Green Corner…Attracting Hummingbirds and Butterflies

QUOTE: “The butterfly is a flying flower,The flower a tethered butterfly” (Ponce Denis Écouchard Lebrun)

Attracting hummingbirds and butterflies to your garden can bring a sense of delight.

Hummingbirds, said to be nature’s perfect helicopters, are attracted to tubular-shaped flowers.

Humming birds are often heard — by their hum — before they are seen.

Their feather colours are a combination of brilliant iridescent and metallic. Their beaks are needle-like in shape.

They have extremely strong chest muscles that account for 30 percent of their body mass. These muscles enable them to roll their shoulder joints back and, using their wing tips projected in a flat figure of eight, they hover.

They establish this extraordinary feat of 200 beats per second in the same manner of a variable-pitch rotor on a helicopter.

By slightly altering the wing angle they can move forward, backward, sideways and with ease perform upside-down maneuvers. There are about 10,000 species of birds but only 328 kinds can hover.

Hummingbirds don’t have a sense of smell. They are attracted to colours — bright red, pink, and orange.

Hummingbirds enjoy flowering nectar-rich plants. Zinnias are a great attraction for them.

Vines which attract hummingbirds include morning glory.

But many are opportunistic feeders. As long as a flower has nectar, it doesn’t have to be tubular or red.

Hummingbirds are a gardener’s friend. Many gardeners say so, because they feed on insects such as mosquitoes and aphids.

Sometimes they glean the insects from bark or foliage and other times they will dart to and from a perch to feast on a cloud of mosquitoes.
Then, there is no more delightful decoration for a garden than nature’s own–butterflies.
On a warm sunny day these visitors provide color and motion that it is agreed by many gardeners, doubles the pleasure of gardening.
For these enthusiasts it is fortunate that it takes very little effort to make the yard attractive to butterflies! Butterflies like bright, sunny areas.
These insects are particularly attracted to hot-coloured, fragrant flowers.
The flower nectar they need for energy is available in lots of different flowering plants.
They will visit your yard in search of those that are most easily accessed by their long, coiled tongues, or proboscis, which enables them to reach deeply into the centre of flowers where the glands that produce the sweet nectar are located.
They get further nutrition from moisture from puddles and raindrops, rotting carrion and other liquids—even it is said human perspiration if you stand very still–that provide traces of minerals and nutrients not in nectar.
The Best Butterfly Blooms are composites, umbels, and panicles, whose clusters of small florets provide many sips plus a place to pause.
These include flowers that are brightly colored in lavender, purple, red, orange and yellow or , flat or tubular in varied lengths and fragrant particularly single-flowered types where the nectar is more accessible
Flowers which attract butterflies include zinnia, lantana, marigold and sunflowers.
By Clifford Stanley

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