on feeding humming birds during seven summers. 331


In the fourth season of experiments the bottle held by the

green flower was put out when the others were, but was not filled

for six weeks. During that time humming birds were present and

drinking on 23 days. It is safe to say that they were seen drinking

fully 400 times from the other bottles, but never once were they seen

to approach the green flower. The first morning it was filled four of

them were about the yard and one drank from this flower two

minutes after the filling. The following year (1911) after dark on

July 14 the green-flower bottle was set in its bed of green and was

left empty for a few days. About noon on the 17th one of the ruby-

throats visited it, thrusting in her bill; the bottle was then fiilled for

the first time that year, and in a half minnte a bird was drinking

from it. To this is added a transcript from my journal bearing date

of July 17, 1912: “About 9 a.m. before I had put out any sirup a

humming bird was dashing from bottle to bottle and tried the green-

flower one. It was bent over in the green foliage, and certainly has

had no sirup in it for six weeks or longer. I filled it after I saw the

bird visit it, and she came again to drink.”


The new bottles No. 5 and No. 6, covered like No. 4 with

white muslin and nailed to a weather-beaten fence picket, were put

out after dark on July 23, 1911, but neither was filled for one week.

The next morning about 8 o’clock a humming bird was searching one

of these bottles for suspected sweets ; four such visits were noted in

one day and on several other occasions. At the end of the week the

filling of No. 5 began, but no sirup was put in No. 6 for two years.

During these years a record was kept of each time a humming bird

was seen to visit and search this unfilled bottle, and the total num¬

ber was 15, in addition to those visits already mentioned.


Thus far this writing has been confined to a description of the

things seen ; no theories have been advanced, no deductions have been

made, no hypotheses have been carrried to their logical conclusion.

The first deduction offered is that at the beginning of the experi¬

ments, in 1907, the artificial nasturtium may have led the humming

bird to explore its depths, and, finding its contents to her taste, she

returned to it. Other birds may have found the sirup there in the

same way, yet it seems more likely that most of them were led to the

bottles by seeing another drinking. This probably was the case with



