Middle Age Came for Me With a Hummingbird Feeder

What hummingbirds taught me about aging, curiosity and the completely rational desire to win at a hobby that has no winners

Eric Spitznagel,

AARP

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Published June 29, 2026

an illustration shows two middle aged men looking askance at each other’s hummingbird feeder

The hummingbirds don’t know they’re at the center of a middle-aged turf war.

Agata Nowicka

Middle age didn’t arrive with a sports car. It arrived with a plastic feeder shaped like a tiny airport bar.

The hummingbird feeder was a pandemic gift from my wife in late spring 2020, something to do while the world sorted itself out. I hung it in the backyard, filled it with sugar water and went inside feeling like I’d done something wholesome. Because a man who feeds hummingbirds is a man with his priorities in order. I assumed it’d be a phase, like sourdough or jigsaw puzzles or that three-week period when I watched every Star Wars movie in order.

I hung the feeder on a Saturday, and not one bird showed up over the next two days. I convinced myself that I’d done something wrong. Mixed the recipe badly, picked the wrong spot, committed an obscure offense against hummingbird sensibility. By day three, I’d mostly accepted that nature had rejected me personally.

Then one appeared. I was at the kitchen sink washing dishes, and a sudsy coffee cup nearly slipped out of my hands. The bird hovered for two seconds, gulped down its complimentary cocktail and vanished. I stood there gasping, like I’d just witnessed Springsteen playing an encore in my garage.

For a while, that was enough. I filled the feeder every few days, and they came, and I watched. The whole arrangement had a pleasing simplicity. The faster they emptied the feeder, the more victorious I felt. I told myself I was communing with nature. I may have been a little too generous with the sugar.

That lasted about two summers.

By the third year, I’d started tracking arrival times. Not formally, but I’d notice things, like which birds came at dawn versus late afternoon. Or whether I was seeing the same regulars or new arrivals passing through. Or if my numbers, in some vague and unscientific way, were going up or down.

The years went by. I got a second feeder, then opinions about placement, then a working knowledge of hummingbird behavior that I’ve deployed, unprompted, at more dinner parties than I care to admit. Then this summer arrived, and what had been a pleasing backyard hobby became something my wife would describe as “a problem” and I would describe as “a commitment.”

Looking back, I should have seen it coming. According to a December 2024 report from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the average American birder is 49 years old, and participation is “particularly strong” among those 55 and older. I am, as it turns out, exactly the target demographic for losing my mind over a backyard feeder. I might’ve stayed in that comfortable state of fascination indefinitely if it hadn’t been for Gary.

The Gary problem

I was standing at the kitchen window on a Tuesday morning, coffee going cold in my hand, when I noticed that my neighbor Gary had three hummingbirds at his feeder. I stood there for several minutes, too heartbroken to move.

He got two more later that same morning. I got zero. Zilch. Nada. I was being ghosted by hummingbirds.

Gary and I aren’t friends, exactly. We’re neighbors in the way that suburban men are neighbors. He’s my age, give or take, somewhere in the shadowy middle of his 50s. Our main mode of communication is silent nodding. We’ve exchanged maybe a dozen sentences in the years we’ve lived 20 feet apart. He also has a hummingbird feeder, which he put up after I debuted my hummingbird buffet. I’m not saying he stole my idea, but c’mon, he totally stole my idea!

Watching his five (five!) hummingbirds from my window, I felt something that wasn’t quite envy and wasn’t quite wounded pride. It was the specific sting of being rejected by a wild animal that doesn’t know I exist and isn’t capable of having an opinion about me. The hummingbirds weren’t choosing Gary. They were simply going where the nectar was, which was also, technically, my yard, which made it worse.

There’s no official scoreboard in hummingbirding, which is why I had to invent one. My goal wasn’t to dominate the neighborhood. My goal was to create a welcoming habitat that happened to outperform Gary’s. I began researching feeder placement, nectar concentration and optimal flower color combinations.

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The formula was where things got complicated. My wife, Kelly, had been watching me from a reasonable distance, the way you watch a person carry a piece of furniture that’s too heavy, waiting to see if they drop it.

“You’re putting too much sugar in,” she finally told me. “You’re gonna give them diabetes.”

She wasn’t entirely wrong. The Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute recommends a ratio of one part sugar to four parts water. I’d been running slightly hot, so I adjusted the formula and watched my hummingbird traffic decline like a Cubs bullpen in August.

a photo shows a hummingbird with its beak in a feeder

The author’s first, and possibly last, attempt at becoming a nature photographer.

Courtesy Eric Spitznagel

I tried to go back to the original ratio. The birds didn’t return in the same numbers. Whether this was because of the formula, the season, Gary’s presence as a competitor or simply the indifferent chaos of the natural world, I can’t say.

What I didn’t know yet was that a neuroscientist in Toronto had a more interesting explanation for all of it — one that had nothing to do with nectar ratios and everything to do with what happens to a 50-something brain when it finally finds something worth paying attention to.

