(bright music) - When we are working out in the yard, Tom and I often love to take a break and sit on the patio.

There, we enjoy the flowers in our pots, hanging baskets and retaining wall.

And if we're really lucky, hummingbirds will come to keep us company.

There's plenty of food for all of them, but no, they have to chase each other all around the yard.

Imagine my surprise in finding out that there is a festival dedicated to hummingbirds right here in Minnesota.

Let's go and find out more.

- [Narrator] Funding for "Prairie Yard and Garden" is provided by Heartland Motor Company, providing service to Minnesota and the Dakotas for over 30 years in the heart of truck country.

Heartland Motor Company.

We have your best interest at heart.

(bright music) Farmers Mutual Telephone Company and Federated Telephone Cooperative.

Proud to be powering Acira, pioneers in bringing state-of-the-art technology to our rural communities.

(bright music) Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleen in honor of Shalom Hill Farm, a non-profit rural education retreat center in a beautiful prairie setting near Windham, Minnesota.

And by friends of "Prairie Yard and Garden," a community of supporters like you who engage in the long-term growth of the series.

To become a friend of "Prairie Yard and Garden," visit pioneer.org/pyg.

(bright music) - I have mentioned before that many of the ideas for our show come from other people and from reading articles.

Last year, I read about an event called the Henderson Hummingbird Hurrah in a magazine I enjoy.

I clipped that article and did some research to find information and a contact.

That led me to Brenda Kotacek who was very familiar with "Prairie Yard and Garden" and said she would be glad to tell us about the hurrah.

Thanks, Brenda for letting us come.

- Thanks, Mary for coming.

We welcome you to our garden.

- Tell me, what is the Henderson Hummingbird Hurrah?

- Okay, the hurrah was started in 2008 as just a festival to honor the hummingbird, the ruby-throated hummingbird.

And it was started by Dolores Hagen.

She passed away in 2016, but she started it.

She started this whole garden.

Everything was all started by Dolores.

She loved all nature and all birds, but the hummingbird was her favorite.

So the festival every year, we do banding, we have speakers, we have garden tours in the garden, we have vendors and food and it's held always the third Saturday in August.

And the reason is that's when Dolores found that the most hummingbirds were in the garden.

In the middle of August to the end of August, a lot of the locals are here, the babies have fledged already and a lot of the ones from up north are already starting to head south.

And they know there are feeders here.

They know there's food for them to eat, that there's flowers and so they stop in too.

The hurrah started actually in Dolores's backyard, a couple blocks from here.

And she just had many, many hummingbirds and the first couple years, she had the hurrah in her yard.

But it got so big that she asked the city if she could use this land down here to build a garden and we could have our hurrah as a citywide event each year then.

So it expanded then.

We try to have the banding always in the morning.

We try to change the garden every year.

We're told what to plant each year.

We have like a master gardener that says, "This is what you should plant."

We have a lot of perennials that come up every year, but we try to change some of the annuals every year and we make sure that we always have plants that the butterflies and the hummingbirds like.

We add new features, we have our vendors food.

We always try to get nature speakers in to talk to our guests.

And we also have educational displays like the Monarch Ventures.

We have someone about bees, Minnesota Wildlife Refuge and Audubon Society.

They all have educational displays over by the food shack.

And we have a children's activity too.

They can paint, they can have their picture taken with their head in the hole.

They'll look like a big hummingbird.

And so we have something for all ages and it's all free.

- What is your background with gardening?

- Well, I like flowers.

I'm not as much of a gardener as a bird person.

I have a lot more experience with birds than I do with gardening.

But we have a lot of master gardeners and that help us what to plant, how to take care of them.

And I'm learning all the time with the plants and I know which plants the hummingbirds like, so I plant them at home too.

- How did you get started with the hurrah?

- I've always loved birds and I started as a volunteer back probably in 2010.

I just volunteered to help when they had their hurrah each year.

And then I retired from my job and I was able to become more of a full-time volunteer then.

- [Mary] Being a bird person, why are flowers important to the birds?

- [Brenda] The birds pollinate the flowers.

