Today I put up my hummingbird feeder, filled with 1:4 sugar/water solution, and was blessed to see hummers almost immediately swarming it. How can this be? I only bought the feeder at the end of the migration last year, and it has been down since the last sippage in late spring... that is so cool, that there must be a host of hummers migrating through unseen, under-appreciated, yet very present.
I just had a visitor to the hummingbird feeder I've never seen before: a medium sized bird with brown/olivish head and back, peach chest and undertail coverlets, cream belly, and 2 distinct wing bars. The eye was black. The bird was sipping from feeder, ignoring the seed/feeder 3 meters away.
The yard was filled with the usual offerings: doves (mourning, white-winged, Eurasian), blue jays, cardinals, common grackles, house sparrows.
I will check Sibley and enter below my visitor...
I'm fairly confident it was a female oriole, though none of my books had a match to the bird I saw: it was much more orange than yellow, and back was darker than what I see for most of the pics on the internet, so I chalk that up to natural variation. Now it seems I need to start sticking orange slices up in my trees, which they feed on; maybe a male will grace me with its presence, too.
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