How To Use Leftover Fruit To Help Attract More Hummingbirds To Your Yard

There may be no more exciting avian visitor to the backyard than a hummingbird. The thrumming of their wings announces their presence as they zoom into your garden and flit from one flower to the next, dipping their long beaks in to drink the nectar. If you want to welcome these tiny, delicate visitors, a hummingbird feeder filled with sugar water is always a welcome food source for the birds. You can also plant certain fruits and herbs to attract hummingbirds and other flighted friends. But one trick to feed hummingbirds that you might not have heard of is leaving out leftover fruit.

If you sit in your backyard and watch hummingbirds go about their day, it would appear that they feed entirely on nectar. Indeed, that is quite a common belief, and the fact that they eat every 10 to 15 minutes throughout the day gets bandied about quite a bit. But while hummingbirds do drink plenty of nectar — their beaks are evolved for this purpose, after all — their diet is actually much more complex than that. The nectar in their diet is great for supplying the birds with carbohydrates, but building even a body so tiny and delicate as theirs requires protein as well — and that's where the leftover fruit comes in. Hummingbirds get their protein intake from eating tiny insects like ants, aphids, gnats, mosquitoes, spiders, and fruit flies, with these insects actually making up around 80% of the birds' diets. The fruit brings the bugs, and the bugs bring the birds.

The method for attracting fruit flies to your yard is, as you might expect, quite simple. All you do is take any set of guidelines for how to keep fruit flies out of your kitchen, and reverse them. Fruit flies are attracted to fermenting sugars on moist surfaces, as occurs with overripe fruits beginning to turn. So all you need to do is put out your overripe fruits somewhere that they'll stay moist and begin to ferment, and you can trust the fruit flies to do the rest.

In practice, this might look like hanging a squishy brown banana — or even just the peel — near the hummingbird feeder in your yard. The overripe banana will attract the hummingbirds as soon as the fruit flies show up, which never seems to take very long. Hummingbirds that are already accustomed to stopping in for a drink of nectar will be delighted at the additional food source, swinging by quite regularly to clean up any and all fruit flies in the vicinity.

Obviously, this method is not exclusive to bananas. Any and all rotting fruits and vegetables will attract fruit flies and other small insects, and the hummingbirds will be more than happy to take part in the entomological buffet. One word of warning, though: While it might be tempting to simply toss these overripe fruits in the garden, it really is best to hang them at least 4 feet off the ground. Any lower than that, and the hummingbirds may still show up to feed, but they will be in danger from housecats and other terrestrial predators. Suspended in the air, though, especially beside a sugar-water feeder, you'll have a whole spread for those favorite avian visitors.