Aug 08, 2026
Michigan Hummingbird Season: A Month-by-Month Calendar
Timing derived from eBird data, 2016-2025 (sourced Aug 2026)
Michigan's hummingbird year runs on a tight schedule with a hard south-to-north lag built in: Detroit and Grand Rapids see real activity a week or two before Traverse City and the Upper Peninsula catch up. But once the Upper Peninsula does catch up, it catches up fast — by late May, Marquette County actually shows a higher share of eBird checklists reporting Ruby-throated Hummingbird than either southern county we track. The whole season, statewide, runs roughly six months: nothing in winter, a hard climb through May, a broad summer plateau, a late-August peak, and a sharp September collapse. Here's how it actually unfolds, month by month.
The short answer: late April in southern Michigan, early May in northern Michigan and the Upper Peninsula, reliably common statewide by the second week of May, and essentially gone by early October.
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| When do they arrive? | Late April in southern counties; early May in northern Michigan and the Upper Peninsula |
| When should feeders go up? | Early-to-mid April statewide, as a buffer ahead of the earliest scout birds |
| When do they nest? | Late May through July, statewide |
| Busiest month? | August — statewide peak of 26% of checklists, in the last week of the month |
| When do they leave? | Sharp decline through September; nearly all gone by early October |
| Any in winter? | Rufous turns up most years in fall and early winter. Genuine rarities have shown up too — Michigan has two accepted Anna's Hummingbird records, one in the Upper Peninsula in 2010 and one that stayed until January 2025 |
Free download
The whole year on one page
Arrival windows region by region, when to hang feeders in your part of the state, and when to watch for Rufous — sized 8.5" x 11" for easy reference and printing.
Download the printable calendarOne page · PDF · free to print and share
Michigan's Hummingbird Season at a Glance
Before the month-by-month detail below, here's the whole season in two pictures — Ruby-throated's full-season curve, and the late-season visitor worth watching for, shown at its own scale since its numbers are a small fraction of Ruby-throated's.
How often each species turns up on eBird checklists, week by week — statewide, 2016-2025. Source: eBird bar chart data (Cornell Lab of Ornithology), 2016-2025 (pulled Aug 2026).
Regions used below
We track four counties chosen to span Michigan's real climate divide: Southeast — Wayne County (Detroit, Ann Arbor); West — Kent County (Grand Rapids); North — Grand Traverse County (Traverse City), the heart of northern Michigan; Upper Peninsula — Marquette County. Statewide figures cover the whole state; the four counties show how much that average hides.
Regional Arrival and Departure Snapshot
Michigan is big enough that a single statewide date is wrong almost everywhere. Here's the same timing on the map — the Upper Peninsula arrives last in spring and empties first in fall, while Detroit holds its birds nearly three weeks longer.
One thing to know before you start
Michigan's season fully resets every winter. Unlike states with a real coastal or southern overwintering population, our data shows Ruby-throated activity sitting at or below eBird's noise floor statewide from December through March — effectively nothing, with only isolated single-week blips too thin to count as real presence. The only winter activity worth watching for is Rufous, in small numbers, or a genuine one-off rarity — not a resident population holding on through the cold.
January: Quiet for Ruby-throated, But Not Empty
Ruby-throated numbers sit at literal zero in January, statewide and across every county we track. But January isn't quite the dead month it looks like. The first week of January is one of the better Rufous Hummingbird stretches of Michigan's whole year — busier, in ten years of records, than any week in December. If you've left a feeder up, this is a week to keep an eye on it.
January is also when Michigan's two Anna's Hummingbird records both come into focus. The most recent was a male in Arcadia, Manistee County, that stayed until 19 January 2025 — the kind of appearance that makes national birding news for a Pacific Coast specialist. Allen Chartier, the only licensed hummingbird bander in the state, banded it on 15 January and found it alert and healthy. If you spot any hummingbird in Michigan this month, photograph it and report it to the Michigan Bird Records Committee right away.
February: The Deep Quiet
Still nothing — February is the one month where our data shows an absolute, unbroken zero across the entire state. There's no scouting, no stragglers, no regional exception. If you're the type to plan ahead, this is a fine month to give your feeders a thorough off-season cleaning so they're ready to go by March.
March: Getting Feeders Ready
March stays effectively silent — our data shows one isolated blip statewide that sits right at eBird's reporting floor, which reads as noise rather than a real early bird. Treat March as prep time rather than watch time: check your feeder for cracks or degraded seals over winter, and stock up on sugar.
April: The First Real Scouts
April is when Michigan's season actually begins, though barely — real signal doesn't show up until the very end of the month, and only in the south. Statewide, the last week of April is the first time Ruby-throated shows any consistent presence at all, and it's still a light one. This is scout-bird territory: the earliest, most adventurous males pushing north ahead of the main wave, and Detroit and Ann Arbor tend to see them before the rest of the state does. Watch for spring snow, too — a late-April cold snap isn't unusual in Michigan, and a stocked feeder is a real help to an early arrival caught in one.
Get your feeder up before the first bird arrives, not after.
Michigan's arrival staggers north across about two weeks, so a feeder that goes out early costs you nothing — one that's still in the garage when the first scout turns up costs you the sighting. April is also the month to check last year's feeder for cracked seals and worn ports before the season depends on it. AspenPerch® has a built-in ant moat and a Polyperch® comfort perch, so birds rest between sips instead of hovering through the whole meal.
