This morning I was standing at my kitchen window and saw a little "whoosh" go by! I wondered if it could possibly be ... and it was! It went straight to my black & blue salvia! I had finally given up and taken my feeders down since I knew I had enough flowers to keep them interested. I actually had intended to have a couple of feeders up by July 1 since this is the time they usually arrive for the summer. Sugar water is now cooling and I'll be able to put the feeders up in another hour or so. Yea! I'm so excited they're back!!

Now I've just got to go outside and fill my numerous seed feeders! They're eating me out of house and home....

Carol

Carol R
Tennessee
USDA Hardiness Zone 7
Heat Zone 7

Carol,
That is fantastic. I know you have been very patiently waiting. Hopefully Carol in Ct. will be ringing the dinner bell too very shortly.

Penny
Niagara Falls, NY
USDA zone 6a/6b
Heat zone 4
Sunset zone 39

Well I usually have hummers arriving in May, now I only have 2 females areound here, no males and wonder where they went.

I had 4 pairs till the second week of june, and then they were gone...I have flowers for them to feed on and a couple of feeders too...

I miss all the action...

Cottagelover,

A little background on the annual hummingbird cycle may help figure out what's going on.

In the spring, male Ruby-throats arrive a week or two earlier than females, in any given area, looking to set up good spots for attracting a mate. Once the females arrive, they two scope out a spot, but it's to build a nest. A female's nesting area may be considerably removed from the area where a male is hanging out attempting to attract a mate.

It's actually not correct to refer to hummingbirds in "pairs", as the males and females do not pair up, except for the (obvious) required moments for fertilization of the female's eggs. After that mission is accomplished the male generally has no further contact with the female, or his offspring, except to chase them away from a feeding territory he may have staked out. In areas where the female can carry off two nestings in the season, such as in the deep south, she may well mate with an entirely different male for the second brood. I don't know for certain, but it's possible that she may mate with more than one male per nesting, making the usual two nestmates only half-siblings.

Once the female begins incubating her eggs, her visits to a feeding area may be fewer and farther between. A male may also wander a bit, looking for more receptive females with whom to mate. So the "four of each" I assume you're referring to may actually have involved more than eight indidviduals, as the birds come and go.

Depending on what part of the country you're in, the males may already be close to finishing up their mating cycle and beginning to disperse from their mating territories. That doesn't mean you won't see more adult males - in fact, as dispersal continues and migration begins to kick off, you may have "spurts" of hummers showing up at your feeders: first adult males, then adult females and lastly, young from the year.

At this point, you're probably in the last few weeks of the nesting cycle, so your females may be sporadically gathering food for their young. Keep the feeders up, and I suspect you'll see more hummingbirds over the next month or two--perhaps considerably more, depending on your location.

Kevin Morgan
Baton Rouge, LA

thanks for all the info. I am in the Muskoka/Haliburton region of Ontario on a wonderful lake. So your info is quite correct...by mid July, the young are at the feeders and I hope the males will return then ...by the second week of September, all our hummers are gone.

Welcome to FF and the Hummingbird Forum Cottagelover! As you can see there is a lot of Hummingbird Love and knowledge on this forum, glad to see you found the answers you were looking for, thanks Kevin!

Ruth
Everett, WA
Zone 8