on feeding humming birds during seven simmers. 387


ter was suggested by seeing on several occasions two birds drinking

together from one bottle, a phenomenon that needs explanation when

we consider the pugnacious disposition usually exhibited by one

drinker toward another.


In further confirmation of the foregoing is the history of the

feeding in 1913. Bottles No. 4 and No. 6 were set out on April 30.

For two months and a half no humming bird visited them. It

chanced on July 14 that the stick support of No. 4 was lying on the

ground, leaving only No. 6 in position, when my sister saw a hum¬

ming bird thrusting her bill into it. She hastened to fill this bottle,

which was the first time it had ever been filled, and it lacked but

eight days of two full years since it was first set out. Six days later

I was in the orchard a hundred feet or more distant from the bottles,

when a hummingbird flew towards me and buzzed about my head as

do no other birds except those that are fed. With greatly accelerated

pulse I hurried to the house and filled the bottles. In exactly two

minutes the humming bird was drinking from one of them ; this

was the first drinking witnessed in that year. It was one of my

most thrilling' experiences in bird-study. Two marvellously long

journeys of from one to two thousand miles each had this small

sprite taken since last she had drunk from the bottles, yet she had

not forgotten them, nor the one that fed her. She was quite prone

to remind either of us when the bottles were empty by flying about

our heads, wherever she chanced to find us, whether in the yard or

in the street. Once having been long neglected she nearly flew into

my face as I opened the barn door to step out.


The last experiment made was that of flavoring one of the

bottles of syrup with vanilla, and later with extract of lemon, to see

if the birds showed preference for the plain sirup or for the flavoured.

Both kinds were served at the same time, and of both the birds

drank, showing no choice that could be detected.


It may already have been surmised from the gender of the

pronoun used that it is the female only of this species that has the

“ sweet tooth.” Never once in the seven summers has a male ruby-

throat been seen near a bottle. The drinking birds have been ex¬

amined long and critically, with binocular and without, in order to

detect on some of the birds the identification marks of the young



