Interesting Hummer Behavior

[Jeff Nelson]

While Cathy and I don't have a martin colony (yet), we do have a lot of other varieties of birds around our house, yard, and through out our 40 acres in the woods, marsh, meadow, and blue bird trail. We feed humming birds on our back deck from eight feeders and as you can imagine have a large number of hummers visiting from sun up to sun down during the summer months. Cathy has already used over 30 lbs of sugar this summer making the nectar and fills the feeders twice a day. The hummers are very aggressive about the feeders and constantly buzzing around and landing to drink. We noticed the following very peculiar behavior the last few days.

One of our most popular humming bird feeders is a clear plastic feeder attached by suction cups to the kitchen window in front of the sink. This feeder is protected by a large overhanging roof and not only attracts constant attention by the hummers but also provides Cathy with a great view of their activities when working in the kitchen. Cathy mentioned to me several days ago that the hummers were acting peculiar and had not used the window feeder in several days. They continued to empty all of the other feeders several times a day, but the window feeder had stopped going down in nectar and no birds were seen to visit it.

At first we thought that perhaps some event at the feeder might have frightened the hummers from it. Perhaps a feral cat might have hidden on the deck and attacked them (or something similar). Whatever. We thought that they would resume using that feeder after several days and Cathy continued to empty, clean and refill it along with the others. After about five days we were becoming more and more puzzled by the behavior and we went out on the deck last night and inspected around the feeder very closely. Everything was normal except that a spider had constructed a large web between the wall of the house and our AC unit which sits on the ground directly below the feeder. There was over three feet of distance between the web and the feeder and I did not think it could be a problem when Cathy pointed it out and asked if that could possibly be scaring the hummers away.

As I thought about it more I remembered that I have rescued several humming birds from our pole barn over the years that have become entangled in spider webs. In each case I found them on the floor of the barn unable to fly and totally exhausted from trying to free themselves from the webs they were wrapped in. Clearly a spider web can be deadly to a hummer if they become entangled in one and perhaps they avoid them for that reason.

It was almost dusk last night when I grabbed a broom sitting on the deck and reached over with it to pull down the web. This morning the feeder was covered with hummers again and things are back to normal.

Jeff

[admin]

Jeff,

They eat spiders and use the web material for nest building. It must have a lot to do with the size of the spider/web where the line is crossed.

Then there is this problem:
http://www.birdwatchersdigest.com/site/ ... ummer.aspx