Supposedly they are very territorial. When they first migrate, they will feed from any feeder that they can find. However once they establish their territories, the males will become very aggressive during mating season and will chase away the others. I used to have over half a dozen at the same feeder about 2 months ago, and then they started fighting more and more often with each other, eventually resulting in lesser numbers. Now I consider myself lucky if I see one or two a day but when they do arrive, they barely stay for more than a couple of seconds and immediately take off whereas I had some of them literally nest on the thing and spend almost the whole day perched on the wire above the feeder. Now, one of them actually comes to the window almost each time, stares at me for a couple of seconds and then takes off on a hurry. In June, I would stand outside refilling the feeders and have them stay 2-3 feet away from me for minutes, not bothered by me or anything else. I also have a regular bird feeder about 4 feet away from the hummer feeder, and recently I have had about a dozen Blue Jays claim that feeder as their own. They are extremely loud birds (crows, magpies and jays are all in the same family), and they may also be scaring the others away when they show up intermittently throughout the day, accompanied with real loud noise. It is almost time for the hummers to migrate, so I won't bother changing anything this year but next year, I will add more hummer feeders and a large feeder for the Jays about 50 feet away from the other two, further away into the yard.

Flowerkitty, that is so interesting because you are only a bit to the south of me and perhaps 3 hours west and the same species are showing up at your feeders the same time as ours. We just had our first House Finch and mourning dove yesterday, 2 weeks ago Dark Eyed Juncos showed and a week before that was the Gold Finches. We tend not to have enough cover for Cardinals and peckers because we are a hardwood forest but we 'will' hear the peckers and if you don't blink we will get views of Downeys from time to time. I *LOVE* Blue Jays and can't wait to see them again even if they are huge PIGS. We have our peanuts in the shell ready and waiting for them. Their colours and patterns are really quite exquisite if you sit and look at them. Here the squirrels are the worst problem. We just put a baffle on the post, appropriately named "The Squirrel Baffler" and it is working well but the squirrles are VERY persistent and they sit there staring at it as though, if they stare long enough, the thing will go away. I don't mind the mourning doves so much since they will clean up spillage and we don't have pigeons but every time I'm sitting mesmerized in front of the feeders I think of a cartoon my husband devised. It was called "Bird Feeder" and showed tiny little perching birds at a feeder and a hawk flying into the scene for his lunch. Our first winter at this house, we had no neighbors and one of the rescue places near here was training a young goshawk to predate his meals in our woods. It was quite a neat thing to see. He had the bird on his hand and had a small dog scaring up mice in a huge log pile next to my house and just on the edge of the woods. The bird was not successful but it was still interesting to see how they teach them to be predators when they actually grew up in captivity/rescue. Now our whole street is finished so we won't ever see anything like that again unless it happens naturally. Barb southern Ontario, CANADA zone 6a

On the 2nd, I watched a Coopers take a Cardinal at my feeder and fly off to enjoy the meal. I was shocked at how fast it ran down the Cardinal who was flying as fast as it could. The episode sent me to the computer to differentiate the Coopers from the Sharpie. In the end the large size of the hawk convinced me.

catherinet: I've had several suet cages disappear - sometimes I find them farther away as if the coon got tired of carrying it and just ate the suet there. The jelly feeder was different. At first the dish disappeared, and I found one of them across the street, but the coon apparently learned that if it took the dish away across the street it would never refill. But if the coon dropped the empty dish under the feeder, I would put it back up and refill it. So every morning I'd find the empty dish neatly left under the feeder. I appreciated that and that's probably one of the reasons I was willing to share with the coon last year. And then there was the time I wondered why my hummingbird feeder that hung on the deck railing was empty every morning. I took the feeder off the deck and hung it on a shepherd's hook in the yard. Claire