Who Invented the Hummingbird Feeder? The 98-Year History of a Design That Still Leaks

It started with a magazine article

In June 1928, National Geographic ran a piece by Margaret Bodine called "Holiday with Humming Birds." A man named Laurence Webster read it, and had a glass blower make a small feeder for his wife May at their summer place in Holderness, New Hampshire.

May Rogers Webster turned out to have a remarkable gift for it. She became known for taming hummingbirds — birds that would come to her hand — and the feeder her husband had made for her is still called the Webster feeder by the people who collect them.

It took twenty-two years and her death before anyone sold one. In 1950, the Webster design became the first commercially produced hummingbird feeder in the world.

Then came the IV bottle

In 1958 a pet supply distributor in Denver decided to move into bird feeding, and went looking for a way to hold sugar water where a hummingbird could reach it and gravity could not spill it.

The answer they landed on was the medical IV bottle. Inverted, sealed, drawing down slowly under vacuum. It was cheap to make in plastic, it was already a solved engineering problem, and it worked.

It worked so well that nearly seventy years later, most of the feeders sold in America are still that same idea.

Which is worth sitting with for a second, because the IV bottle was designed to hang in a climate-controlled hospital room. Not on a south-facing porch in July.

The two designs, and what each one costs you

Almost every feeder you can buy is one of two things.

Vacuum feeders

The inverted bottle — the IV lineage. A reservoir above, ports below, air pressure holding the nectar in. They are easy to fill, they hold a lot, and they meter nectar out over time.

They also leak. Not because they are badly made, but because of what they are: a sealed vessel full of liquid and trapped air. Warm the air and it expands, and the nectar has exactly one place to go. A loose seal does it, a low nectar level does it, a gust of wind does it, and a hot afternoon does it reliably.

Every drip lands on your deck, and every drop on your deck is an advertisement to ants. If that is the problem you are living with, we wrote about keeping ants out of a hummingbird feeder separately.

Saucer feeders

Saucer feeders turn the whole thing upside down. The nectar sits in a shallow bowl and the bird probes down into it. Because nothing is under pressure, they essentially do not leak — a real advantage, and the main reason serious hummingbird people tend to own them.

Their failure is quieter. Many of them are genuinely hard to clean, and a feeder that is hard to clean is a feeder that gets cleaned less often.

That is the more dangerous problem of the two. A feeder that drips is annoying. A feeder with mould in the ports makes birds sick. If you are not sure how often yours needs doing, start with how to clean a hummingbird feeder.

The plastic flowers are decoration

Those little moulded flowers around the feeding ports do nothing to keep insects out.

What actually works is a bee guard — a mesh or cage over the port, sized so a hummingbird's tongue reaches the nectar and a wasp's mouthparts do not. It is a geometry problem, and it is solved or not solved at the design stage. You cannot add it later.

So here is what I am doing

I have been working on a feeder. It should be available in February.

NectarBloom™ started because I could not find a nectar I felt good about putting out for my own birds — everything on the shelf was dyed, cut with filler, or vague about what was in it. Feeders turned out to be the same problem one step further along. Ninety-eight years of iteration, and the thing still mostly gets designed around what photographs well and what costs least to mould.

It is being finalised right now, which means a couple of the decisions are still genuinely open. I would rather you made them than me.

Two decisions still open

Recycled material, or virgin?

Recycled is the better answer environmentally and it is the one I want to make. It also costs more, and depending on the source it can vary slightly in shade from batch to batch — two feeders from the same run might not be exactly the same colour. I do not think that matters. Some people will. Does it matter to you?

Red ports, or clear?

This one goes to the heart of everything I have written about nectar.

Hummingbirds are drawn to red. That part is real. What was never true is that the nectar needs to be red — the birds are responding to the feeder, not the liquid. That is the whole reason red dye was always unnecessary.

So red ports do the job the dye was pretending to do. The argument against is that some people want a feeder that disappears into the garden rather than announcing itself, and muted or clear ports simply look better on a porch.

Red works harder. Clear looks better. I honestly do not know which one you want.

Tell me what is wrong with yours

I am not going to tell you this will be the best feeder ever made. I have not finished building it. Anyone who tells you their product is the best in the industry before it ships is selling you something.

What I can tell you is that it will be designed around the answers readers give me, by someone who has spent a year thinking about what actually happens to sugar water in a plastic bottle in August.

The poll on the most annoying thing about your current feeder went out to subscribers in this week's issue — it is still open, and I am reading every result. If you are not on the list yet, subscribing means the next one comes to you.

In the meantime, if you are still seeing birds, the migration map shows where readers are reporting them right now.

Sources

• Margaret L. Bodine, "Holiday with Humming Birds," National Geographic, June 1928, pp. 731–742
• May Rogers Webster
• Bird Watcher's Digest — tips on choosing hummingbird feeders
• Tejas Hummer