They get their food from the flowers.

The ones that have nectar, they drink from that and then they help pollinate the plants so it nurtures them.

So the hummingbirds like to build their nests up quite high in the trees and they have just a very small nest.

It's only about the size of a 50-cent piece and they try to make it look like a knot on a tree branch so that it's camouflage.

And they generally only have lay two eggs.

And in Minnesota, they nest once.

Because then, the babies are big enough to leave by fall when it gets cold.

Some places in the United States that hummingbirds may nest a couple times a year, but in Minnesota, it's too cold.

That second hatching may not make it, they may not make it out before it gets cold.

But yeah, they really are good at camouflaging.

I've only seen one in my life, a nest.

- So when do the hummingbirds generally arrive in Minnesota?

- Usually around May 1st.

I've seen them the earliest I've seen one, I've kept track since the year 2000.

The earliest I've seen one was April 12th and April 18th and April 21st.

But generally, it's around the 1st of May or the first week in May.

The females in the juveniles will stick around probably until the end of September, first part of October.

- So then do the males help take care of the babies too?

- No, they do not.

The female builds the nest, she feeds the babies.

She stays here and takes care of them until they leave in the fall.

The male does not help at all.

- [Mary] How can people find out more information about the hurrah?

- [Brenda] We do have a Facebook page.

It's under Henderson Hummingbird Hurrah and we also have a website.

The website is being worked on, but there is a lot of information on the website.

We're trying to get that updated to also include the National Ruby-Throated Hummingbird Center, but that is also a Henderson Hummingbird Hurrah is the website.

- [Mary] Was there something about feathers too that I was reading?

- [Brenda] Henderson Feathers is the organization, the nonprofit organization that heads up all of this.

It's all under the nonprofit of Henderson Feathers, which was started by Dolores Hagen back in 2008.

And she loved all birds and eagles too.

We have a lot of eagles here in Henderson 'cause the river is just right on the other side of the levee.

- I would like to find out more about the banding.

Can we go watch that?

- Oh sure.

Lori would love that.

(bright music) - Hi, I'm Lori Walewski and I work at Wolf Ridge Environmental Learning Center in Finland, Minnesota.

And I'm a naturalist and informal educator there.

- Lori, how do you get to be a bander of hummingbirds?

- I got my start as an intern at Wolf Ridge and by banding songbirds up there.

And so a teacher first got me interested in birds when I was in first grade, we'd have to do little reports with with birds and ruby-throated hummingbirds was one of the birds that I chose to look at.

So I think I've always had a love of birds.

And then when I was introduced to bird banding at Wolf Ridge, that just sort of carried over.

I had hummingbird feeders at my yard and I was like, "I wanna get to know these individuals.

Are these the same birds that are coming back year after year?"

And through the network of people who band birds, I met someone else who had a hummingbird permit and by doing an apprenticeship I was able to work with him and get my permit to band hummingbirds.

The permits are issued through the United States Geological Survey.

So it's a federal permit to band hummingbirds and it's a standalone permit different from other birds because they are so small and specialized.

- What's the purpose of banding hummingbirds?

- Well, like with any bird, it's to learn some things about them we don't know.

So we wanna learn things about like where they migrate, maybe what they eat, how long they live.

Those are some of the things that we can start to determine.

By putting the band on, we don't learn that, but if we catch the bird with the band on again, then we can start to determine some of those things.

- How many birds on the average do you band in a year?

- Well, myself, for hummingbirds, I probably band maybe 100 a year.

But there are folks that I know that band ruby-throated hummingbirds that live in Southern Illinois and they're doing five to 6,000 a summer.

So that's what they do.

They're retired and they have their homes that they go to, that have lots of feeders and they do that every single day.

And so it can be quite a few birds that can get banded.

- Do hummingbirds return to the same place each year?

- They certainly will, yeah.

If they find a territory that has lots of hummingbird feeders or lots of flowers, it's a really good habitat there.

Sure, they're gonna come back to the same place each year.

And I'm sure that you probably have hummingbird feeders at your house and if you don't have that up when they arrive, they're looking in that window.

