Porch & Bloom
The Last Fill-Up: Why a Tennessee Potter Says This Is the Hardest Month of a Hummingbird's Year, and What She Keeps in Her Flower Bed
Almost everyone who loves hummingbirds knows to put a feeder out by May. Far fewer know that the weeks that matter most are happening right now, in late September, when a bird no heavier than a penny has to nearly double its weight before it crosses the Gulf of Mexico without stopping. Evie Pruitt, 72, has spent thirty-one summers in an old tobacco barn in East Tennessee finding out where hummingbirds actually eat, and what happens to those places in the fall. This is her last season at the wheel. What she has written down is worth more than anything she ever fired.
Evie Pruitt, 72, in her mother's zinnia bed behind the old tobacco barn where she has made them since 1996. Greeneville, Tennessee.
Evening in Greeneville: A Barn That Smells of Wet Clay
The workshop is a tobacco barn behind the house, the kind East Tennessee used to hang burley in every fall. There is a potter's wheel under the only window, a brick kiln in the corner that her husband Dale built for her in 1986, and a row of small, round, unglazed pots along a plank shelf, none of them bigger than a softball. Evie Pruitt does not look up. Her thumbs are inside a turning lump of clay, easing it into a round belly with a narrow flower mouth at the top. She has been making this same shape since 1996.
"Quitting's not the hard part," she says, still watching the clay. "It's what I don't see anymore. Mama had them working her zinnias all through September, and every yard on this road had a bed like hers. You'd stand on the back step of an evening and count. Eleven, one night. Eleven. Now I drive into town in September and every bed's cut back and every hook's empty."
Evie at the wheel this September, throwing some of the last she will ever make. The kiln in the corner, Dale built it for her in 1986.
What Everyone Knows About Hummingbirds, and the Part Nobody Mentions
You do not need telling that birds have had a hard few decades. North America has nearly three billion fewer birds than it did in 1970 , more than one in every four. Out West, some hummingbirds have lost more than half their numbers; the rufous is down by roughly seventy percent. Even the ruby-throat, the only hummingbird that nests in the eastern half of the country, has slipped about seventeen percent since 2004. That has been in the papers. What has not been in the papers is what happens to one particular hummingbird, in one particular backyard, in the third week of September. That is what Evie has spent thirty-one summers writing down.
"Everybody talks about spring," she says. "Have your feeders up by Mother's Day, that's what Mama said, and she was right. But spring's the easy part. In spring the whole world's blooming. September's the hard one. September's when everybody's done."
Her mother, Ida Mae Carver, kept a bed of zinnias, red salvia and bee balm along the fence of the farmhouse outside Greeneville where Evie grew up and still lives, for forty years, and never once hung a feeder from the gutter. She set a jelly jar of sugar water down among the flowers, at knee height, where the birds were already working. That is older wisdom than it sounds. The first hummingbird feeder anyone ever wrote down, in 1900, was a paper trumpet flower wrapped around a small glass bottle. The first feeder sold in stores did not arrive until 1950, and it was a bottle made to hang. Within a generation the feeder had left the flower bed for the eaves, and by the time most of us bought one, it was red plastic.
Where a Hummingbird Eats in Late September, and What Happens to It
Here is the question almost nobody asks, and this month it is the only one that matters: a young ruby-throat is passing over your county tonight, and he has to find fuel. Where, exactly, is it?
A ruby-throat weighs a little over three grams. Before it crosses the Gulf of Mexico it has to put on nearly as much again, up to about six grams , then fly as far as five hundred miles without stopping , eighteen to twenty-two hours over open water. It comes down on the other side at around two and a half grams. To get there it has to eat every ten or fifteen minutes, all day, for weeks. For every bird hatched this summer, it is the first time it has ever made the trip.
The Five Places a Hummingbird Looks for Fuel in September
Garden flowers. The salvia, the zinnias, the bee balm.
The best food he has, and the first to go. "And what happens to a flower bed at the end of September?" Evie says. "It gets cut back." The shears come out in exactly the weeks he needs it most.
Wildflowers along the roads and creeks.
Jewelweed, trumpet creeper, the last of the thistle. Mowed with the ditches, or finished by the first cold night.
Small insects and spiders.
A hummingbird cannot live on sugar alone; the gnats and tiny flies are his protein. They thin out as the nights cool, and faster wherever the yard gets sprayed.
