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...
