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Gardening: Anna’s hummingbird gets fine welcome in Liberty Lake – heated feeder under heating lamp

Liberty Lake resident Shelly Horner shows off her commercial heated hummingbird feeder that keeps the syrup from freezing. Horner backed the feeder with a 7-watt reptile heating lamp to keep a recent visitor, an Anna’s hummingbird, warm during the cold weather. (Pat Munts/For The Spokesman-Review)
Liberty Lake resident Shelly Horner shows off her commercial heated hummingbird feeder that keeps the syrup from freezing. Horner backed the feeder with a 7-watt reptile heating lamp to keep a recent visitor, an Anna’s hummingbird, warm during the cold weather. (Pat Munts/For The Spokesman-Review)Buy a print of this photo
By Pat Munts For The Spokesman-Review

Burke and Shelly Horner of Liberty Lake loved how their garden looked last summer.

As they do every summer, they filled their small yard with as much color as they could with plantings of annuals that attract birds and beneficial insects, especially hummingbirds.

“We love the Supetunias and annual salvias because they attract everything,” laughed Shelly as she talked about seeding her petunia starts in the basement.

Their small front porch was bedecked with hanging baskets and flower boxes filled with pink petunias while the backyard featured pots of flowering annuals several feet across.

This fall as the summer plants faded, they filled the front porch boxes with fall-colored flowers albeit fake ones to bolster the remaining petunias.

Then something strange happened in late October.

Poking about among the last of the real and fake flowers was an Anna’s hummingbird. They had taken the hummingbird feeder inside mid-September after the birds normally leave the area for warmer places. But there she was, and she was hungry.

“We quickly ordered a heated hummingbird feeder and hung it next to a 7-watt light used to keep reptiles warm,” Shelly said. “It didn’t take long for her to find it.”

They named the bird Hazel and monitor her comings and goings all day. According to Burke, she comes in about every 15 minutes for a long drink and then flies up into a nearby now-bare maple tree.

“We are using a 3 parts water to 1 part white table sugar as our winter mix to give her more carbohydrates.”

The normal summer blend is 4 parts water to 1 part sugar. The Horners don’t add any red food coloring to the mix as there is enough red on the feeder to attract the birds. They set up the reptile heater light to provide a little warm air for Hazel in which she happily basks between drinks.

This is not the only hummingbird still hanging around the area this year. I had just started my communication with the Horners when a friend, Michael Loundagin, on the South Hill sent me a picture of an Anna’s hummingbird hanging out in his South Hill garden. I wrote about him a couple of years ago. The Horners said they knew of one more person in Liberty Lake with a winter visitor. In 2012, I wrote about another hummingbird visitor in the South Park Road area in Spokane Valley. That bird made it through a good part of the winter and its 10-degree weather.

Anna’s hummingbirds are hardy. They are common on the West Side in the winter. When they aren’t sipping nectar, they are searching for bugs – there are still bugs out in the winter – to supply their protein needs. Called “hawking” the bugs, they will sit in high tree branches and watch for insects before swooping down for a snack.

Just before sunset, they retreat to nearby conifers or hedges and reemerge at sunrise the next day.

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Correspondent Pat Munts can be reached at pat@inlandnwgardening.com.