How you can attract more hummingbirds

Everybody loves a hummingbird. But the speedy-winged creatures are more than fun and beautiful – they’re an important pollinator of wildflowers. Especially red ones.

Why red? Hummingbirds see red where insects don’t. That means lots of red flowers are pollinated by hummingbirds, says Nick Clausen of the Backyard Nature Center in Wichita. And that’s why hummingbird feeders so often have some element of red on them.

This is the time to put hummingbird feeders out if you want to see the diminutive birds and help feed them for their winter migration. In the Wichita area, August and September are the main time to attract them.

You don’t need anything fancy, just some clean feeders and the ability to change out a simple sugar-water mixture every three to four days. You definitely don’t need any red food coloring. While it’s good to have some red on the feeder, that can come from something like a red ribbon attached to the feeder; yellow and blue also will attract them. Red shouldn’t be in the sugar water you put out for the hummingbirds.

Here are some tips for feeding them.

Number of feeders

“I would have multiple feeders out, because they don’t share well,” Clausen says of the birds. In fact, they fight over them. So the more feeders you have, the better chance you have of seeing hummingbirds. Master gardener Cindy Vadakin puts a feeder, for example, at each corner of her deck.

Placement of feeders

Next, “put it where it’s easy to see on a regular basis,” Clausen says of the placement of the feeders.

Nectar: homemade or pre-mixed?

“And then a lot of people like to grab pre-mixed nectar, but it has preservatives and food coloring,” Clausen says. Homemade is easy enough to make: 1 part sugar in 4 parts water, mixed vigorously. Change the nectar every three to four days.

Plant flowers

It’s never too late in the season to add flowers for new pops of color in the yard, whether with hanging baskets, pots placed on the patio or in the midst of the garden, or planted in the ground. Masses of color are to the hummingbirds what runway lights are to airplanes, waving them in. If the plants also feed pollinators, all the better.

“I have all the plants blooming that should attract them,” master gardener Vadakin said last week, from a carpet of Bubblegum petunias to red cardinal flowers to agastache – aka hummingbird mint. A lot of the bloomers can feed butterflies and bees and other pollinators as well as hummingbirds.

If you’d like to plant more native and wildflowers for wildlife, a good place to start is the FloraKansas Great Plains Plant Bazaar at Dyck Arboretum of the Plains in Hesston. The sale is held both in the fall and the spring. The fall sale will be Sept. 9 through 11. You can click on the Native Plant Guide and Plant List at dyckarboretum.org to see the plants that will be for sale. Whether or not you go to the sale, the guide is helpful for seeing when flowers bloom, so that you can pick up similar plants at a garden center and have continuous bloom through the growing season. There also are suggestions for planting for pollinators, planting for monarch butterflies, and plants for shade.

This story was originally published July 28, 2016 at 9:40 PM with the headline "How you can attract more hummingbirds."