When are hummingbirds returning to Washington? Here’s the perfect recipe to attract them

Bird song is once again starting to fill the Washington air as temperatures creep up and migratory birds return to the Evergreen State. One type of hummingbird calls Washington state home year-round, but other varieties return each spring.

Hummingbirds are a favorite for many bird watchers, and bird feeders are the best way to see them. If you’re looking to set up your own hummingbird feeder, or you’re just a casual observer wanting to spot the tiny bird, here’s everything you need to know:

Hummingbird Species in Washington

Washington state is home to one hummingbird species year-round, the Anna’s Hummingbird. However, according to Ed Dominguez, the lead naturalist at the Seward Park Audobon Center in Seattle, that hasn’t always been the case.

“Until the mid-twentieth century, this was a hummingbird that also was down in southern California, northern Mexico,” Dominguez said. “But with more and more people planting flowering trees and plants and shrubs through the twentieth century, that made great food for Anna’s Hummingbird, and they worked their way north.”

Typically, three others join it around March when the temperature starts to warm up – the Rufous, Calliope and Black-Chinned hummingbirds, though the Rufous is the only one commonly found west of the Cascade Mountains.

“The Rufous hummingbird is migratory,” Dominguez said. “They spend the winter down in Southern California or Baja California in Mexico, and then they make their way up here.”

Western Washington’s two hummingbird species can sometimes be “very, very difficult to tell apart,” Rob Faucett, a retired ornithologist who’s served as the collections manager for the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in Seattle, told McClatchy News.

But as a general rule, Faucett said the Rufous is marked by its reddish-orange feathers, while Anna’s hummingbirds have green backs and gray abdomens. Males tend to be easier to identify due to their bright red heads.

Another distinct feature of the Anna’s hummingbird is the aerial display males perform to attract females, known as the J-dive.

“You’ll hear them all the time in nice, sunny weather,” Dominguez said. “They will buzz in front of a female [hummingbird], or a human being, and then they will shoot up in the air 60, 80, they can go as high as 130 feet straight up in the air. And then they dive straight down into the group like a bullet.”

Faucett had a bit of a different take on Washington’s hummingbirds.

“Our hummingbirds are beautiful, but they’re actually relatively kind of plain. As far as hummingbirds go, we kind of got shafted,” Faucett said. “Look up the hummingbirds of Colombia… it’s like you’re on LSD; it’s the craziest thing. So ours are cool, ours are really cool, but not like [that].”

Tips for your hummingbird feeder

Experts recommend filling a hummingbird feeder with a simple mix of water and sugar and avoiding honey, molasses, or brown sugar.

“The ratio that most closely approximates the sugar content in flower nectar is four parts water to one part sugar,” Dominguez said.

It’s also important to clean the feeder often. Faucett recommended cleaning it every three to four days, while Dominguez suggested cleaning it every five days.

Faucett said one of the most common and overlooked mistakes people make is putting their hummingbird feeder near a window.

“People love putting hummingbird feeders near their windows, which is a great way to kill hummingbirds,” Faucett said. “It’s like, ‘Hey, let’s put it up in front of the window.’ Okay, great, there’s a hummingbird, but then two days later, it flies into the window and breaks its neck.”