Hummingbird Migration

Recently we advised you to leave your hummingbird feeders out for a couple of weeks after you’ve seen the last one. We’re at that stage now but a friend and neighbor was over Saturday and reported that she had seen one that morning. So, we’ll leave them out a bit longer even though it seems that we may have seen the last of them until the Northern Hemisphere tilts back toward the sun next spring.

As we noted in that last hummingbird post, they’ve been at this migration business a lot longer than humans have been around to watch. Here is D.H. Lawrence on the subject of hummingbirds:

Primeval-dumb, far back

In that most awful stillness, that only gasped and hummed,

Humming-birds raced down the avenues.

Before anything had a soul,

While life was a heave of Matter, half inanimate,

This little bit chipped off in brilliance

And went whizzing through the slow, vast, succulent stems.

I believe there were no flowers, then,

In the world where the humming-bird flashed ahead of creation.

I believe he pierced the slow vegetable veins with his long beak.

Probably he was big

As mosses, and little lizards, they say were once big.

Probably he was a jabbing, terrifying monster.

We look at him through the wrong end of the long telescope of Time,

Luckily for us.

The Return of the Schrodt Hummingbird Feeder

We’ve waxed eloquent about Schrodt Hummingbird feeders which seemed, for a time anyway, to have gone the way of the Dodo.  We are happy to report that, for now anyway — and we’re not holding our breath — they have returned and we are selling them again.  As you can see from the photo, they are beautiful feeders and, more important, hummingbirds love them.  We carefully hoarded our last two, hanging them in locations where, if one fell, it would have a soft landing and not break.  That required us to hang them in a garden farther away from our normal hummingbird watching post on the back porch.  The first thing we noticed was that fewer hummingbirds came to the back porch.  They were all out in the garden with the Schrodts.

The hummingbirds have departed from most of the United States but they’ll be back in a few short months.  These feeders make great Christmas presents.  Buy now.  We can’t guarantee how long they will be around.