It’s hummingbird season at my house.
The Rio Grande, a few hundred yards from my house, is a bird superhighway with seasonal flyovers of geese and sandhill cranes. Quail and roadrunners trot across my yard every day. But the hummingbirds put on the best show.
I read about hummingbirds as a child but never saw one until I came to New Mexico. They’re tiny critt
ers, about three inches long, with short, rapidly moving wings that allow them to hover and a needle-like beak that taps the nectar from flowers. They actually do hum, though it’s more of an angry, insect-like buzz generated by wings that beat about 80 times per second.
You wouldn’t think birds that feed on flowers would flock to an area that’s mostly desert, but apparently there’s enough vegetation in the Rio Grande valley for them to thrive. So if you want to see hummingbirds in Albuquerque, all you have to do is hang out a feeder with faux nectar and they will show up.
The hummingbirds arrive at my house in late April and patronize my feeders through the summer. Traffic picks up in August, perhaps because there are fewer flowers and my sugar-and-water hummingbird chow is the next best thing. Their extremely high metabolism makes them sugar junkies.
I have two feeders outside my office window. Each one holds about a quart of liquid, which lasts a week or so in the spring. Now I refill the feeders every day with a mixture of one part sugar to four parts of water, and am considering buying sugar in bulk at Costco.
The hummingbirds swoop in, hover and dip their beaks into the flower-shaped nozzles of the feeders. Sometimes they perch on the feeder but often stay airborne while feeding. Then they fly backwards a few inches, hover for a moment and go back in for seconds or thirds. When not pigging out they hang out in a nearby tree and beat an airborne path back and forth to the feeders. The cats and I enjoy watching them through the window.
Cute as they are, the hummingbirds are voracious and fierce. When I go out to change the feeders several of them whizz past my head. If the feeders are empty for a while one or two hummingbirds zoom up to the window and hover an inch or two from the glass, as if to say: “Where the hell is it?”
At this point the hummingbirds may be bulking-up for their fall migration. My flock probably will self-deport to Mexico. But they’ll be back in the spring.