Because this isn’t a coincidence, and it’s not entirely explained by the fact that people over 55 have more free time to stand at kitchen windows monitoring their neighbors’ feeder traffic. It is explained, at least partly, by what’s happening in our brains.

The subtle power of birdwatching (or anything-watching)

Earlier this year, the Journal of Neuroscience published a study that involved scanning the brains of 29 expert birders and 29 novices. Led by Erik Wing, a postdoctoral fellow at the Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest in Toronto, it found that the experts had denser, more structurally compact tissue in regions linked to attention and perception — differences that held up regardless of age.

I reached out to Wing, and not just because he’s got the perfect last name for somebody studying anything related to birds. I was looking for tips that might help me close the gap with Gary. He was patient with me, and also not remotely interested in my feeder problems. (“Unfortunately, I don’t have any special knowledge on this one,” he said, suppressing a laugh.) What Wing wanted to talk about wasn’t what was happening in the hummingbird’s head. It was what was happening in mine.

He told me that watching birds carefully isn’t just watching birds. Every time you spot a hummingbird and try to figure out which type it is — there are 366 different hummingbird species in North America alone — your brain is doing something genuinely complicated. It’s filtering out irrelevant information, pulling from memory and updating what it thought it knew.

Skilled birders, Wing said, develop “the need to separate sometimes very subtle patterns that differentiate separate species, and the need to develop concepts that are flexible so that the same species can be identified despite variability in regional appearance, age, sex and lighting conditions.”

That means your brain is learning to see past the obvious and find what actually matters. That’s a useful skill. It’s also one that tends to erode as we get older.

Wing was careful about what the study proved and what it didn’t. Experts’ brains look different from novices’ brains, but we can’t say for certain which came first: whether birding reshapes the brain, or whether people with certain attentional gifts simply gravitate toward birding.

“We still can’t prove a causal link between brain differences and birding experience,” said Wing. Fair enough. But he said something else that I’ve been sitting with ever since.

When I asked him why birding seems to grip older adults the way it does, he talked about a shift that happens somewhere in adulthood. When we’re young, we’re in explorer mode, grabbing at everything we can get our hands on. Somewhere along the way, that gives way to routine. We get very good at knowing what we already know. Which is fine. But it’s also how decades disappear.

Birding cracks that open again, said Wing, explaining, “Curiosity and ‘explore’ tendencies appear at every age.” The part of me standing at a window running informal tallies at seven in the morning is not, it turns out, the part of me that’s getting older. It’s the part of me that refuses to.

I thought about Gary’s feeder. I thought about the 11 minutes I’d spent watching hummingbirds choose the wrong yard. Then I went outside and added a third feeder.

What the hummingbirds taught me

I did eventually talk to Gary. It was a Saturday morning in late May, both of us out back at the same time with our coffees, doing the thing we’d apparently both been doing all spring without ever discussing it. He was wearing a Bad Brains T-shirt, which told me more about Gary in three seconds than two years of nodding at each other from our respective yards had. We’re probably more alike than either of us had bothered to find out.

an illustration shows multiple hummingbirds with their beaks in a feeder

The hummingbirds are blissfully unaware that two middle-aged men have turned their feeder habits into a competition.

Agata Nowicka

He mentioned he’d been getting a lot of activity lately. I mentioned I’d been getting some. We spoke in the vague, modest terms of men who are each concealing the full extent of their investment in a situation.

Then we both looked up at the same moment, because a hummingbird had appeared in the airspace between our yards, hovering exactly equidistant between his feeder and mine, as though running the numbers. We watched it. It went to his feeder.

I looked at Gary. Gary looked at me. He nodded once. I nodded once. The bird drank, vanished, and we went back inside.

The wages of paying attention

Molly Mather, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern University’s Mesulam Institute for Cognitive Neurology & Alzheimer’s Disease, points out that as people move through adulthood, they tend to drift away from future-focused, achievement-oriented pursuits and toward experiences that feel meaningful right now, in the present tense. Wing said something similar from a different direction: that birding drags you back into explorer mode, where you are genuinely curious and genuinely uncertain about something you don’t fully understand yet.

Together, what they describe is a 50-something man standing at a kitchen window, studying the world outside more than he has in years. Both of them were careful to say that the science doesn’t yet prove that any of this rewires the brain or delays cognitive decline.

But here’s what I know. I’m outside in the early morning, paying close attention to something small and fast and genuinely strange. The paying attention feels like it matters.

The hummingbirds don’t know that two middle-aged men in a Chicago suburb have organized a significant portion of their time around the question of whose yard they prefer. They’re just doing what they do: moving fast, burning through the world, vanishing before you’ve finished deciding how to feel about them.

I have a new formula. I’ve been refining it for three weeks. I’m not going to describe it here, because Gary is almost certainly an AARP member and I’m pretty sure he reads AARP. Hi, Gary. You’re going down, my friend. I intend to deploy the formula in the coming days, probably on a Tuesday morning, while you’re on the train. And there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.

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