Awesome! Do you keep your feeders up in winter? If not, you should. Any hummingbirds that show up in winter are vagrants. Allen's and rufous hummingbird are the two most common winter vagrants, although the bird must be captured and measured by a certified hummingbird bander if it's not a male to be identified to species (and we only have one certified guy in Georgia who does the rounds every year). We had a blue-throated hummingbird of all things in Georgia this year! Crazy!
No, we take them down when we haven't seen any hummers around for several weeks. We have three of them right now engaged in aerial dog fights around the feeders. I just put fresh juice in them today.
Actually not likely to just keep a feeder up, as Connie would have to maintain it the entire time just on the slim chance a hummer might show up.
We had a weird thing happen last year with the hummers. I had walked into the bedroom and saw something strange at the window. It was a hummer with his beak stuck in the window screen. I was able to push his beak back out, and he flew off, hopefully none the worse for wear. Then a day later, I happened to glance out the back door and saw yet another hummer stuck in the screen enclosing our porch. This one (or maybe the same one?) wasn't so lucky. He was already dead when I found him. Never had something liek that happen before or since. So maybe both instances were just the same bird with suicidal tendencies.
When we first had the house built, we used to have a male cardinal that would just hang on the screen windows looking inside the house. We could tell it was always the same one, because he had a distinctive notch in his tail feathers. Never had any others do that, and I guess he finally moved on to the big bird feeder in the sky as one day he just stopped showing up.
We have been having some doves lately getting into the bird feeders, and this is a new event too. We have always had them pecking around on the ground, but it wasn't until this year that they discovered the concept of bird feeders up off the ground. They seem to be more keenly aware of their surroundings than the other birds, because they understand the concept of INSIDE by seeing us through the windows. The other birds tend to ignore us when we look through the windows at them, but not so with the doves. Connie doesn't like them in the feeders, calling them "pigeons", because they are so big that they shake the feeder poles when they land and take off. That will shake the hummingbird feeders causing the fluid to slosh around.
