Home : Hummingbirds : Bird Watcher's Digest: Best Hummingbird Feeders
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Home : Hummingbirds : Bird Watcher's Digest: Best Hummingbird Feeders
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Bird Watcher's Digest magazine is packed with expert content, including tips and advice from birding experts such as editor Bill Thompson, III, Kenn Kaufman, Kevin Cook, and many others! Subscribe Today >> Hummingbird Feeder Roundup
Large-capacity hummingbird feeders—those holding 16 ounces or more—aren’t for everyone. If you’re one of the many backyard bird enthusiasts who feel lucky to see a hummingbird zip through a few times each season, small-capacity hummingbird feeders should meet your needs. It’s important for the health of your hummingbirds to keep feeders scrupulously clean, and there’s no reason to let large quantities of nectar spoil if only a few hummingbirds frequent your yard. There are so many smaller-capacity feeders on the market that it probably would be impossible to test all of them fairly in a single season. Feeders with nectar capacity over 16 ounces are fewer in number, but there is still an impressive array to be found. They can be godsends for those of us who seem to spend part of each summer day washing, filling, and rehanging armloads of feeders. Imagine: a feeder that holds 96 ounces of nectar! Large feeders vary greatly in size, design, and overall attractiveness to humans and hummingbirds. Download the Comparison Chart! NOTE: If you have problems opening the file, you may not have the required reader, Adobe Acrobat Reader, to open the file. If so, you may obtain a FREE copy of the software by visiting Adobe's website. THE TESTERSBird Watcher's Digest asked manufacturers to send their large-capacity feeders to each of four field testers in different regions of the country: Julie Zickefoose in Whipple, Ohio; Miles Blumhardt in Fort Collins, Colorado; Lynn Hassler Kaufman in Tucson, Arizona; and Nancy Newfield in Metairie, Louisiana. Box after box of hummingbird feeders began to pour in to the testers’ homes around the first of July. After a week of this, the rumble of the UPS truck carried new meaning. At Julie Zickefoose’s Ohio home, each feeder was hung in the same spot—a prime location under a porch awning and in front of the kitchen sink—for a minimum of four days. Perhaps 100 visiting rubythroats formed the test panel. In Colorado, Miles Blumhardt hung feeders three at a time for four days, rotating them between three different spots in his yard. Broad-tailed hummingbirds were his main subjects. Lynn Hassler Kaufman hung each feeder out for three days, then changed its location between three different spots for another three days. Black-chinned, Anna’s, Costa’s, rufous, and broad-billed hummers frequented her Arizona feeders. Louisianan Nancy Newfield adopted a more scientific approach, hanging two feeders from a shepherd’s crook stand in the middle of a yard where no feeders had hung before. She counted feeding bouts at each feeder for one hour, then waited a half hour, moved the crook, and hung two more feeders. Rubythroats were her primary subjects. RATINGS PRIMERTesters rated each feeder on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being poor, and 5 being excellent, according to the following criteria: ease of filling, ease of use, ease of cleaning, ease of hanging, durability, stability, attractiveness to hummingbirds, and visual appeal to the tester. Testers added comments on these and other miscellaneous features and drawbacks of each feeder. The scientifically rigorous among our readers will immediately note that each tester had a different procedure, one adapted to his or her habits and daily rhythms. What results from this test, then, is subjective in nature, and shouldn’t be taken as anything more than the impressions of four veteran hummingbird hosts. As they say in automobile ads, your mileage may vary. A whole lot of data came out of the testing, and as we crunched it down, we noticed some interesting things. When all categories were weighted equally; in other words, when the numerical score for ease of hanging, for example, was given the same importance as attractiveness to hummingbirds, and the scores were simply tallied up, some odd things resulted. A feeder that got poor ratings for attractiveness to hummingbirds floated up to first place simply because it was easy to clean and hang. Clearly, we needed to crunch our results a little more. When we ranked the feeders solely on their attractiveness to hummingbirds, they stacked up quite differently. Hummingbirds don’t care whether their human servants labor with a bottle brush and cotton swabs or simply give a feeder a quick pass through the dishwater to clean it; they’re looking for a whole different set of criteria. Perch-to-port distance and feeding port design are their principal concerns. We finally decided to combine all the feeder features cited above, add those scores up, and then add in once more what we deemed its single most important feature: its attractiveness to hummingbirds. In effect, the feeder’s attractiveness to birds is given twice the importance of any other feature. THE RESULTSWhat results is a ranking, in descending order of tester and hummingbird popularity, of the 18 feeders or feeder types we received. Several manufacturers sent multiple feeders. When they differed substantially in the design and arrangement of their feeder ports, they were tested separately. Feeders that had identical feeder ports with different nectar reservoirs were treated as a single group, on the supposition that the feeder ports were the only distinguishing feature as far as hummingbirds were concerned. Three feeders tied for second place; two for ninth; hence the breaks in numerical sequence. |
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