Excellent Birds

I remember the swarms of hummingbirds just before sunset. They need to feed heavily for their tiny metabolisms to make it through the night. We had six feeders, most with at least four perches, and they were still lined up, waiting. Every so often, a territorial male would roar through, scattering the hungry birds for a moment, before they returned to the chore at hand: drinking their fill.
What was their fill? Sugar water with a drop or two of red food coloring. We had been told by several "experts" that the dye wasn't necessary, but it was more of a habit than a necessity, so we kept it in. We started feeding hummingbirds in the late spring, before we had even moved up to our cabin for the summer. They were waiting for us when we did arrive - waiting for us to fill the empty feeders. The first one we had was a small inverted bottle with a single tube stuck in a rubber stopper. With the bee guard off, three or four birds could hover around it and consequently we had to refill it twice a day in the middle of the summer. My father hung a perch near it made from a bent coat hanger, and we watched as they lined up to fill their bills.
Over the years, we tried all manner of feeding systems, usually preferring the larger models if only to limit the number of times we had to push our way through the crowd to fill them. We had to warn guests not to sample the "Kool-Aid" in the back of the refrigerator. Those gallon jugs were the spare nectar: boiled, cooled, and ready to pour.
I have a completely visceral memory of the sound of hummingbirds. I called my mom for the recipe for hummingbird food. She has a house full of hummingbird knick-knacks. Over the years she got quite a reputation, and her house filled with all kinds of reminders of her attentions to the needle-nosed avians. I continue to try and coax them to my back yard with my four-perch, figure eight bottle feeder. Sometimes I stand at my kitchen window, listening for the sound. Then I close my eyes and imagine the swarm.