They know right where that feeder was and they're asking for, "Hey, hey, get this out there."

So yes, if they find a good restaurant, they'll be back year after year.

- Have you ever caught some of the birds that have been banded before?

- I have.

In fact, I've caught some in my yard that I have branded previous years and I also had the opportunity that I got really lucky and I caught a bird that someone else had banded in Texas.

So I got information back on that band and I found out that it was banded as a hatch year bird in fall.

And I caught it in spring the next year in Northern Wisconsin.

I was actually banding there.

And so we learned from that that birds migrate at least from Texas to Northern Wisconsin and that it could live at least one year.

- That was my next question is what is the life expectancy of a hummingbird?

- I would say average life expectancy is probably one to three years.

Longevity records for ruby throat are up in the nine to 10-year range.

- [Mary] How many types of hummingbirds come to Minnesota?

- [Lori] In the eastern half of the United States, we have only one species of a hummingbirds that will nest and that is the ruby-throated hummingbird.

So they'll fly from here down to central or South America.

So if you think of Costa Rica, it's a great spot to go find wintering ruby-throated hummingbirds.

- [Mary] So when you catch a hummingbird, what do you do with it?

- [Lori] Well, the first thing is I need to identify to species and then I also need to identify to age and sex so I can determine what size band that I put on the bird.

- [Mary] How can you tell those things?

- [Lori] (chuckles) Well, we can take a look at their feathers, different measurements, their weight, their beak length, their wing length, all those things will help us figure those out.

- So about how much does a hummingbird weigh?

- Our average hummingbird, well, a ruby-throated hummingbird weighs about 3.5 grams.

The males are usually lighter weight and smaller and many other measurements than the females.

- [Mary] What in the world do you use to measure a hummingbird?

- So there's a varieties of tools that we use to weigh and measure the birds.

Obviously, they're really tiny and specialized.

So we have special pliers here that are used to close the band around the bird's leg.

And there's circles, you can see cut in here so they'll close it exactly so it won't pinch on the leg here.

So when I'm banding ruby throats, I'm actually using two different sizes of bands.

I use a slightly larger band on the females and this band is cut to a length of 5.6 millimeters long.

The males' is a little bit smaller.

This one's only gonna be 5.4 millimeters long.

- What do the bands look like?

- Well, they're right on here, so.

(Mary gasps) So yeah.

- [Mary] That's the band?

- So that is the band on there.

They are very tiny here.

This is some what I call blank bands that they were the strip from between the bands.

So part of being a hummingbird bander is you have to make the bands yourself.

So from the federal government, they'll send the bands to you and they're printed on a sheet of aluminum metal.

Now this is just a photocopy of that sheet and this has 300 bands on it.

And so each of these rows of bands gets cut so that it's 1.3 millimeters high.

And that's gonna be the same for whatever species of hummingbird that you band.

So if I was in Arizona and maybe I band a magnificent hummingbird, that's a very large hummingbird compared to a ruby throat, I would need to cut the band strip longer to make the band the proper size.

- [Mary] What are the measurements that you take?

- So I'll take a variety of different measurements.

One is I'm taking their beak length.

That is a characteristic that generally, in the female ruby throats is longer than the male.

So that can again help me identify perhaps the young birds that look just like the female by their sexes.

So the males tend to have smaller beaks, shorter wings, longer tails, and weigh less.

As an adult, the males will have the ruby throat and no white on the tips of their tails, whereas the female birds will have the white tips, longer beaks, longer wings, and shorter tails and just the white throat as opposed to the ruby throat.

To measure the length of the beak wing in tails, I use the calipers.

This is a digital calipers and I simply slide it out and hold it to the beak.

We can use my hummingbird here to demonstrate that.

And so I'm going to look at the exposed length of the beak.

And this hummingbird beak length is 41.04 millimeters.

- So is that pretty close to what it would be in real life?

- It is.

I was shocked by that too.

(both laugh) - Are you kidding?

- So well we can measure their beak that way.

We're going to measure their wing that way and we would measure from their wrist to the wing tip.

