Attracting Hummingbirds to Your Wildlife Garden

Jun 1, 2010Kelly McMath

The hummingbird’s size, high energy, great agility and vibrant colouring make them fascinating to watch as they dart and hover between blooming flowers in their search for nectar. Offering some good hummingbird habitat features could help attract them to your wildlife garden.

Like all birds, the keys to attracting hummingbirds are food, water and shelter.

Keeping Them Fed

Hummingbirds burn some serious calories. They beat their wings up to 80 times a second during normal flight, and their heart rate can reach up to 1,260 beats per minute. To keep their energy level up, they feed anywhere from five to eight times every hour, up to 60 seconds each time. Providing the right food sources will attract them, and keep them coming back.

Flower Nectar and Tree Sap

Flower nectar is the hummingbird’s natural energy source. Their long tongues and beaks allow them to pull nectar from bell or trumpet-shaped flowers. As they dart from plant to plant, they act as pollinators, transfering the pollen they’ve picked up to other plants and helping to ensure future growth and bloom.

Because they have no sense of smell, hummingbirds use colour to find nectar; visiting red, purple, blue and yellow flowers first. Choose a variety of plants whose bloom times overlap to ensure a continuous supply of natural nectar throughout the growing season.

Insects and Spiders

Spiders and small insects such as mosquitoes, gnats, fruit flies, and small bees provide the protein in a hummingbird’s diet. They find them when they’re pulling nectar from flowers, pick spiders from their webs, snack on insect eggs and larvae found in tree trunks, and catch adult insects in flight.

To ensure that hummingbirds have enough insects to eat and aren’t inavertently poisoned, don’t use chemical or organic pesticides in your garden.

Growing a variety of small-flowering native plants such as goldenrod, aster or pearly everlasting will attract different insects as food for hummingbirds.

Artificial Feeders

If natural food sources for hummingbirds are running low, you can supplement by adding and maintaining a feeder or two.

To make your own hummingbird syrup, mix one part white sugar to four parts water. Boil the water for one to two minutes to reduce chlorine and kill any bacteria or mold spores that may be present, then add the sugar. Once the sugar has dissolved, remove the mixture from the heat and allow it to cool thoroughly. Fill your feeder and store any excess in the fridge for up to three or four weeks.

Empty, clean and refill your feeder every couple of days to prevent the syrup from going moldy or fermenting and to encourage hummingbirds to keep coming back.

Do not use honey, artificial sweeteners or food colouring in your feeder. Honey may cause a tongue fungus, and artificial sweeteners do not provide the energy hummingbirds need. Food colouring offers no benefit to attracting or nourishing hummingbirds and only adds chemicals to their diet.

Water

As with all birds, hummingbirds need a source of fresh water. Planting native trees and shrubs with large leaves such as maples, tulip trees and basswood will give them a place to find water for bathing and drinking.

Shelter

Hummingbirds are accustomed to woodland living so include trees, shrubs, and vines as well as flowering plants in your garden. Allow space for them to hover among the blooms. Trees such as birch or maple may invite sapsuckers, whose holes are sometimes visited by hummingbirds looking for any remaining sap or insects the holes attract.

Nesting

Hummingbird nests can be difficult to spot, but with the right circumstances and right conditions, hummingbirds will nest in gardens. They look for broadleaf trees where the average temperature is less than 35 degrees Celsius, or 96 degrees Fahrenheit, and usually build out of the wind, anywhere from one to 15 metres above ground. This helps ensure that the tiny nest is well hidden, is not accidently blown away in harsh winds, and that extreme heat does not “cook” their eggs and kill the embryos.

Hummingbirds use plant down such as milkweed, thistle, cattail, willow and fireweed down, as well as animal hair, to line their nests. Spiderwebs bind the little cup-shaped nest together and to branches, and provide insulation for the very tiny babies. Lichen and bud scales from fir, pine, spruce or hemlock trees on the outside of the nest help camouflage it from predators.

The right environment will draw hummingbirds to your garden and just as they bring pleasure, so does the sight of a fluttering or resting butterfly.

Sources:

Canadian Wildlife Federation

Attracting Hummingbirds to Your Wildlife Garden