Porch feeders.
Being taken in all over the country this month, by people who have heard that a feeder left out will stop the birds from migrating. The Smithsonian's National Zoo calls that "a myth." It doesn't stop them. It just leaves them hungry.
The one feeder still standing in a flower bed.
"Which is the whole reason I do this," Evie says.
Read that list again and notice what it is really telling you. Four of those five disappear in the same three weeks. Not out of meanness. They disappear because the season feels over to us. To the bird, it is the most important stretch of the year.
That is the whole argument for a feeder this month, and it is not the argument the stores make. It is not that a feeder beats a flower; a bed nobody cuts back beats anything anyone can sell you. It is that in most American yards in late September there is no bed left, no roadside, and no porch feeder , and the one thing you can put out in five minutes that will still be there in October is a red flower full of sugar water.
Where most feeders hang: sun-faded plastic, ten feet above the nearest flower.
"The Bird People All Say Plant Flowers Instead"
They do. Put the question to Evie and she does not argue with it for a second.
"They're right," she says. "A bed of salvia and trumpet vine you never cut back beats anything I ever made, and it feeds them bugs besides. If you've got that, keep it, and don't send me a dime."
She lifts her foot off the wheel.
"But go look at the yards on your road in September. Lawn. A strip of mulch along the foundation. A feeder hanging off the gutter that's been out since June. Telling folks to plant a whole pollinator garden by next Tuesday isn't fair, and most of them won't. A feeder in the bed by the back step, they'll do. Five minutes."
Audubon says much the same: native flowers are the best nectar a hummingbird can get, and a well-kept sugar-water feeder is a sound way to add to them. Add to them. "Good," says Evie. "That's all I ever claimed. It's a flower that doesn't quit in September."
The Feeders Bird Rescuers Wish Nobody Would Hang
Which brings us to the shelf by the checkout at every hardware store in America. Red plastic bottles, yellow plastic flowers, eight ports and a hook, a few dollars apiece: the cheapest thing in the category, the easiest to find, and the kind that people who nurse hummingbirds back to health spend a good part of every summer warning against.
Plastic has a problem nobody prints on the box. It sits in the sun all day with sugar water inside it. It fades, turns brittle and cracks, and every scratch and hairline crack is a place for black mold to take hold where no brush can reach. Mold in a feeder can make a hummingbird's tongue swell until it can no longer feed. There are also open questions about what sun-warmed plastic gives off into what's inside it, BPA among them, which is why a good many longtime hummingbird people have quietly gone over to glass or glazed clay.
"I'm not going to cook their sugar water in plastic in the sun all day," Evie says. "I wouldn't drink out of it. Why would they."
Evie has spent thirty-one summers arriving at the same conclusion from the other end, and she can tell you exactly which four things do the damage.
Four Things That Make a Feeder Worse Than No Feeder at All
1. "The Leaky Bottle": an upside-down reservoir over a base
"It drips. Maybe not the first week, but it drips, in the sun and in the wind." Every drop on the porch rail is an invitation to ants, bees and yellowjackets, and a hummingbird that finds the ports crowded with wasps goes somewhere else.
2. "The Yellow Guard": yellow bee guards and plastic flowers on the ports
"Yellow's the bee color. You've hung a sign for the very thing you're trying to keep out." Bird groups from Audubon down advise avoiding feeders with yellow on them for exactly this reason.
3. "The One Big Feeder": eight ports, a quart of sugar water, hung in the open
"That's not a feeder, that's a castle, and one bully male's the king of it." A single territorial bird will sit in a nearby tree all day and run off every other hummingbird that comes near, in the very weeks they all need to eat.
4. "The Narrow Neck": a bottle you can't get a brush into
"If you can't scrub it, it's growing something." And a hummingbird that tastes spoiled nectar at a feeder often will not come back to that feeder at all, even after it's clean.
"That's the bit that gets me," Evie says. "Somebody spent good money meaning nothing but well. And what they've hung is the one thing in the yard a hummingbird's got a reason to skip."
The alternative: a red flower at flower height, right where they're already looking.
