Farm News 06-24-07

Summer

The air is becoming warmer and the landscape has reached its maximum saturation of green, from now until winter the landscape colors will include more browns, reds, and yellows each week. Last week I went to the ranch for several days. The Flint Hills are blanketed with miles of unbroken green grass.

A large hummingbird population visits the front porch of the ranch house, supping on bottles of nectar and engaging in non-stop aerial battles. Hummingbirds are irritable, pugnacious little flying jewels, darting about so quickly that it was impossible to count them accurately. The general consensus of the loafers parked on the porch was that at least six to twelve hummingbirds were in sight at any time from dawn to dusk.

There was a constant racket of twitters, wing-slapping, and the buzz of their wing beats. They slap one another with their wings as they brawl around the feeders, producing similar to that produced by swatting a fly. Jeannette slept on the porch one night and was awakened well before sunrise by the uproar. The feeders were empty, which put the hummers in a bad mood. The Trumpetvine, their favorite food source, had only the first few blossoms open and were an insufficient food supply for such a horde of hummers. With nowhere else to go, they spent the morning buzzing Jeannette until, finally, one of the old goats who lives there replenished their feeders.

The Ruby Throated Hummingbird arrives in Kansas in early April and immediately goes about propagating its kind. They build a little cuplike nest out of moss and lichens, line it with something nice and soft, and the female then lays two eggs, each about the size of a green pea, and starts incubating. By this time it is the latter part of April and the young will hatch after sixteen days of incubation. Two to four weeks after hatching they begin flying. So, beginning in late May young hummingbirds begin to appear.

I have watched closely in May and June to see if I could tell the young ones from the adults, and if the young ones showed any awkwardness in flying. I can't. They all fly and zip about, engaging in aerial combat. One time, several years ago, I saw two males engaging in what appeared to be more play than combat. They were hovering on opposite sides of a post, both facing the post. They would drift from side to side until they both happened to drift out to the same side, where they could see each other. When that happened they would snap back to behind the post. It looked like good old peek-a-boo to me.