By STEVE GILLILAND
Explore Kansas Outdoors
Although we usually have one or two hummingbirds at our feeders both in the spring and fall, our area of Kansas is not is not known to be a hummingbird Mecca. My brother in Tennessee has them in swarms both times of the year. As I sat on the deck Saturday morning wondering where our little visitors were this spring, I couldn’t help thinking about an adventure we had years ago.
I believe it was on a Friday morning Joyce called me at work and rather calmly announced that we had a new house guest in our garage.
I was silent for a little as my mind processed her statement. “She is way too calm for it to be a raccoon or a possum,” I thought, “and if it’s the neighbor’s cat she would relish the opportunity to use whatever force necessary to extract it. A toad,” I guessed off the top of my head.
Then she proceeded to tell me how she’d come home to find a female hummingbird hovering around the light bulb on the garage ceiling.
The day was chilly and blustery so Joyce reasoned it had possibly come into the garage to escape the chilly wind. Two strings that once hung a clothing rack for a garage sale still hang from the ceiling, so along with all the garage door tracks and brackets it had plenty of places to roost when it wasn’t hovering near the light bulb. She tried to chase it out with no success, so we hung our hummingbird feeder inside the garage so it could eat overnight and decided to tackle its extraction anew on Saturday morning.
Meanwhile, Joyce consulted the ever-wise and all-knowing Mr. Google. Using the search phrase “how to remove a hummingbird from your garage” turned up a ton of results; evidently this is a common problem where hummingbirds are plentiful.
All residential garage doors have a heavy cord with some kind of plastic handle that allows you to manually open the door without the automatic opener after pulling on this cord. These cords hang down from the track and ironically most are red, making them easy to see. It’s a known fact that hummingbirds are attracted to red, so attraction to these red cords and handles was a common possibility listed in many Google responses for hummers becoming trapped in garages.
Other common thoughts were hummingbirds' attraction to other large red or orange objects in those garages and hummingbirds' misunderstanding of enclosed spaces.
Tips for removing a hummingbird from one’s garage mostly involved hanging a feeder in the open garage door and enticing the little guys out that way. One suggestion was to catch them in the dark as they would probably land on the floor once they couldn’t see, but as tiny as she was that didn’t seem like the best plan to me.
Our first thought was to somehow capture the little bugger in a fishnet, but I thought the openings in the net would be big enough for her to just squirt through. Joyce came up with the idea of “herding” her out with an open umbrella. I climbed to the top of our step ladder and opened the umbrella, and I believe it might have worked had it not been for all the obstructions (light, hooks, and garage door tracks) on and near the ceiling. The hummingbird came within inches of me numerous times as she flitted around.
For "Plan B,” we borrowed a fishnet made from smaller mesh and decided to try a combination of enticement and capture. Since she seemed hungry and was not all that shy, we hung the feeder on a hook from the ceiling and I stood on the ladder mere inches from the feeder, hoping she would come and drink as I stood there. I held the net under the feeder and sure enough, in just a couple minutes she landed and drank.
I slowly raised the net but at my movement she flitted away. It took a while, but each time she returned to drink and each time I raised the net until it was just below the feeder. The next time she landed I quickly raised the net to the ceiling and had her captured. Before I could grasp her through the net, however, she wiggled out the side and was free again.
I repeated the process, and again finally had her in the net. This time I carefully grasped her tiny body through the fishnet and gingerly climbed to the floor and hurried outside, and all the while she scolded me with scared, angry chatters. With Joyce’s help, we released her from my grasp and from the net and she zipped away.
Throughout this adventure, I couldn’t help scoffing at the naysayers who believe all life on this planet just evolves from something else. As I watched this tiny bird mere inches from my face and as I carefully grasped her fragile little body through the net, I could see only one thing she could have come from, and that’s another hummingbird that was created by God to be a hummingbird in the first place.
Anyway, I guess Joyce and I can now add “Able to Successfully Free Trapped Hummingbirds” to our resumes.
Continue to Explore Kansas Outdoors!
Steve can be contacted by email at stevenrgilliland@gmail.com.