Thirty-One Summers of Going Out to Count: What Evie Found Out
Evie Pruitt did not set out to make anything for birds. She taught art at the county middle school for twenty-eight years and threw pots at night, mugs and pie plates for the craft fair over in Jonesborough. When her mother died in February of 1996, Evie promised herself she would keep Ida Mae's zinnia bed going. Her mother's old jelly jar had cracked, so that spring she did what everybody did: bought a red plastic feeder at the hardware store and hung it off the porch above the bed.
It dripped. The ants found it inside a week. One male took up a post in the dogwood and ran off everything else that came. By July, the bed her mother had kept for forty years had exactly one hummingbird in it, and he was mean.
"So I did the only thing I knew how to do," she says. "I went out to the barn and threw one." A small round belly, a flower mouth at the top, her mother's zinnias painted on by hand. Dale cut her a length of rebar, and she pushed it into the middle of the bed at flower height. "Four days later I looked out the kitchen window and there was a little green female on it, just drinking. I sat down at the table and wrote down the date. I don't know why. I just did."
Then she threw another for the bed by the mailbox, and wrote that down too. That is the whole method and she has never changed it: make one, put it in a bed, go out at evening and count, write down what you saw. By the fourteenth summer she wanted to settle something for good. In 2009, to Dale's great amusement, she hung one of the big eight-port feeders from the store back up on the porch, filled it every morning, and counted it against three of hers in three separate beds. Same yard. Same evenings.
The Bloom-Line Rule: Why Small Details Decide Whether a Hummingbird Stops
A hummingbird on the move does not scan your gutters. Migrating ruby-throats follow the flowers; in spring they move north with the first blooms, and in fall they refuel wherever something is still in bloom. Birds & Blooms puts the advice plainly: place a feeder "close to or among the colorful hummingbird flowers in your garden. This should create a target area for the birds."
What decides whether he stops is rarely the sugar on its own. It is whether he can spot it at a glance, get at it without a fight, and trust what's in it. "He doesn't need more sugar," Evie says. "He needs it where he's already looking, and he needs more than one place a bully can't guard."
The Bloom-Line Rule
"The Red Flower": the feeding port on top
Red is a hummingbird's signpost. As Audubon has put it, "The color on your feeder is enough to attract them," so nothing red ever goes in the water. Plain white sugar and water, one to four. "Mama never dyed anything. The flowers aren't dyed."
"Flower Height": the 24-inch stake
It puts the red flower in the bloom line, among the salvia and the zinnias, instead of up under the eaves. "They don't look up at your gutter. They look at flowers."
"The Top Port": the belly sits upright
Nothing hangs upside down, so there is no vacuum to break and no slow drip down the side. Cornell's Lab of Ornithology notes that feeders with their ports in the top are "fairly bee- and wasp-proof." "No drip, no sticky rail, nothing calling the yellowjackets."
"The Small Belly": about six ounces
Not a compromise, and not a small version of something bigger: it is the size Evie arrived at after thirty-one summers of making them bigger and making them smaller, and it is the size her notebooks say gets emptied. Enough for a couple of days of visitors, small enough that the sugar water gets drunk before it can turn. "Folks think bigger's kinder. It isn't. A big feeder is just old sugar water."
"The Wide Mouth": nothing you can't scrub
The flower lifts straight off and a bottle brush reaches every inch. The inside is glazed smooth; the crackle is on the outside only, where it belongs. No plastic anywhere near the sugar water. "If you can't scrub it, don't hang it."
"Out of Sight": more places, not a bigger one
Cornell's Lab of Ornithology: "four tiny feeders with one feeding port each... will attract and maintain more hummingbirds than one large feeder with eight ports." Two, three or four in separate beds, out of sight of one another, and no single bird can guard them all.
Left: one big feeder, one bully. Right: the way Evie has set them out since 1996.
"One Bird, and Seven"
Evie takes the notebooks down from the shelf over the kitchen sink: not one book but thirty-one black-and-white composition books, held together with a stretched-out rubber band. More than six thousand entries, one line for every evening she went out to count.
"Summer of oh-nine," she says, finding the page with her finger. "September the fourteenth. Big feeder on the porch: one. Same bird all day, sat in the dogwood and ran everybody off. My three in the beds: seven. Same yard, same evening, forty feet apart." She shrugs. "Seven's a lot of birds to leave hungry."
She turns further back, to 2004 and three feeders that went to a woman in Morristown. "She calls me every April with the date the first one comes back to the same bed. Twenty-two years. I've got the whole run of them written down in her voice."
