Hummingbird Voices

I started to realize just the other day that with the evenings getting cooler and autumn getting closer my hummingbirds may soon be leaving me. I asked my mother if she knew when they started to head for their winter homes and she thought that it was about mid September.

Hmm, that is just a few weeks away and I will be sad to see them leave.

This year I hung our humming bird feeder right off my screened in back porch behind a large Rhododendron shrub and just outside the window over my kitchen sink. Apparently it was a good choice. Not that we've had oodles of hummingbirds mind you, but the ones we have had are full of personality. The shrub has given them a place to perch between drinks and apparently, for one precocious male, it provides a look-out to keep everyone else away from his favorite feeding spot.

Though there seemed for the longest time to be just one pair of hummers frequenting our feeder I have discovered over time a smaller less prominently colored male and began to recognize the difference between two unremarkable colored females. But, at no time did any of my pretty little friends share space at the feeder. Now I've seen photos in "Birds & Blooms" magazine of feeders just loaded with thirsty hummers. But not at mine, apparently my little buddies do not like to share.

Which leads me to my original thought when I sat down to write today...hummingbird voices.


This ruby throated male, the one who watches from his perch in the Rhododendron, he taught me a wonderful lesson this summer. Hummingbirds are noisy little critters. Now up until this summer had you asked me about the noise a hummingbird makes I would have answered quickly about the beating of their tiny little wings as they buzz past your head at goodness knows how many miles per hour while your out in the garden. But, if pressed, I would not for the life of me been able to tell you if hummers talked.

Well, they do!

Maybe I am one of the last to figure this out, or maybe there are many others like me who had never had the chance to listen to them up close. One woman who stayed with us a month or so back was lucky enough to be staying in a guest room whose window is off to the right of the feeder. She was thrilled when she came out to breakfast to tell me about the gorgeous male ruby throat she had watched from her room. I had her come to the kitchen with me and told her to wait quietly for a bit and she might just hear him as well. And, just as I knew he would, he made me proud with his incessant chattering as he scared off his female companion so that he may have the feeder all to himself.

She was as wide eyed as I had been the first time I had heard him. He chatters with this little high pitched, but very audible and very recognizable, voice. And boy oh boy, when he's wound up he wants you to know!

I had hung, on the same arm as the hummingbird feeder, a feeder that holds a piece of fresh fruit. Well, my little male came buzzing round the corner of the house and right up to his favorite little branch in the Rhododendron, took one look at that other feeder and started in on a chattering tirade. It took me a few minutes to figure out what he was so upset over. But, once I did it was easy enough to move the feeder to a branch on the other side of the shrub away from his private feeding spot. That did the trick. He returned to eat just as soon as I went back into the porch.

He chitters and chatters at the female if she's there before him until she leaves. And he even yells at the chickadees and goldfinches if they get too close for his liking. To the best of my knowledge it is just the male that I have heard. I've never been able to tell if she yells back. Though I am sure that she too must have a voice my little male friend is so loud and so insistent I have never been able to hear her.

So, I will miss my hummingbirds more this year than ever before. I've grown accustomed to, even fond of, the daily chatter of my pushy little guy trying to keep his feeding station private and to watching him sit on his little branch cleaning himself and itching his head with a foot so tiny I can barely see it. I hope that next year I will have such colorfully (both literally and figuratively) and noisy little visitors.