I find hummingbirds quite amazing. These tiny little birds that each year undertake an amazingly long journey, roughly here to Mexico. It can’t be easy. But they do it. And they are currently on their way.
There are a couple of different interactive maps you can find online to check their progress. The easy way is to just Google hummingbird migration map 2023 and you shouldn’t have much problem finding one. I like Hummingbird Central myself because it also shows some other information and is usually fairly up to date.
At present, they have made it to northern Pennsylvania and are probably entering New York state, or getting pretty close. This is a map that relies on reported sightings on the birds, so it might lag a bit behind, but it is fairly accurate. There is also a map that tells you when sightings were made in different areas last year.
I usually expect to see them about Mother’s Day. The second Sunday in May is usually a fairly reliable date, but they are likely a few of them around earlier. Last year there were a few around on the last week of April.
Arriving that early is probably taking a bit of a chance. There aren’t a lot of flowers in bloom that early, and the bugs haven’t started to appear in large numbers. But they must be finding something to eat along the way. But a lot of us will help out, putting up our hummingbird feeders at the first site of them.
I don’t know if this happens to others, but they will remind me when they arrive. I have a couple regular hummingbird visitors that if the feeder is down or empty will come and hover about a foot in front of my face when I go outside. Just to let me know I’m failing at my job, and my job is to help keep them fed.
Which means I should probably start looking for the feeder and all the parts to go with it. Those little yellow plastic flowers that go on the feeder have a way of going missing over the winter. Best to start searching for them now.