That is not just sentiment. Hummingbird experts Kenn and Kimberly Kaufman put it plainly: hummingbirds "may return to the same spots where they've found food in the past, even after migrating thousands of miles." A bird that fills up in your flower bed this September may be the one hovering over the same spot next April.
Some people would call it more than that. Dale died in the spring of 2019. For thirty years he had sat on the porch swing of an evening and talked to the hummingbirds working the zinnia bed, as if they were neighbors. The morning after the funeral, one came and hung in the air outside the kitchen window, right over that bed, for as long as it took Evie to set down her coffee. "I don't know if I believe it," she says. "But I quit arguing with it."
Thirty-one notebooks, thirty-one summers. Every first arrival, every bed, every evening count.
Do This First. It Costs Nothing.
Before anybody sends Evie a dollar, she would like a word about your porch feeder: leave it up. The idea that a feeder keeps hummingbirds from migrating is, in the words of the Smithsonian's National Zoo, "a myth." Texas Parks & Wildlife says a feeder left out "may help some of those stragglers along who were slowed by illness or late nesting attempts." The usual rule of thumb is to take it down two weeks after you see your last hummingbird, not before.
Second: don't cut back your salvia, zinnias or bee balm yet. Let the first frost do it. Every bloom left standing in late September is a meal for something on its way south.
Third: sugar water, done right. One part plain white sugar to four parts water. No red dye; the red belongs on the feeder, not in the bird. Never honey, which can grow a fungus that is fatal to hummingbirds. Keep it in the shade, and change it every few days while it's still warm out.
"Do all that before you buy a thing from me," Evie says. "A feeder in a yard where everything else got cut back is a start. A feeder in a yard that's still blooming is a filling station."
What People Write Back After a Season
"I'd never once thought about September. I always took my feeder down on Labor Day because my neighbor said they'd forget to leave. After reading this I put Evie's in the salvia by the back step instead. Three days later there were two young ones squabbling over it at suppertime. My husband stood at the sliding door with his coffee going cold, which he will deny."
Carol M., Lexington, KY
"What I didn't expect was that it would be the prettiest thing in the garden. Every feeder I ever owned was red plastic I was half ashamed of. This one sits in the zinnias like it grew there, and I can see it from the kitchen sink, which, as Evie says, is rather the whole idea."
Diane W., Asheville, NC
The Questions That Come Up Most
I've never seen a hummingbird in my yard. Is there any point?
"Commonest question there is, and the answer's nearly always yes. In September they're passing through everywhere, and they're passing through looking. He doesn't have to live in your yard. He has to fly over it and see one red flower. Give it a full season. Plenty of folks call me the second spring, not the first."
Isn't it too late in the year to put one out?
"Late September's the best two weeks of the whole year to put one out, not the worst. That's exactly when this summer's young are on the move and at their hungriest. A bird that fills up in your bed now may come back looking for that same spot in April. Leave it out two weeks past the last one you see."
Won't bees and ants get into it?
"Bees come for drips and for yellow, and there's neither on it. Keep it in the shade, and if the bees find it anyway, move it a few feet. Ants I won't lie to you about. Nothing on a stake stops an ant. But with no sticky drip down the side, there's a lot less to bring them up."
What do I do with it in winter?
"It's clay, and clay and frozen water don't get along. Before the hard freezes, empty it and bring the belly inside. Leave the stake right where it is. Come spring it'll be standing in the exact spot they remember."
6:48pm, a backyard outside Chattanooga. A young ruby-throat, filling up for the Gulf.
A Craft Ends This Fall, and So Does the Supply
After thirty-one summers at the wheel, Evie has come to a decision that nobody forced on her but that her hands have made for her. It is arthritis, at the base of both thumbs, and it has been getting worse for six years. She can still paint. She can still glaze and load the kiln. She can even still center a lump of clay, slowly, with her elbows braced on her knees. But the last pull, the thin flower mouth at the top that has to rise straight and even without a wobble, is going.
"The belly I can still do," she says. "It's the mouth. If the mouth isn't true, the flower won't seat. If the flower won't seat, it drips, and then I've made the very thing I've been against for thirty years. I won't sell a crooked one. Dale would have had something to say about that."
