Hiya masondad! :-) Welcome! Just wanted to add something. I hang my feeders on the overhang of the house, but like you mentioned - they're kinda high to maintain. So, what I did was bought some of those neat ol "S" hooks (that are long) that you can buy at any birding store (or even from Lowes in the flower pot/accessory area). I have about 2 or 3 S hooks linked on each other to bring the level of the feeder down to my level so that I can easily hang it (plus easier to view at eye level). They're attached to one of those round thingies, sorry don't know the name, but it's a round metal with a screw at the end that you can just screw into the wood (the ones that you put hanging potted plants on). Hope you get your feeder up soon and have some visitors. You'll fall in love with them. Keep us posted and good luck! :-)

I'm hoping to put my Oriole feeders (liquid and orange halves) out this week. The weather is so crazy, but I would rather be a bit early than miss the OrioleâÂÂs. I go by the weather for hanging the hummingbird feeders out. However, itâÂÂs usually by the first of May at home (twin cities) and shortly there-after up at the lake. Sandy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hummingbird "They also typically consume more than their own weight in food each day, and to do so they must visit hundreds of flowers daily. At any given moment, they are only hours away from starving." "stores up fat to serve as fuel, thereby augmenting its weight by as much as 40Â50 percent and hence increasing the bird's potential flying time" Rockport has tons of them in September as they migrate from the east to west towards MX for the winter. http://www.rockporthummingbird.com/

Thanks, Jane, for the references. I found the sites: Carl Strang's June 2009 entry and Stanford group essay on Cowbirds. I'm a little skeptical about Strang's statement on instinctual behavior - it may be true but it sounds more like a belief not based on any science. (Just a quibble on my part - if he'd said the juvenile cowbirds 'appear' to seek out other cowbirds, based on his observations, I wouldn't have been annoyed - but ascribing the behavior to 'instinct' is a jump too far). A very interesting fact in the Stanford essay is that only about 3 percent of cowbird eggs actually result in adults! That's major mortality. The cowbird female just keeps laying eggs and eggs and eggs ... "An average female lays about 80 eggs, 40 per year for two years. About 3 percent of those 80 eggs end up as adults -- an average of 2.4 adults per female. Clearly, such numbers more than compensate for the excessive loss of eggs and young in the nests of inappropriate hosts." I wonder how the current situation differs from the earlier situation when the cowbirds evolved to follow the bison herds and couldn't hang around to set up a proper nest without dropping behind and struggling to find food for themselves and the young. That behavior probably was dependent on the migration patterns of the bison, but nowadays the cowbirds have the luxury of being able to stay in the same area as their young, even if they don't get involved in the raising of them. As far as which came first, the parasitic behavior or the adaptation to it, I would think that the ability to lay so many eggs and the rapid maturation of the young would come early. There's an interesting entry in the Birds of North America Online site (subscription only) saying that "Most fledgling losses occurred 1 or 2 d after leaving nest". There are a lot of unknowns here, but it's an interesting topic for study. I'm glad I don't have to do the research myself, it would drive me crazy trying to pull together all of the variables. Claire