This Week Outdoors: You'll be hearing a lot of media buzz about the two full moons in August, and the blue moon of August. However, August's full moon also has been known as the sturgeon moon, for being the best time for catching sturgeon; the red moon, because the rising moon has a reddish cast through the abundant haze at this time of year; the green corn moon; and the grain moon.
Q: Dozens of readers have asked about the lack of hummingbirds they were witnessing since about mid-summer. The same question arises in abundance every year in mid- to late July.
A: It's a matter of the natural cycle for the species here in Central Pennsylvania.
When the small birds arrive on their migration from the south in late winter to mid-spring, we notice some of them. Most of us are not ready with our sugar-water feeders or nectar plants when the real numbers of northward bound hummers first arrive, and we miss most of them.
The birds zip about the region, looking for their courtship and mating territories, again before most of us are ready to really take notice.
They find their mates, build their tiny nests in spots where we usually don't observe them and lay their eggs.
After mating, the male moves on, in search of other females. When all females in the area have been bred, the male's function is pretty much at an end. Many of the males begin their southward migration.
At the same time, the females settle onto their nests, limiting their travels and the amount of time they are available for our bird-watching.
Thus, at about the time most of us are ready to look for hummingbirds, the population in our backyards has thinned considerably.
We are now in the period, when the females have fledged their young and the young have left the nest. For a couple weeks, most of us who are looking will observe more hummingbirds than we've seen so far this year.
If you blink now, you will miss it and be left wondering what happened to all the hummingbirds this summer.
Even if you are spotting good numbers of the birds, hummingbird banders tell us there are many more of the tiny birds around us than we see at any one time. Based on their experience with capturing the hummers in mist-nets and similar devices, and with the data collected from the bands, they estimate that an area holds about five times that number of birds generally seen.
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