After a busy week I got back to the sanctuary friday afternoon. The weather was beautiful but I was disappointed to see that most of my feeders were still rather full, after 5 nights away. However, I settled down in a sunny spot (it was chilly; has been since I got back in may!) in front of a nice patch of flowers (porterweed, cape honeysuckle, autumn sage and pineapple sage (only now coming to into bloom) and others. I needed to relax and was not really expecting to see hummers - but one came after about a half hour, and I saw him several times in the course of the afternoon, mostly viting various clumps of flower. And twice I saw a fight with a second hummer! So they are still around and I checked all the feeders (many less than I had up in the peak weeks) and cleaned and refilled some.
Then this morning, despite intermittent rain and almost steady fine drizzle, I saw one of them again, and filmed the above video. He starts by feeding on Cape Honeysuckle (orange-red flowers - technically Tecomaria capensis, a tropical from South Africa, which also attracts hummingbirds at our winter place in the Bahamas). Then he switches to pink porterweed (Stachytarpheta mutabilis), another tropical hummer magnet. At the start of the video you can see the pink flowers of rosebud sage (Salvia involucrata "Bethelli) and towards the end you can see on the left Golden Shrimp Plant (Pachystachys lutea), pineapple sage (S. elegans) and morning glory "Heavenly Blue", which is not a hummer plant.
Tomorrow the wind will be from the west, but if it should edge towards the north, I might lose my last hummers of the season.
Finally here is some video from yesterday (oct 3). Not in focus, I will upload better soon.
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