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I love hummingbirds. I’m used to putting out a feeder and filling it a few times during the spring and summer. I’m used to seeing one or two hummingbirds. Spotting a hummingbird at the feeder is a happy surprise, not something you see all the time or even every day. After moving in here, we started putting up feeders, our expectations not taking into account that we had built a house halfway up a hill in the middle of a forest.
Apparently, forests are filled with birds. Hunh.
After I posted a photo of my porch, someone emailed me about red dye being bad for hummingbirds. I researched a bit and discovered conflicting reports as to whether red dye is or isn’t bad for hummingbirds, but what is known as an absolute is that it isn’t necessary in order to attract them. But, this feed was already in the feeders, and for awhile, it wasn’t going anywhere fast so my new plan to use clear sugar water had to wait. Over the past couple of months, there was a hummingbird visitor here, another there. Just the usual.
Then suddenly there came a swarm, as if the woodland community had finally gotten the memo.
I felt like I was in the middle of a Hitchcock movie. There were, I’m not kidding, at least twenty hummingbirds, all at once.
What you don’t see in these photos are the hummingbirds that were swooping and divebombing my front porch as they made passes at the feeders, buzzing and zipping around me with their long, sharp beaks. I took my life in my hands to take these pictures.
They sucked the feeders dry in a matter of hours. And I can’t decide if I want to stop filling the feeders for awhile in hopes they’ll go away or if I’m too scared to stop filling them because I think they will kill me if they don’t get what they want.
“The Hummingbirds (2008) is a modern Hitchcock thriller/masterpiece, his first posthumous film with Universal Studios. It is the apocalyptic story of a remote West Virginia farm filled with an onslaught of seemingly unexplained, arbitrary and chaotic attacks of ordinary hummingbirds.”
If I’m found dead, the hummingbirds did it.
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