Her daughter Rhonda is a nurse in Johnson City and has never cared for clay. There is no apprentice. When Evie stops, thirty-one summers of knowing go quiet with her: the notebooks, the evening counts, the feel for exactly how thin a flower mouth can be pulled before it slumps in the kiln.
What remains are the pieces from this, her last season at the wheel, thrown a few a day, with more of them broken back into the clay bucket than kept. There were 94 finished ones on the barn shelves when we visited in September. They are the final ones that will ever come out of that barn.
"The Money Was Never the Reason. It Still Isn't."
Evie could ask more, and anyone who has held one would understand why. She has kept the final run deliberately low. Not as a sale. Not as a clearance. As a gesture.
Her granddaughter Kaylee, 26, runs the online side through Backroad Goods , a small shop she set up from her apartment in Knoxville when the orders got past what a kitchen phone could handle. "Turns out there are thousands of people who've been looking for exactly this," she says. "Something made by somebody who actually went out every evening and counted."
Evie's Bloom-Line Feeder, in Brief
Made by one pair of hands:
every belly is thrown, painted and fired by Evie Pruitt in her barn in Greeneville, Tennessee. Not a factory, not a production line. Each one carries thirty-one summers and more than six thousand notebook entries behind it.
The Bloom-Line Rule:
built to put sugar water where hummingbirds are already looking: at flower height, in a red flower, among your blooms, in the weeks they need it most.
Sized for the bird:
a 24-inch antique-bronze steel stake with a hand-shaped leaf, bent to Dale's old pattern by a welder in nearby Mosheim. A belly about 3½ inches across holding roughly 6 ounces, one red flower port on top. The flower lifts off for filling and a bottle brush reaches every inch. Smooth-glazed inside, crackle outside. No plastic touches the sugar water.
Three patterns:
red flowers, blue flowers, or a blue leaf band. Take one, or put two to four in separate beds, out of sight of one another, the way bird experts advise.
Strictly the last run: 94 remained
when this article went to press. The final pieces from Evie's barn: no restock, no successor, no second batch.
Red flowers, blue flowers or a blue leaf band. Every one painted by hand.
Where They Are Sold
Evie's Bloom-Line Feeder is sold through Backroad Goods , the small online shop her granddaughter Kaylee runs. It is not in garden centers and not on any marketplace, for the plain reason that one woman in a tobacco barn in East Tennessee cannot supply them.
Painted by hand, one at a time, at Evie's kitchen table. No two are quite alike.
This Fall Only. Then the Barn Doors Close.
The season is not over. It is at its most urgent. Across the East this month, this summer's young ruby-throats are putting on the three extra grams they need for a five-hundred-mile crossing none of them has ever made, and they have only a few weeks left to do it. They will cross yard after yard after yard and find, in most of them, a bed that's been cut back and a hook where the feeder used to hang. The ones that do find a stop may well come back to it in spring. And the shelves in Greeneville are emptier every week: the run before this one sold through in nine days.
Nothing to Lose: The Whole-Season Guarantee
Nothing about a hummingbird runs on your schedule, so the guarantee isn't tied to a clock. Put it in the bed. If you are not entirely happy with the feeder itself, the clay, the painting, the weight of it in your hand, send it back for a full refund. No conditions, no deadline, no forms. Evie stands behind every piece that leaves her barn, and so does Backroad Goods .
More From the Beds They Went To
"I volunteer with a licensed wildlife rehabilitator, and every fall we see what a bad feeder does: moldy ports, sticky feathers, young birds too light to make the crossing. The things Evie thinks about, no drip, no yellow, a mouth you can actually scrub, more than one place to eat, are exactly the things we see go wrong. It's the only one I tell people to buy."
Marcy L., Huntsville, AL
"We ordered three and put them out like she says, one by the mailbox, one by the patio, one outside the kitchen window. Ordered the second week of September, had them in the ground by the twentieth, and that same evening there was a little one on the red one. We hadn't seen a hummingbird in this yard since about 2018. I sat on the back step until it was dark just to be sure I hadn't imagined it."
Patricia H., Columbus, OH
"I'd always assumed the pretty ones were ornaments and the useful ones were ugly, and you had to pick. Turns out that was just what everybody was selling. This is both, and I'm a little put out it took me this long to find it."
Janet D., Roanoke, VA
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