These little creatures are a delight to watch

Sure, you know that hummingbirds feed on the nectar of flowers. But did you know that they eat a lot of insects as well? Not big ones, mind you. Nothing so big as a grasshopper, but tiny ones: mosquitoes, gnats, aphids. Spiders, too. Nectar alone doesn't have all the nutrients, like protein, needed to fuel the prodigious metabolism of these tiny birds.

The hummingbird family is one of the largest in the world, with more than 300 species, and the vast majority are found in the New World tropics of South America and Central America. Several species breed in the Western United States, but only one, the ruby-throated hummingbird, in the Eastern United States.

Hummingbirds are the smallest birds in the world, and the smallest of these is the bee hummingbird. At a scant 1.6 grams, it is about the size of a large bee, thus the name. At the other end of the spectrum, the giant hummingbird of the Andes weighs 20 grams, or about as much as a house finch.

Tubular flowers an attraction

The ruby-throat is a medium-size hummer with an average weight of 3.5 grams, or about an eighth of an ounce. It visits a wide variety of native flowering plants, including trumpet-creeper, coral honeysuckle, cardinal flower, bee balm, wild bergamot, columbine, red buckeye and Catawba rhododendron. A trait that most of these plants share is tubular flowers. These flowers have a symbiotic relationship with the hummingbird: the long, slender bill of the hummingbird is adapted to reach nectar at the bottom of the tubular flower, which in turn benefits from the bird's inadvertent transfer of pollen between the plants.

Another characteristic that enables the hummingbird to extract nectar is its ability to hover in mid-air. Most flowers are too fragile to support the weight of even a small bird. The hummingbird's ability to hover for several seconds in front of the flower allows it to remain stationary without landing long enough to probe the blossom and draw out its nectar. Only a few other birds can hover, but none as well as hummers.

It is easy to enjoy hummingbirds at home. Local birding-supply stores, even hardware stores, carry a wide variety of hummingbird feeders, and many of them are inexpensive.

Artificial nectar is cheap and easy to make. Just mix 1 part sugar to 4 parts water (Example: ½ cup of sugar to 2 cups water) and boil until the sugar is thoroughly dissolved. (No food coloring or honey, please!) Sugar water can be stored in the refrigerator for up to a week, but the solution in the feeder should be changed every couple of days and the feeder washed and rinsed thoroughly.

When you first start to put up a nectar feeder, it may take a while for hummers to find your feeder and start coming to it, so you may be wasting a lot of sugar water initially. But it is very important to maintain a high level of sanitation with the feeder and the sugar water to keep from doing harm to the birds you are attracting.

If you prefer to attract hummers in a more natural way, add several of the flowering plants mentioned above to your landscape. There are several non-native plants that can be attractive additions and also appeal to hummingbirds. The butterfly bush and one or more of several varieties of salvia are among them.

The best time to put those feeders out is at the beginning of the season, just when the spring return of the birds is anticipated. That's usually early April for our part of the country. The males tend to arrive first, followed in a few days by the females.

Use of feeders tends to drop off in the middle of the nesting season, and people often wonder where the hummers went at that time. But activity picks back up in July as all the young hummingbirds leave the nest and begin foraging on their own. Then things slow again as the birds begin their southward migration in late September or early October.

To learn more about hummingbirds, visit these Web sites: www.rubythroat.org; www.hummingbirds.net and www.enature.com/birding/audio.asp.

■ Bird's-Eye View is a joint column by Ron Morris and Phil Dickinson. Today's column was written by Morris. Morris retired after 24 years as curator at the N.C. Zoo. He has studied birds around the world and is currently the vice president of the Audubon Society of Forsyth County. Dickinson is a legal writer. He has been an active birder for 15 years, and is a past president of the Audubon Society of Forsyth County and chairs the conservation committee. If you have a birding question or story idea, write to Bird's-Eye View in care of Features, Winston-Salem Journal, P.O. Box 3159, Winston-Salem, N.C. 27101-3159, or send an e-mail to birding@wsjournal.com. Please type "birds" in the subject line.