Follow these tips to take care of the hummingbirds, then sit back and enjoy the show

Our three hummingbird species are back. The largest is the Black-Chinned, the most authoritative is the Rufous and the smallest child in the block is the Calliope. Short advice, if you can not feed during the season (April to August), just trust your plants to feed these little ones. Many of us keep our feeding troughs until the end of September to catch all the migratory owls heading south.

Let's keep our eaters clean this season, prepare our own food, and provide the plants you love. We can sit down and enjoy the show.

Hummingbird Feeding Tips:

• Clean with hot water (without soap).
• The charger must be completely disassembled and the power connections removed.
• Use a bottle brush for inverted feeders and pipe cleaners for small holes.
• Every time you fill your charger, remove it and rinse it with hot water.
• Use brushes and pipe cleaners twice a week to make sure they are clean.
• BLACK MOLD is a death sentence for hummingbirds. If there is a signal to dip your feeder for 1 hour in a mixture of 1/4 cup chlorine per 1 gallon of water. Rinse the parts several times with warm water to remove any traces of bleach.

Shuttle:

• The glass dispensers are the best. When you buy plastic, make sure it's "food grade" or "UV stabilized." This ensures that no chemicals escape from the food they eat. Cheap plastic decomposes and contaminates food.
• When using inverted feeders or rinses, make sure that the feeder can be completely disassembled for cleaning.

Eat:

• The best food for hummingbirds is made by you.
• One serving of WHITE SUGAR to FOUR parts of WATER. Boil some water in a pot and then add sugar, or you can add boiling water from a teapot to stir the sugar until it completely dissolves. Cool to room temperature before charging the charger. You can keep this for 7 days in the fridge.
• NEVER use brown sugar, honey or sugar substitutes because they contain components that can harm birds.
• DO NOT use red paint (the red in the feeder is enough to attract you). Do not add perfume
• If the food is cloudy, it is bad, clean and refill.
• Even if this does not seem to be the case, food can spoil quickly in hot climates.
• To avoid mold, change your food often, be careful.
• Temp 25 or less, change every four days, 25 to 30 alternate days, more than 30, every day.
• Just fill the charger with what is used between cleanings.

The plants:

• You may already have perennial herb hummingbirds in your garden as bee balm, bleeding hearts, columbine, foxglove, honeysuckle plant Joe Pye, and Russian Wise, just to name a few, but you can accentuate these plants with annuals in containers or hanging baskets. be sage, fuchsia, mouth of the dragon, verbena, zinnia and the old darling of the petunias.
• Keep your baskets out of the reach of predators.

For more information on hummingbirds, see rpbo.org/humingbirds.php.

Karen Siemens

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