It's time to get those feeders up, JD! There have been several sightings in Southeastern PA just within the last few days. Here's a great and informative migration map you can check to find out in more detail... http://www.learner.org/jnorth/maps/humm_ruby_spring2012.html

I bought 2 small round plastic feeders at Walmart last year; .50¢ each on clearance! Of course I can't find the second one. My hummers like this one better than the glass Perky Pet I had also purchased; it's been 'retired', since they won't use it! The cheapie has the screw on bottom, that splits apart, for oh-so-easy cleaning! I'll be going back to check at the end of the season again this year.

If you Google you can read allot on them. It might be hard in some areas to attract but one's you have them in your house they always come back to the same site as long they live. Purple Martin houses are very popular in our area, I don't have any up, perhaps some day I will, my obsession is tree Swallows for about 10 years now. Hope you have luck this year! Konrad

When trimming, keep in mind that this is a matched set of “bookends,” so they should be exact, mirror image duplicates of each other as much as possible. I would think of the trimming project as a challenge … as if you were involved in a manufacturing process making a machine project on a lathe or something along those lines. It would not be at all detrimental to use a tape measure to double check dimensions for matching throughout the process. I would rough out the shapes of both before fine tuning either. The place to begin is standing back well away from them trying to envision what they are to become. If the shrub needs to be moved a little left, right or forward, this is the time to notice it and account for the adjustments you’ll need to make in the cutting. It really barely matters where the plant roots are located. If you the shrub to be 4” to the right, “move” it there with the cutting process. It’s important to envision the finished product before cutting because there is a substantial part of them that won’t get any cutting at all. If you just charged up on them and started hacking away, there’s a good chance you’d cut some wrong parts off. Since the pair of shrubs are matched, the first cuts to make should determine the height. (To match the pair, follow a line on the siding of the house as a guide. Don’t measure from the ground.) Keep in mind that you do NOT want to cut at the place where you envision the limits of the finished product to be (the red line in picture.) There are three reasons for this. As soon as you finish cutting the plant it’s going to grow and if you cut it at the finished height, in a short time it will grow too large. The second reason is because, even though you tried hard to make it a perfect shape, it’s not going to end up as perfect as you’d hoped for. Later, when you need to trim and try to perfect it again, you will want to be cutting only in the newer, softer, easier-to-cut foliage, rather than in the hard, sticky, woody portion. If you don’t cut a little smaller in the first place, you’ll probably end up where the next cutting has to dip somewhere into the woody portion of the plant again. This is a royal pain. If you make the plant a little smaller to begin with, it gives you a “cushion” against having this happen. In general, I find that people have a strong resistance to cutting the plant smaller (the blue line in the picture.) But do yourself a favor and get over this. If you mistakenly cut this plant to a stub, in two years you’d barely remember your error because it would be pretty large again. In cutting it just 6” less than you want it to be, in two months you’ll barely remember or notice that you did that. The third reason you want to cut the plant a little smaller than the “finished product size” is because the more foliage you remove from the top portion of the plant, the greater it is that you expose the bottom portion (the part that is undercut and desperately needs to grow) to more light and an improved chance of quicker growth. Between the yellow line (which represents the ground plane) in the picture and the shrub, there is nothing at all to cut … until you get higher up to the blue line. At this cavity at the lower portion of the shrubs, all the foliage will be left untouched so it can continue to grow as quickly as possible. The goal is to keep the upper portions of the shrub trimmed so that it shades the lower portions the least as possible. Even if you want the shrubs to be larger than what I'm showing, for now you should trim them as I'm showing because you're in a corrective phase trying to regain the lost lower foliage. In your second-to-last picture, it shows how a subordinate, adjacent shrub has encroached on the Yew, which is clearly the more important shrub. The lesser shrub should be trimmed such that this doesn't happen.