We’ve reached the peak point in the summer here on the Cape and Islands – peak tourists, peak traffic, peak restaurant waits. It’s that time in a tourist economy where everything just seems to be humming. But if you hear actual humming, it’s not your imagination or tinnitus, it’s probably Ruby-throated Hummingbirds, who are also at their peak abundance here in late summer.
Ruby-throated Hummingbirds are everyone’s favorite feathered backyard visitors, flashy, fast, and endlessly entertaining. They arrive back from Central American wintering grounds each May, then get right down to breeding. Males defend territories where they display endlessly to females, but are complete deadbeat dads who don’t help at all with the nest. So the female sets out to incubate the eggs and then raise those high energy, sugar-addicted kids all by herself, if you can imagine. You may see her collecting spider webs to make her thimble-sized nest or snatching gnats from the air – hummingbirds eat a lot of insects. They are one of the few birds likely to eat a lot of adult mosquitoes around yards, as well as aphids.
By now, the chicks are all fledged and out exploring their world, which is why there are so many hummingbirds in late summer. They are easier to see at feeders, and at their favorite late summer wildflowers, cardinal flower and jewelweed, both of which can be found at the edges of wetlands. While you can buy cardinal flower for your yard, jewelweed, also called touch-me-not for their spring-loaded seeds, is something you’d only have if you have wet spots in your yard. If you want to add some native hummingbird nectar plants for next year, add Wild Columbine and Coral Honeysuckle for spring into early summer, and both scarlet and regular bee balm in addition to cardinal flower.
It’s always worth scrutinizing your hummingbirds, because you never know when a vagrant of a western species will turn up – while we just have the one breeding species, there are over a dozen species out west, several of which have been recorded in Massachusetts, mostly in fall and even winter, oddly enough, typically when someone leaves their feeder up. But just this week, bird bander Sue Finnegan netted the state’s first August record of a Rufous Hummingbird at her banding station at Wing Island in Brewster.
Ruby-throated Hummingbirds are a success story - they were considered to be sparse and declining breeders in eastern Massachusetts as recently as the 90s, but have increased significantly since then – Mass Audubon’s State of the Birds report considers them to be strongly increasing, having more than doubled the number of breeding locations between the 1970’s and now. Listener Cheryl Letourneau in Middleboro may have cornered the market on Ruby-throated Hummingbirds – she recently sent us a video of at least 20 visiting her yard. The reason was not a mystery – at least 11 feeders were visible in the video. She reported up to 40 at once in other years, which would be the highest count ever for Plymouth County.
You don’t have to have as many feeders as Cheryl to enjoy hummingbirds, but you do have to act now, because hummingbirds won’t be here after summer. When we get to the point where nobody’s on the road, nobody on the beach, you feel it in the air, the summer’s out of reach. But you can see them, their green feathers shining in the sun. I think our love for them will still be strong, after the hummers of summer have gone. (With apologies to Don Henley.)
