Sticky Situations Keep These Birds Humming
When I go to visit my father in Palm Desert, I always come away with a slight twitch. I develop it while basking in the sun on his garden patio.
For a while, I thought it had something to do with the villainously cheap wine he serves (you can hear it knocking in the bottle), but I finally realized it was the pack of crazed, dive-bombing hummingbirds that hang out in his back yard.
They actually don’t aim for people; they generally miss you neatly on the way to the huge clumps of nectar-filled flowers my dad insists on cultivating. Still, if you’re used to birds that spend their days gliding lazily and going chirp, it’s hard not to duck when out of nowhere comes a zip! whirrrrrr . . . . And then, before you truly realize what just happened, comes another zip! and the little speed freak has gone ballistic into the neighbor’s honeysuckle.
You get over it, I’m told. Indeed, once you decide that the birds are not out to drill you like a pudgy supersonic cocktail toothpick, they cease to be a threat and become scenery. And are thus an asset to the garden.
They are actually even better than that. Like bees, they act as agents of garden pollination, albeit unwitting ones. While they’re sucking nectar out of blooms, they’re smudging their faces with pollen from the flower, which, considering their appetite, they spread around like crazy. If you think you’re a chow hound, consider these hummingbird fun facts:
* The hummingbird has the highest metabolism of any warm-blooded animal, with the possible exception of the shrew.
* To maintain that metabolism (a hummingbird heart beats like a drum roll, at about 1,260 beats per minute), they need to feed every 10 minutes or so during the day. This means they will visit hundreds of flowers during daylight hours.
* Eventually, they poop out. They have the ability, once they finish stuffing themselves, to slow their bodily functions and go into a kind of trance or torpor. They do this at night. During this time, their heart slows to around 50 beats per minute. They can appear dead, but they’re actually just thinking about their next few hundred meals.
Which, if you want them to hang around your garden, it is up to you to provide. Sure, you can plant an acre of ornamental cactus, and a couple of hummingbirds may drop by, but they’ll only do it to twitter a few hummingbird expletives at you and show you their colorful backsides, never to return. If you want hummingbirds, you have to plant sticky stuff.
A fine source for plant ideas and a short course in how hummingbirds operate is “How to Attract Hummingbirds and Butterflies,” published by Ortho Books. It will tell you, among many other things, what sorts of flowers are ideal for the little creatures.
Among them: impatiens, trumpet creeper, cardinal flower, orange honeysuckle, ocotillo, red buckeye, beebalm, California fuchsia, gilia, columbine, scarlet larkspur, bouvardia, paintbrush, red-flowering currant, begonia, canna, eucalyptus, bottlebrushes, powder-puffs, silk-oaks and hibiscus.
Most of these and many others (the book provides a complete list of so-called “hummingbird plants”) have a common denominator: they’re red, a color highly attractive to hummingbirds. Blue or violet flowers tend to attract bees and other nectar feeders, and are thus useful in keeping them away from the plants hummingbirds prefer.
The ideal hummingbird flower is tubular, rich in nectar, lacking in fragrance and structurally designed to be accessible to hummingbirds but inaccessible to other nectar feeders. When you see a hummingbird poking its bill into a red, bell-shaped bloom, it’s a good bet that it’s happy and getting enough to eat (at least for a minute or two, until it gets hungry again).
There are a few rules about planting a hummingbird garden, but the main one seems to be this: don’t crowd the birds. While highly mobile, hummingbirds need room to maneuver into position and perform spectacular little aerial mating displays (my dad’s garden likely is the local lover’s lane). Therefore, don’t cluster the plants too closely. Also, if you want to be the perfect host, plant a few trees for shade and nesting sites.
Finally, if you’re completely wild about the little hummers, set up a feeder. This will attract even more birds than the flowers themselves, since flowers produce only so much nectar. As long as there are tiny insects as well as nectar or sugar water for the birds to feed on, they’ll remain.
And, according to the book, if you continue to provide food and shelter for them, hummingbirds will return year after year to your yard, and some may even recognize you as their personal benefactor and follow you around the yard in search of, yes, more food.
This would only make my dad happy. He has lots of gooey red plants. He also has a hummingbird feeder. He has obligingly hung it from one of the patio eaves, directly above the chair he usually motions me into when I arrive for a visit.
The feeder is painted a bright red, and it works beautifully: It still makes me twitch.
