Plant Gardens 101

Before you create a hummingbird habitat in your backyard, there are several important things you must know, and do, to attract these beautiful creatures and to protect them. The selection of a good hummingbird feeder, placement of the feeder, maintenance of the hummingbird feeder and choice of food can be critical, both to your enjoyment of the hummingbirds and to their survival. I will cover each of these points, but first, allow me to give you a little information about the hummingbirds themselves.

How many types of hummingbirds are there? There are more than 10,000 species of birds in the world. About 925 of those species have been counted in the U. S. and Canada. Of all the birds living in our part of the world, few are as interesting, as fascinating, or as beautiful as the hummingbird. There are 16 species of hummingbirds breeding regularly in the United States and another half dozen Mexican or Caribbean species that have been reported here. (more…)

Humming birds are found throughout the Americas including the Caribbean. Known for their hovering ability and unique ability to fly backwards, humming birds hover by rapidly flapping their wings at speeds up to 80 times a second. The Bee Hummingbird is the smallest bird in the world at only 2 inches long and around 1.8 grams. The Giant Hummingbird is the largest hummingbird at 24 grams and approximately 8 inches long.

They have the fastest metabolism of any birds and to sustain this they must eat their own weight and more in food daily. To do this they must visit hundreds of blooms a day to harvest the nectar. They have long bills and tongues to reach deep into flowers. They are able to slow down their metabolisms when at rest, unlike most other high metabolism animals and this extends their lifespan which has been reported to be up to 17 years. (more…)

Hummingbirds have an unusual capability to hover in one place by quickly flapping their small wings which may genuinely have made them the fairies that a lot of people saw hovering around brilliantly colored flowers.

It’s not hard to make a garden that will lure hummingbirds, but if you’d like to build a home in which they will gladly nest and live all the way through the northern summer, you want to provide them with more than a sugar water feeder and a plant or two. An active hummingbird garden doesn’t have to be huge, but it will have all of the following major ingredients to draw in and keep the little fairies.

Select plants that bear flowers many times through the spring, summer and autumn. Flowers are the major ingredient in getting hummingbirds to your garden. The small birds feed on nectar that is made by flowers, and appear particularly attracted to plants with trumpet or tubular bright red and orange flowers. Some of their particular favorites are rose of sharon bushes, rhododendrons and azaleas, so the red trumpet isn’t a hard and fast rule. For northern gardens that beckon the ruby-throated hummingbird, select from the list of plants below, be sure that you select plants that bloom at different times during the flowering season to furnish food for them during spring, summer and fall. (more…)