 seconds, approximately, that he had his beak burried into the "flower" without stopping to take it out on about the third time he came by. Each time he seemed to feed very excessively. The last time he fed, it was only for about 7 seconds. (I count slower than the usual second, so it was probably longer.) He had both my husband and me amazed at how much he was eating, which is why I tried to count the seconds finally.

Does anyone know how long an average hummingbird eats at one time? We are thinking the storm blew this little guy off course, probably by quite a ways, and he seemed like he was literally starving when he found our feeders.

J.V. Bonham
Centralia, WA
jvbonham at msn.com