The first hummingbird of the year showed up at the feeder at 6:18 in the evening on a Sunday in early May. I had put the feeder out a week earlier, on the conservative side of the arrival window, and had checked it every morning and every evening since. I was beginning to think I had missed something, or that the bird was going to be later than usual this year, when I happened to be on the porch with a book and a small motion at the corner of my eye turned out to be a male ruby-throated hummingbird hovering at the port.

He drank for about three seconds. Then he zipped sideways to the porch rail and sat there for less than a minute, looking. Then he came back and drank for another four or five seconds, and then he was gone, in the direction of the neighbor’s flowering crab apple, which has been in bloom for two weeks.

The First Visit of the Year

I checked the time on the kitchen clock. 6:18. The previous year’s first hummingbird had been on May 9, four minutes before seven in the morning. The year before that, it had been on May 6. The pattern across the years I have records for is that the first arrival is somewhere in the first half of May, and that the time of day is highly variable but the date is, within a week or so, repeatable. Ruby-throated hummingbirds winter in Central America and migrate north over the Gulf of Mexico in spring, a flight of about five hundred miles non-stop, which is a remarkable thing for a bird that weighs about as much as a nickel.

The male tonight was probably not the same male as last year. The literature on banding studies suggests that some hummingbirds do return to the same yards across years, but the proportion that do is not high, and a yard like mine is not on any obvious migration corridor that would funnel birds back to the same point. He is most likely a different bird, in for a few days to feed, before continuing north or settling locally if conditions are right.

Will He Stay or Move On

Whether he settles will depend on what the yard offers him. My feeder is one option. The crab apple, the columbine, and the early-flowering honeysuckle are all in bloom now and are providing nectar I cannot match in any feeder. By June the bee balm will be up. The cardinal flower will follow in late July. The yard has been planted, over the years, with a slow accumulation of hummingbird-friendly species, and by midsummer the food supply is good enough that I have had multiple males defending overlapping territories at the same time.

The feeder, in my experience, is more about supplementing the natural food than providing it. A yard with no flowers can support a hummingbird on feeder sugar alone, but the bird will not stay long. A yard with flowers and a feeder will hold a hummingbird through the summer. The right ratio is roughly one part sugar to four parts water, with no dye and no honey, changed every few days in warm weather to prevent fermentation. The basic recipe has not changed in fifty years and does not need to.

The Feeder Supplements the Flowers

I have started keeping a small log this year of who comes to the feeder and when. The first male tonight at 6:18. I expect a second male within the week, possibly a third by the end of May. The first female usually arrives ten days to two weeks after the first male, although there are years where this is reversed. The fluctuations in arrival dates and sex ratios at a single yard are part of what makes hummingbird watching interesting across multiple years. No two seasons are quite the same.

The visit tonight lasted only a few seconds, but the year had turned, and the year turns on visits exactly like this one.