Mark your calendar now for the ever-growing, ever more popular Sedona Hummingbird Festival that will take place in Sedona, Arizona – the most beautiful place in America to see hummingbirds. Presented by the International Hummingbird Society, the Festival is located in the heart of Sedona's spectacular red rock landscape. Plus, the stars of the event are the hummingbirds – there are dozens of hummingbirds that visit the feeders right at Hummingbird Central – the Sedona Performing Arts Center – and admission is Free!
You can see even more hummingbirds at hummingbird banding locations and on the Gardens Tour. As many as 8 species of hummers can be found in the Sedona area during the festival – how many will you see? Mid-summer Festival dates are Friday thru Sunday, July 24 to 26, with Workshops preceding the Festival on Thursday July 23. But wait, July in Arizona? Sedona is located north of Phoenix, south of Flagstaff, where there are higher elevations and mild temperatures. And July is peak time to see the most hummingbirds as well as the greatest variety of species – as many as 8 different species of hummingbirds, plus many other avian attractions.
Admission is Free to Hummingbird Central, where many of the activities take place, but you will want to look into purchasing tickets for off-site activities and speaker presentations in advance. This popular festival features an array of activities for visitors and local people alike, including 14 different speaker presentations on a variety of hummingbird-related topics, the hummingbird gardens tour, banding demonstrations, birding field trips, and the hummingbird marketplace filled with hummingbird-related products, gifts, and art; plus a photo contest, Kids' Day activities, a raffle, a display of hummingbird paintings by local artists, a festival dinner, and a plant sale!
There are also Pre-festival Workshops that provide exceptional information about how to photograph hummingbirds, and how to get started painting hummingbirds. For more information, take a look at Sedona Hummingbird Festival - July 24-26, 2026 - Come Join Us!
May Notes
For every backyard birder, since you have likely already added your summer feeders and foods to your feeding station, or started a second feeder site with an oriole feeder with grape jelly and a hummingbird feeder with sugar-water nectar, it's important to keep feeders clean and filled as best you can during this peak of spring songbird migration. As migration winds down, because we believe that some orioles and hummingbirds will stay and nest where they find a dependable source of food and water, along with the right nesting habitat – as long as you are within the species' nesting range.
At the same time, check your water daily and keep the water level below 2 inches so small birds can bathe. Continue to fill your seed feeders too – providing black-oil sunflower seeds and nyjer thistle seeds is rewarding, and good ole dependable no-melt suet is valuable to many birds throughout the year. In short, summer is not a down period for feeding birds, it's actually a period when a different seasonal group of birds merges with resident species. And who doesn't enjoy seeing and hearing orioles and hummingbirds outside your home, along with thrushes, wrens flycatchers, woodpeckers, finches, and cavity nesting birds!
As we suggested last week, we try to do something each week to add to or improve the habitat in our yard in a way that will convince more birds to spend time in our company. Thanks for benefitting birds! Share your backyard birding experiences and photographs with The Birding Wire at editorstbw2@gmail.com