And then we'd also measure their tail length in the same method.

Taking the various measurements help us identify birds to perhaps their species or their sex.

- [Mary] How do you handle a hummingbird?

- Well, there's a variety of different ways that I can hold the bird, but often, when I'm taking those measurements, I'll place some in this is just a toe cut off a nylon.

And it makes it just a little bit easier to work with a bird that can be very fast and feisty and ready to go on its way.

So it doesn't escape, yeah.

- So do you submit the information that you gather to a central location?

- Yes, and that goes back to USGS and they collect all the data there.

And if anybody ever finds hummingbird or any other bird that has a band on it, you can go online and say that you found a lost band and that will direct you to the site and you read the number on the band and you will get information back telling you where that bird was originally banded, what kind of bird it was, how old it was, and any other information that they can share from the database.

- Well this has been absolutely fascinating.

I don't know about you guys, but doesn't she do a wonderful job?

(crowd applauding) - [Lori] Thank you.

- Thank you so much for teaching us.

- [Lori] You're welcome.

(bright music) - I have a question.

I've been seeing more Japanese beetles in my garden.

What's the latest on controlling them?

- Well, the latest on control, I'm sorry to have to brag about this, but at the arboretum, they're not much of a problem anymore.

We'll still see them and they'll still do a little bit of chewing damage, but our population has dropped about 90% in the last four years.

The biggest impact I think, to it has been drought.

Because female Japanese beetles love to lay their eggs in irrigated turf, dial back your irrigation.

You don't need a green lawn all summer long.

Just do it for those nice events that you might be having.

Any sort of parties that you're hosting, fine, green up your turf for that, but then let your turf go dormant.

Same thing with your garden beds.

If your plants are established, dial back the irrigation because the female beetles will not want to lay their eggs except anywhere in wet soil.

At the arboretum, we also think that our wild turkey populations have a huge impact on them.

We catch them in the Wilson Rose Garden where I'm standing every single morning before 7:00 AM cleaning up all of our roses.

They'll do the same thing to our grapevines as well.

And then the latest thing that I'm holding right here is actually a dead Japanese beetle that has a little egg on it.

The egg is from a parasitic wasp called the winsome fly, which is tachinid.

It was actually imported from the same region that the Japanese beetle came into the United States in the early 1900s.

The weird thing is in Minnesota, it's finally taking hold here.

It's taken quite a while for them to sync up with their life cycles, but the winsome fly is actually providing some really excellent control these last few years.

We have partnered up with University of Minnesota extension entomologists to track the rates of parasitism, meaning how many of our trapped beetles have winsome fly eggs on them?

And that number is going up.

Just a few years ago, we were at 15%.

This year, we maxed out at about 40% of our beetles.

So that's excellent biological control that's happening.

And then finally, other University of Minnesota entomologists have discovered that out east, there is a native fungus in the soil that will kill Japanese beetle grubs.

And where they've established that in Michigan and other states further out east, we're getting about 25 to 30% control of the grubs.

So with the turkeys, the tachinid, the winsomely and the fungus eating the grubs, we might not have to deal with too much Japanese beetle damage from now on.

(bright music) - [Narrator] Ask the Arboretum Experts has been brought to you by the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum in Chaska, dedicated to welcoming, informing, and inspiring all through outstanding displays, protected natural areas, horticultural research, and education.

(bright music) - Mary, the plants are vital to the hummingbirds and we've tried to plant as many as we can of the plants that attract the hummingbirds so that they can get their nectar.

These right along here are called kufiya and they look like little bat face.

They're a bat-faced Kufiya.

They love those plants, they love the salvia.

And also these little, this is like a heather.

It's a type of false heather plant.

And the tall one here, there's a white one back here and a pink one over here are nicotiana.

They love the nicotiana.

Any type of flower that looks like a little tube or trumpet, we have honeysuckle vines here and we have a trumpet vine and they love any flower that looks like a little trumpet where they can stick there a little beak on.

And they even drink from the flowers that come, of course, they're done now.

The flowers on the hosta.

They will drink from the flower that comes up from there.

