Creating a Schoolyard Hummingbird Habitat

Materials

1. Getting Ready
To prepare for your first hummingbird visitors, teach students to use field guides or Internet resources to find out which species are found where you live. If ruby-throated or rufous hummingbirds migrate through your area, students can predict the first bird’s arrival by checking the Journey North Web site to access current migration data or compare previous years’ data. The Hummingbirds.net site maps the ruby-throated migration. Previous years' maps are also available for study and comparison. To find approximate arrival dates for other U.S. hummingbird species, click here.

Just before their spring migration, hummingbirds gorge themselves on nectar and insects. Some even double their body weight to store enough energy to make the journey north. When they arrive, they survive on insects, the nectar of early-blooming flowers, and even tree sap, which they lap from holes made by woodpeckers known as sapsuckers. During this critical time, you can provide food for hummingbirds — and maybe even entice a few to stay — by hanging feeders and planting early-blooming trees, shrubs, and wildflowers that are indigenous to your area.

2. Hanging Feeders
Ideally, feeders should be hung where students can observe them and where they are safe and accessible to hummingbirds. Have students survey the schoolyard to determine the most sheltered places for hummingbirds to feed that have good access (e.g., a corridor of trees or shrubs leading to the area). To help attract the birds' attention, hang red ribbons on the feeders and nearby shrubs. If you live in an area where mornings are chilly, use feeders without perches, as hummingbirds can become hypothermic if they drink very cold sugar water while perching. By hovering while feeding, they warm their bodies and avoid hypothermia. Check out these other Hummingbird Feeder Tips.

3. Planting Nectar Flowers
After the feeders are hung, students can learn more about hummingbirds, come up with additional questions, and plan other ways to make the schoolyard a better hummingbird habitat. They could, for instance, research flowers to grow to increase the food supply and help catch a hummer’s eye. (See the Which Plants to Plant? activity. Flowering plants are especially important to sustain the hummingbird habitat over the summer if feeders will not maintained during that time.

4. Offering Shelter and Water
As in any schoolyard habitat for wildlife, in addition to food, you should provide shelter and water. Do you need more trees or shrubs to create cover, nesting places, or perching spots near feeders? (Hummingbirds spend about 80 percent of their time perching.) How will you provide water? In nature, hummingbirds prefer showers to baths and can often be observed streaking back and forth in the fine spray of a waterfall in order to clean their feathers. Commercial bird misters are available from birdwatchers’ supply stores. Similar devices that attach to a garden hose are also sold as plant misters or poolside “personal cooling systems” and are often less expensive. All use a small amount of water and can be set to spray on a timer: the birds have even been known to learn a misting schedule and regularly appear just in time for their morning or afternoon shower. Hummingbirds will also bathe in flight by brushing against or sliding around on wet leaves. It's quite a site! To create this bathing alternative, simply make a small hole in the bottom of a bucket, fill the bucket with water, hang it above a leafy branch, and refill as needed.

Seasonal Tips
Although spring is an ideal time to start a hummer habitat project, you can integrate hummingbirds into your curriculum throughout the year. Why not start off the school year with observations of the peak of the southward migration in your area? Fall is the best time to plant many of the perennials, shrubs, trees, and vines that hummingbirds will seek out when they return. In winter, you can engage students in planning habitat areas or even propagating plants from seed indoors. No matter what time of year you start a hummingbird garden, be sure to avoid using pesticides. Chemicals sprayed on flowers could be ingested by the birds and could kill small insects that are an important source of food for hummingbirds.

Curriculum Connections
When the hummingbirds do arrive in your outdoor classroom, encourage students to make careful observations, keep records of all the hummer happenings, conduct investigations and inquiry projects (click here for inquiry ideas), continue to improve and expand habitats, and celebrate the hummingbirds in your schoolyard. Explore all the ways these avian jewels can naturally motivate learning and integrate all areas of the curriculum. Draw on the ideas, activities, and resources in this month’s Curriculum Connections section to get started. If you and your class are lucky enough to attract an early arriving ruby-throated or rufous hummingbird, don’t forget to report your sighting online at Journey North!

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