Lots of luck is right, Bamatufa. During the years I was a boat captain in the Gulf oil fields, the migrating birds would land on our boat, totally exhausted. Most all of them would die there, if they landed. I've thought about that a lot, and unscientifically have my ideas of why they died. In salt air, or with salt spray getting on their feathers, they would become heavy. And if they landed, they would need fresh water, but also they would need to dry their feathers. And, they would preen their feathers to clean them and get them back in place. I submit that preening causes them to ingest sea salt, and their little systems cannot take that. Only once during my years on the water did I catch one of those birds, and I washed it off and left it in a dark place. We had no live insects to feed it, but when morning came, I released the little guy, and off he flew. I hope he made it. It was not a hummer though. Many of the offshore oil platforms have colonies of birds living on them, some are swallows which catch bugs in midflight. But I've seen them seeking a bug near the water, and a wave rise up and slap them out of the air. There they floated with wings outspread, with death all around them from fish or gulls, because they could never rise to fly again.

The tree fern will remain potted in the shade house during warm weather. I'll probably put it in the heated GH (the one the hummer was trapped in) during the winter. It just takes up so much room. Hopefully I won't kill it. Daniella I have no idea what the variety is and it's not tagged. Is there an easy way to tell them apart? Lucy the gh's are actually pretty empty right now. The shade house holds mainly orchids during the summer and never gets too crowded. The other one in the backyard gets way over packed during the winter but the GH at the farm has plenty of room. It's 15,000 sq ft but only gets heated to about 45 F. It's just too expensive to keep it warmer then that, even with using propane instead of electricity. The last time we heated the farm GH to 65-70 F was 3 winters ago and it ran about $8000. Too much to spend on a hobby and the cost of fuel is significantly higher now.

Yes it must have heard me :-) It really was posing a long time until I said..ok I am done lol. I feel bad for them in this rainy cold weather...one was sitting forever on the fence in front of my kitchen window this morning. But I know that if I would have opened the door...well...bye bye birdy. Siam I told ya that they love the Canna's ;-))) Lucy

In Colorado I saw a hummingbird buzzing around the Agastashe 1 week ago. It does seem a very late! I know that hummingbirds can survive freezing temperatures because in the mountains here there can be year-round frosts, and I've gone camping in June and woke up to frost dusting the ground (and the tent) while the hummingbirds were busy flitting around like there was no problem. Hummingbirds are extremely common in the Rocky Mountains all summer and you'll come across swarms of them around meadows especially when the shortened growing season has everything blooming all at once. I've heard that hummigbirds migrate based on a biological clock, not food - and that there are frequently stragglers - so it's a good idea to have a feeder out to help the stragglers make it. I wonder if they are also adapting to environmental change? Regardless of whether or not you want to point to climate change (and personally, I absolutely would cite that), it's also a fact cities extend the growing season an additional couple weeks in each direction because of the heat island effect, and also provide an abundance of non-native, late-blooming plants growing in gardens (for example, brugmansias!) that are not normally present this time of year. Maybe human populations are serving as a secondary "corridor" for the hummingbirds to migrate later than they did 200 years ago! Cities and towns certainly do form chains that would be easy to migrate along. It would be silly to think some species wouldn't take advantage of the environmental change humans bring just as much as some other species are negatively affected.