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Hummingbird Haven

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A male Allen's Hummingbird perched on a red garden feeder in southern California, showing its iridescent copper-orange gorget glowing in the sunlight against a soft green background.
Allen's Hummingbird at the garden feeder. © John Corney

I've had hummingbird feeders in my garden in southern California for 15 years or more. No matter the season, I keep the feeders full. Anna's hummingbirds are our year-round residents, and in spring other varieties pass through on their northward migration — most spectacularly, the Allen's hummingbird.

I don't know whether it's the consistency of the feeders I've maintained over the years, or something unique about this particular spring, but this year the number of Allen's hummingbirds in my garden is at a record level. I'm filling the feeders at the rate of half a litre or more every day. Think about how many dips of those tiny tongues it takes to get through that amount of nectar.

Close portrait of a male Anna's Hummingbird perched on a tree branch, showing the full iridescent magenta and gold gorget that gives the species its distinctive look. Stylized painterly finish.
A male Anna's Hummingbird at rest, magenta gorget on full display. © John Corney, 2009

The Dog Fights and the Truce

Hummingbirds are famously territorial. Whatever the variety, they all put on a spectacular show fighting over the feeders — darting, chittering, locking into aerial dog fights, jockeying for ownership of a single port. The "ownership" turns over constantly; whoever is closest and quickest wins until the next challenger arrives.

The busiest times are first thing in the morning and the half-hour between sunset and dark, when the birds are tanking up on reserves before the cold night ahead. At dusk, something remarkable happens. Their desperation to build energy finally overcomes their territoriality, and you can watch multiple birds drinking peacefully from the same feeder at the same time. Hallelujah — peace on earth, if only briefly.

A male Anna's Hummingbird perched at a red garden feeder in southern California, displaying its bright magenta-pink gorget and crown in full iridescent splendour.
An Anna's male holding court at the feeder. © John Corney

Beyond the Feeder

It's worth saying that feeders aren't the whole story. Hummingbirds are nectar specialists, and they'll happily switch from sugar water to the real thing when the right flowers are in bloom. In southern California, aloes flower through the cooler months and are an absolute magnet — the long tubular blooms might as well have been designed by a hummingbird committee. I've watched Anna's spend whole mornings working an aloe stalk, ignoring the feeder entirely.

An Anna's Hummingbird feeding mid-flight at a tall aloe inflorescence, wings caught in motion, its green iridescent body glowing against the warm red and yellow tubular blooms.
Anna's Hummingbird working an aloe inflorescence in the garden. © John Corney, 2012

If you have space to plant for them as well as feed them, native and drought-tolerant plants like aloes, salvias, penstemon, fuchsias, and California native sages will pull in hummingbirds in numbers that no feeder alone can match. The feeders are most valuable as a reliable backup — and as a way to keep the birds visiting at close range, where you can actually watch them.

Making Your Own Nectar

If you live in an area where there are hummingbirds and you want to put out your own feeders, don't waste money on the expensive commercial nectar you see at stores. The recipe is genuinely simple:

  • 1 cup of plain white sugar
  • 4 cups of water
  • Mix until the sugar is dissolved

That's it. No red food colouring — the red plastic on the feeder is plenty of attraction, and the dye is unnecessary at best and unhelpful at worst. If you haven't had feeders out before, it may

Hummingbirds in Motion

Photographs can capture the colour, but they can't quite capture the energy of a feeder in full swing. Here's a short video I shot of the activity in the garden:

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Samoan Youth

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This young man was preparing with his friends for his moment of fame on the stage at the Samoan Village at the Polynesian dance festival called Pasifika in Auckland in March this year. Samoan Youth Canon EOS 20D 1/30sec at f/20 ISO 200 Canon 70-300mm lens at 300mm More photographs from the same Pasifika Festival day can be found in my new post, Faces of Pasifika 2007 — A Day at Auckland's Pacific Festival .
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Before and After: Two Joshua Tree Photographs, Two Painterly Reworkings

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I want to try something a little different in this post — a working walk-through of how two of my Joshua Tree photographs from April of 2011 became two of my newest painterly artworks on Redbubble. Same compositions, same landscape, same afternoon in the Mojave. Very different final pieces. The Raw Photographs Both photographs were taken on a single afternoon trip to Joshua Tree National Park, shot in Canon raw (.CR2) format on my Canon EOS. Raw files are, as any photographer knows, deliberately flat — they carry the maximum amount of information the sensor recorded, without any of the punchy contrast, saturation, or sharpening that a JPEG would apply automatically in-camera. That flatness is a feature: it gives the photographer the widest possible latitude to make choices in post-processing. But it also means a raw file, straight out of the camera, doesn't look like the scene the eye remembers. It looks like the scene the sensor saw, drained of atmosphere. Here are the two r...
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Cool Granny in Her Austin A35 — © John Corney 2026 This one has a real backstory, and I'd like to tell it properly. An Auckland Sighting On one of my annual visits home to New Zealand, I was walking through central Auckland — at the corner of Queen Street and Karangahape Road (K Road, as everyone calls it) — when a small yellow car went past me and stopped me mid-stride. It was a beautifully kept Austin A35, one of the little British runabouts that were everywhere in New Zealand when I was growing up in the fifties and sixties. Driving it was a woman of a certain age with the confident bearing of someone who had been driving that same car, or one like it, for decades. She looked entirely at home behind the wheel. She belonged to the car and the car belonged to her, and neither of them was in any hurry to change. If you know Auckland, that particular corner will register: Queen Stree...
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