Attracting hummingbirds

Listen to this radio story (MP3 download) or read below.

Radio interview source: Bill Thompson, bird expert, Bird Watcher's Digest

I get a kick out of hummingbirds. They buzz around our front porch and it's amazing how they hover in the air, like tiny helicopters! They beat their wings about 78 times per second and have to eat half their body weight in food every day. That's like an average kid eating 40 to 50 pounds of food per day!

Hummingbirds feed on insects, tiny spiders, and nectar. Flowers are a natural way to attract them, and many people set out feeders filled with a mixture of water and sugar, too.

Bill Thompson is an avid birder and has some friends who are hummingbird researchers. He says they came up with a way to determine how many hummers come to your feeder during the course of a day.

"They would capture hummingbirds in backyards at feeders and band them," Thompson says. "And they kept catching unbanded birds all day long. And over years of doing this, they discovered they could do this calculation: the number of hummingbirds you can see times six gives you an approximate idea of how many birds you are feeding."