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Hummingbirds - Bird Talk.

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Every evening this motherfucker lands on my grapes and taunts me. He tics at me like Cardinals do then swoops in grabs a grape then just to be extra shitty he lands on my trellis with a grape in his beak just to show me can.

Here he is staring me down. He knows what he is about to do and knows I can't do a damn thing about it.
cardinal.png

Just to add insult he lands on my trellis before taking flight with a fucking grape in his beak.
cardinal1.png
 
Yesterday a hummer checked me out. Flew within a foot of my face. I just stood there looking at it. It came in for another close view, the went over to one of my feeders.
 
bbhaag said:
Every evening this motherfucker lands on my grapes and taunts me. He tics at me like Cardinals do then swoops in grabs a grape then just to be extra shitty he lands on my trellis with a grape in his beak just to show me can.

Here he is staring me down. He knows what he is about to do and knows I can't do a damn thing about it.
View attachment 128066

Just to add insult he lands on my trellis before taking flight with a fucking grape in his beak.
View attachment 128067
Click to expand...
You can't stand for that. I think you need to go Carl the groundskeeper on his little ass!!
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(Actually that is one of the fucking coolest things I have seen!)
 
I was out in the yard doing some work and I spooked a hawk that had landed near the plum tree. It would not let me get close but I managed to take some crappy pics on my phone from about 70 yards. It was going after a dead rabbit.

Here it is scoping out the dead rabbit. Again sorry for the bad pic but it was just my camera on my Pixel7.
PXL_20250817_172953698.jpg

I did manage to catch one pic of it in flight carrying off the dead rabbit. Not the best pic but still pretty cool.
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We have hawks in our neighborhood. I have seen one carrying off something. I know it is the circle of life, but we have small dogs. One of them is just barely 10 pounds so when we see a hawk in the sky we keep an eye on it. We also have vultures. It is great to watch those things just glide in the air.
 
Well have been having a big problem with the feeders. The bees found them. I was wrapping them with saran wrap and that was helping, but then the bees took o1756407058573.pngver.

My wife hates bees so it has been a problem. We like to sit on our patio and with them buzzing around it is not a good thing. Finally started to get a handle on them.

Yesterday looked out and saw a really big hummingbird at the feeder.

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I'd suppose that when replacing nectar a real good wash might keep the bees from being very interested. The HBs poke their beaks through the holes. Can the bees access the nectar that way? They may have something but the HB beaks are quite long and they have long tongues that poke way out past the ends of their beaks. My window feeder would not allow bees to reach the nectar if I don't fill it to the top, but your Kingsyard feeders wouldn't allow that, the column just keeps the nectar high.

I have a big problem this year with rodents eating my Early Girl tomatoes. I think it's a rat, or maybe more than one. I caught one with a trap but the one doing damage now I haven't managed to stop. A few times a trap is sprung but no rat. It's probably ruined a couple dozen tomatoes or more.
 
I am not sure what or how the bees are getting stuff from the feeders. I know that even a little bit of stuff would be a lot to something the size of a bee.
 
No good deed goes unpunished.........

OK so feeding the hummingbirds brought bees onto our porch and sometimes into our house. Fortunately the bees seem to be hanging around the fig tree and away from our house. At least for now.

I have a bird feeder near the humming bird feeders, so cool to look out and see the birds at the feeder
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Well this hawk decided that it would be an easy breakfast and started hanging out in the tree right by the feeder. Actually I first knew about it because my wife said she saw the hawk swoop by the feeder. I saw the hawk fly along our porch and try to get breakfast. So I had to stop feeding the birds here. Also the uneaten seeds seems to have brought a critter that drives my dogs crazy at night. Including at 3:00 in the morning when they start barking. Since I stopped feeding now I see a little baby bird sitting in the feeder in the morning looking cold. Just can't win.

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Stopsignhank said:
No good deed goes unpunished.........

OK so feeding the hummingbirds brought bees onto our porch and sometimes into our house. Fortunately the bees seem to be hanging around the fig tree and away from our house. At least for now.

I have a bird feeder near the humming bird feeders, so cool to look out and see the birds at the feeder
View attachment 131675

Well this hawk decided that it would be an easy breakfast and started hanging out in the tree right by the feeder. Actually I first knew about it because my wife said she saw the hawk swoop by the feeder. I saw the hawk fly along our porch and try to get breakfast. So I had to stop feeding the birds here. Also the uneaten seeds seems to have brought a critter that drives my dogs crazy at night. Including at 3:00 in the morning when they start barking. Since I stopped feeding now I see a little baby bird sitting in the feeder in the morning looking cold. Just can't win.

View attachment 131676
Click to expand...

-Bruh the Hawk has babies to feed too. Just the circle of life.

Leave the hawk feeder up.
 
Stopsignhank said:
I hear you. In fact that is exactly what I told my wife. I don’t mind the circle of life, I just don’t want to see it on our porch.
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-One time my daughter and I were watching like some sort of small mammal, I think it was a mouse or something, scurry across our driveway when a crow comes out of nowhere, snatches it straight up like 30 feet in the air and drops it.

Mouse bits the concrete hard with a bit of a wet thud, it's spine is clearly broken and it's back legs are mangled but it's still alive.

It's dragging itself to some bushes about 5 feet away on its front paws when the crow lands a foot or two away and hops over, doing it's whole bird like quizzical head tilt thing.

Then it just starts hammering on the mouse's head with its beak like a hammer. Bam bam bam. The mouse is like convulsing and shit as it gets its brains bashed out by this crow.

The crow then picks up the still twitching and convulsing mouse body and flies off to have its meal.

This all happened in the span of about a minute and I look over and my daughter has her mouth open and I'm like oh boy that's a therapy but she looks over at me and dead pan says "That was the coolest thing ever".

Anyway dunno where I was going with that but it was in my head and had to get out.
 
It was cool.

I'm going to set 3 rat traps today and put in my garage where a big fat rat's been hanging out. I think it's the critter that has eaten easily 25% of my tomatoes this year and attacked a kabocha squash a couple days ago.

Changed my 4 feeders' nectar today. Shortly after dawn spotted a HB feeding at my window feeder then jump to the other side and feed, get frustrated, then fly under the feeder looking for another source. The feeder was super low on nectar. I have a 2nd window feeder, already clean and I prepared nectar for it & brought it outside and swapped it with the nearly empty one. 20 minutes later maybe the same bird was feeding there.
 
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Hummingbirds suddenly completely disappeared from my yard, and almost a month later are starting to return.

I had hummingbirds at my feeders all through the winter until around 3-4 weeks ago. They suddenly all disappeared. I'd cleaned and refreshed the feeders and the weather hadn't gone bad. There was no explanation. I went outside one morning and looked around my yard. There were many many birds of various kinds but no HBs. There was a woodpecker knocking on one of my plum trees. There was a pair of mourning doves that had apparently built a nest less than 2 feet away from one of my feeders. One was sitting on the nest, the other was a couple feet away sitting on a branch, just looking at me. The nest looked not even 1/2 formed. I never got a look at it. After a few days the mourning doves disappeared.

I looked up what would drive HBs away and at the top of the list was woodpecker. Around maybe 2 weeks later HBs started reappearing at my window feeder, but very few and rarely. They are picking up now, but not like they were. I don't see any woodpeckers or mourning doves.
 
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