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Tue 1 Apr, 2003 05:48 am
I just added a second hummingbird feeder next to the other at my home in the city. It's a perfectly good feeder but a different style with red plastic flower feeding holes instead of yellow but they have ignored it completely for a couple of weeks. I let the other one run dry and now one or two are very reluctantly using the new one. I also put one out at my weekend cottage up in the mountains where I see hummers everywhere but after a week they still want nothing to do with it. Anyone else found them to be very slow to adopt a new food source?
I put up hummingbird feeders as well and have done quite a bit of reading on them. I read that you shouldn't put feeders next to eachother or even in view of another feeder. It takes awhile for them to get comfortable with a new feeder, but they should take to it if you put it in a different spot once they find it. The red flowers should attract them. If they're avoiding it make you you check it to see if an ant or other bug got in it. Hummingbirds won't drink if there's so much as a little bug in there. It takes awhile sometimes for them to get use to a new feeder as well.
Good luck and let us know how it goes.
Hmmm...can't place them cheek by jowl eh? Didn't know that. Thought I'd seen them together at some bird refuges in Arizona. Mine are only a couple of feet apart so that may be a problem. I trick I have always used to keep the ants out is putting a little axel grease along about an inch and a half of the wire supporting the feeder. It lasts a whole season and the ants absolutely won't cross it. (Would you want to hike through that stuff if you were an ant? Yuck.) Just stop by a garage with a baggie and ask for a dab.
Pitter
Thanks. I'll be doing just that ;-)
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