Some people cut them all off and they don't let them flower.

But the hummingbirds love the flowers on the hosta.

We have more of the one over there too.

The more the red salvia.

Anything red really attracts them.

They love red.

But we found also that the purple or the dark blue salvia seem to attract them.

I've noticed they almost go more to the purple and the blue than they do the red.

But they do go to both.

- [Mary] What is that beautiful orange plant there?

- [Brenda] Tithonia is the name or it's Mexican sunflower.

And we've found the hummingbirds and the butterflies love that plant.

In fact, the sign that's over there on the banner that's over on our gate, those are pictures I took in the hummingbird garden.

And the one is of the hummingbirds sitting on the Mexican sunflower, so - [Mary] So is that an annual or is that a- - [Brenda] That's an annual.

It comes up, we buy the little plant about that big and it comes up, they're actually kinda small this year.

Sometimes, they grow even bigger than that.

- Who helps you figure out what to plant?

- We have a couple master gardeners that help us and master gardener Sarah has helped us this year.

And we've had other master gardeners over the year help.

And Sarah, she drew up a map of everything, all the gardens, was able to tell us.

She even told us where to go to get some of the plants 'cause she knew which ones were the nicest plants.

And then we also have the volunteers, a lot of volunteers that come and help us plant.

So there's probably 10 different volunteers that will come during planting.

and they will help water the plants, help come and weed.

And this year, we also had David Rice who is a retired teacher from the Minnesota New Country School.

And he lives right near here and he has a little greenhouse.

So he loves to propagate the plants and he furnished us with a lot of them when we were losing them because of the flooding this year.

- So then how do you raise the funds to do the hurrah and to purchase the plants?

- We're a non-profit, so we survive on donations.

And a lot of the local businesses will donate to us, like the fire department, the Local Lions.

And some of the businesses 'cause we draw a lot of people to town.

We also apply for grants.

And whatever grants we get will help go back into the garden and help us with the National Ruby-Throated Hummingbird Center to get that going.

- [Mary] What is that all about?

- [Brenda] Okay, we decided to start this National Ruby-Throated Hummingbird Center, which is in a building, it was a former church.

And we're able to lease it from the city.

The city bought it when it closed and we're able to lease it with the option to purchase it.

And we will have a gift shop in there.

We'll have educational displays, a lot of children's activities in there for where they can do art.

And we'll be able to have a lot more educational programs with speakers and all the different like Audubon, the Bloomberg Recovery, they will come and we'll be able to invite people to come.

And there are other organizations that donate to us.

Thrivent, they donate every year to us too, so.

- [Mary] And what is the plan for the opening for the Hummingbird Center?

- [Brenda] It's a ways away yet.

We have a lot of work.

We have to get the building handicap accessible.

There's a lot of changes that we wanna do.

We have to get all of our displays set up, so it's probably gonna be a few months yet.

And then there's a lot of landscaping around the church, which there'll be gardens there too.

We will always keep this garden.

This will always be the Hummingbird Garden, but we'll also have Hummingbird Gardens up there.

And it's only about 2 1/2 blocks from here.

Short little blocks.

Henderson does not have very big blocks, so it's within walking distance.

- [Mary] Thank you so much, Brenda, for letting us come and see this wonderful place and learn so much.

Just thanks.

- Thank you for visiting.

(bright music) - [Narrator] Funding for "Prairie Yard and Garden" is provided by Heartland Motor Company, providing service to Minnesota and the Dakotas for over 30 years in the heart of truck country.

Heartland Motor Company.

We have your best interest at heart.

Farmers Mutual Telephone Company and Federated Telephone Cooperative.

Proud to be powering Acira, pioneers in bringing state-of-the-art technology to our rural communities.

Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleen in honor of Shalom Hill Farm, a non-profit rural education retreat center in a beautiful prairie setting near Windham, Minnesota.

And by friends of "Prairie Yard and Garden," a community of supporters like you who engage in the long-term growth of the series.

To become a friend of "Prairie Yard and Garden," visit pioneer.org/pyg.

(bright music)