This is one of my favorite times of year! It's the time when local Ruby-throated hummingbird juveniles are out of the nest and moving around, and northern males are migrating through, fattening up on insects as they get ready for their long migration journey across the Gulf of Mexico.
The males leave first and are usually gone from east Tennessee by the middle of September. Amazingly, that is only a couple of weeks away. They will be followed by the females who have finished nesting, and the juveniles will leave last, along with the late nesting females.
In the spring I refurbished my hummingbird garden and added more hummer-attracting plants--cardinal flowers, black and blue salvia, autumn salvia and pineapple sage. Pentas, lantana, and butterfly weed are more for butterflies, but they attract hummingbirds too. I then topped the garden off with nine hummingbird feeders.
Every time I have the opportunity and there's good light, I plant myself near the flowers and enjoy the challenge of capturing a hummingbird in flight, nectaring a flower or sometimes while they're perched on the feeder--fun, funny and beautiful!
All of this hummingbird watching stirs a deep love and enjoyment of hummingbirds and inspires art.
We have just spent a day of celebrating hummingbirds at our Wonder of Hummingbirds Festival sponsored by the Knoxville Chapter of the Tennessee Ornithological Society and Ijams Nature Center in Knoxville. Visit by
blog post on the festival and check out the T-shirts the volunteers are wearing! My
male hummingbird study, created about this time last year, became the logo art for the festival and was printed on the festival T-shirts and the banner! (above)
To visit more hummingbird art on this blog visit:
hummingbirds.
