The photo at right is from the north side of our deck, showing the two hummingbird feeders I put up a few days ago. I found out about these a couple of years ago from my sister Holly. I bought them back then, but we didn't have a good place for them until our deck was done. Each of these feeders is 4' long, and has 44 “flowers” for the hummers to feed from. You might have noticed that there are no perches as are commonly seen on commercial hummingbird feeders. Instead, the hummers keep flying while they're feeding, and the “flowers” are at just the right angle for them to do so. This is how hummingbirds feed naturally – the usual commercial feeders require them to learn a new feeding behavior. So said the blurb about theses feeders, along with the claim that the hummers would be on the feeders quickly. They were! Less than five minutes after hanging the first feeder, we had a female checking it out and feeding from it. Now with both feeders up for the past few days, we have hummers on them all day long – as many as eight simultaneously, and the number keeps creeping up. Win!
The engineer in me can't help but notice a significant design flaw, though. The clear plastic tubing that forms most of the feeder is fairly thin-walled – and when the feeder is full, it bends in the middle. Clearly this will get worse over time, too. I'm going to purchase some sturdy metal to glue to the bottom, to solve that. If I don't, I doubt these things would last a year...
can you reattach the hang points on the tubes to about a quarter way from each end?
ReplyDeleteYou'd think that would balance it all out nicely, wouldn't you? I tried it, using duct tape to make temporary "mounts". An interesting thing happened - when the hummer juice sloshed toward the middle (just randomly, with the wind), it drooped a little in the middle and went up at the ends - and then of course MORE hummer juice sloshed to the middle. The net effect was better than having the mounts at the end, but still not all that good. In order to fill it up, I really need all those holes to be at the same level. To make that happen, I'm not seeing any substitute for rigidity. I bought some aluminum extrusions to glue on, and as soon as the feeders empty out (tomorrow, most likely), I'll be installing them...
ReplyDelete