We have hummingbird feeders on the porch and, well, hummers would occasionally fly into the windows trying to get inside. Usually they were okay, but we didn't like it. Why did they do this when they had food outside?
I looked around and realized we had a red flower arrangement in the living room, fully in sight of the porch. Put it away, and the thumps stopped.
Enjoyed this recounting very much Frank.
I share couple of my experiences as well.
When may wife and I made a trip to Colorado (our first) we timed it around ice out in the Taylor River Valley. We were fishing Taylor Reservoir just after the ice broke but snow was literally everywhere. My mom loaned my wife a straw hat. As we fished a hummingbird dropped by and just hovered trying to take a sip from the flowers embroidered on the hat. Was a hoot. I remember thinking these early birds were going to starve but later that day we had lunch at a resort up the road and they kept dozens of feeders out that were absolutely swarmed. There were plenty of gnat to mosquito sized insects out including baetis mayflies for their protein needs.
So then we moved to Colorado. And made trip to OK to visit the folks several times a year. Returning from a Christmas trip that had a huge snow we were driving back where the snow was piled up on both sides of the road. I began noticing dead birds on the road and I soon hit one myself. After the second, I mentioned all the dead birds and talked with her about what may be the cause. We decided that they were responding to late to clear cars as they approached and so we slowed down to 50 mph. Dang it seemed slow be we didn't hit another bird. Unfortunately, a lot of folks whizzed by us giving us WTF looks and we saw a lot more dead birds on the road ahead, but at least we didn't kill any more. Actually we only had to drive a couple of more hours to where the grass was uncovered by snow and we stopped seeing birds huddled on the roads.
