Thanks to all for the looks and the comments.

To the camera /lens question: Camera is Canon 5D3, lens Canon 100-400 ver. III. Lens to target distance is about 18-20'. While I tend to experiment with settings as the light changes, shooting these hummers generally starts at f8, 800 ISO, and a pre-set manual focus on essentially a 6" to 10" area directly to the right or left of the single feeder port I'm trying to target. Camera and lens is mounted on a sturdy Giottos carbon fiber tripod equipped with a Jobo Jr. gimble head allowing me to pre-focus but still move the lens aiming point slightly both sideways and up and down without having to worry too much about tilt and such.

Because of where my two small feeders are located, about the only time available where there is enough natural light to operate easily is mid to late afternoon. While there are numerous and excellent articles showing how to shoot hummingbirds with flash, I've never been very successful at it so tend to shy away from the process unless I just get bored and want to experiment.

As the season lengthens and the tiny birds get more accustomed to my presence, I can usually reduce the distance between lens and feeder to perhaps half of that noted above although that may vary on any given day depending on weather, time of day, any other activity nearby such as other feeder birds (have a very small yard), traffic up and down the paved alley, and the number of mowers, weed eaters, and blowers howling at any given moment. In other cases, it may just depend on the numbers of young screaming neighborhood heathens nearby...

While all that may sound like a lot of expensive gear that must be used to get decent images, about 80% of my camera gear was bought used over a period of many years so the investment isn't quite as bad as it first sounds like. Too, I'm one of those camera snappers with an itchy shutter finger with the knowledge that digital images are "free" so you can take as many or as few as you like for the same price. One also has to remember that out of perhaps 200 downloaded images on a/the memory card, I may delete well over half right of the bat just because they're not what I was originally trying for, they were out of focus, the subject decided at the last moment to show me his butt rather than his cute little face, the subject moved just enough that the image subject is wonky and so on. Out of that last hundred, another "delete pass" is made on the computer which narrows down the field by at least another third and out of the last two-thirds, I may actually take 10 or 12 into Photoshop Elements to crop and refine. All photos are downloaded to my semi-ancient computer typically as soon as I'm through shooting and after confirming that those images are indeed on the computer, any memory cards are then formatted in camera to ready for the next "photo excursion".

Sorry, probably too much information but you asked and I get way too wordy when I type.