Shop AspenPerch® →May: The Wave Arrives, and the North Catches Up Fast
May is Michigan's real arrival month, and it happens fast. Statewide checklist reports jump from about 4% in the first week to over 16% by the third. The regional gradient is real at the start of the month — Wayne (Detroit) and Kent (Grand Rapids) are already climbing while Marquette (Upper Peninsula) barely shows a pulse — but by the last week of May, Marquette has leapfrogged every southern county we track, reporting nearly 26% of checklists versus roughly 11% in Wayne and Kent. The Upper Peninsula starts late and catches up hard. By the second week of May, Ruby-throated is reliably common everywhere in the state.
| Region | Ruby-throated Arrives |
|---|---|
| Wayne (Detroit, Ann Arbor) | First week of May |
| Kent (Grand Rapids) | First week of May |
| Grand Traverse (Traverse City) | Second week of May |
| Marquette (Upper Peninsula) | Second week of May |
"Arrives" here means the first week a region's reports climb clearly and steadily above the winter baseline and keep climbing — not the scattered scout birds that show up in late April. We checked the actual number of checklists behind each of these, not just the percentage, since a thinly-birded county can cross a percentage threshold on far weaker underlying signal than a busy one.
June: Nesting Season Settles In
Ruby-throated activity levels off through June, holding in the 12-13% range statewide as birds settle into nesting. Females become secretive around the nest during this stretch, which can make feeder activity look quieter even though the birds haven't gone anywhere — they're simply spending more time incubating and less time visibly perched at a feeder. Males, by contrast, take no part in nest duties and remain visible and territorial.
Why nesting season is the demanding one
There's a wrinkle specific to hummingbirds. Most female birds build up a temporary calcium store in their bones, called medullary bone, and draw on it to make eggshell. Hummingbirds have very little of it, so a laying female has less in reserve. Researchers have seen nesting females eating wood ash and other mineral-rich materials, which they think helps replace the calcium that goes into eggs. In one 1994 study, every bird seen eating ash was a female tending a nest.
It's part of why Pop's Nectar includes calcium and electrolytes rather than sugar alone. Nesting females need extra calcium during egg-laying, and plain sugar water has essentially none. Read more on the research behind it.
Shop Nectarlyte® 8 oz →July: Building Toward the Peak
Activity climbs steadily through July, from roughly 13% early in the month to nearly 16% by month's end, as the state's first broods fledge and juveniles join adults at feeders and flowers. This is typically the most crowded a Michigan feeder gets before the true statewide peak in late August.
Keep pests off without pesticides.
AspenPerch®'s built-in ant moat blocks ants with a water barrier, and HummGuard® Nectar Tips keep bees and wasps out without changing anything for the birds.
Shop HummGuard® →August: The Statewide Peak
August is Michigan's busiest hummingbird month by a clear margin, climbing from about 18% of checklists early in the month to nearly 26% by the last week — the single highest point of the entire year. Birds are in hyperphagia, the intensive pre-migration feeding phase. A Ruby-throated Hummingbird weighs about three grams, and packs on fat worth roughly another quarter to a third of that before heading south — banding work on the Gulf Coast has found the very heaviest birds arriving with nearly double their lean weight in fuel. A handful of Rufous reports turn up in August too, but they're thin enough that the season really starts in October.
This is the month to be generous, not economical.
Michigan's birds are putting on fuel for a flight that ends thousands of miles south, and a feeder that runs dry mid-surge is a missed meal at the worst possible time. The 2lb Nectarlyte® powder or the Nectarade® liquid concentrate keeps you topped up through the busiest weeks of the year.
September: The Fast Exit
September is when Michigan's hummingbirds leave, and they leave fast. Statewide, Ruby-throated reports fall from a peak of roughly 26% in the first week to under 7% by the last — more than a two-thirds drop in a single month. The decline isn't even across the state: Wayne and Kent still hold real numbers into late September (around 8% and 4%, respectively), while Grand Traverse and Marquette have already dropped under 2% by then. Southern Michigan genuinely lingers longer than northern Michigan before it, too, empties out.
October: Last Stragglers, First Real Rufous
By October, nearly every Ruby-throated has left — statewide reports fall from under 2% in the first week to essentially zero by month's end, with only isolated stragglers anywhere in the state. October is also when Rufous activity genuinely picks up, overtaking Ruby-throated as the more notable species to watch for by mid-month; the third week of October is the single busiest Rufous week of Michigan's year. Pop's tip: keep your feeder up for two to three weeks after your last Ruby-throated sighting to support any late-season stragglers, and consider leaving at least one feeder up into November if you'd like a shot at Rufous.
October is the planting month, not the tidying-up month.
Sow native wildflower seed now and it gets the cold, moist Michigan winter most varieties need before they'll bloom reliably next spring — the same spring your hummingbirds come back to.
Shop the Perfect Little Sanctuary® blend →November: Peak Rufous-Watching
Ruby-throated is essentially absent statewide in November. This is instead the best month of the year to watch for Rufous Hummingbird, Michigan's most reliable rare visitor. The Michigan Bird Records Committee no longer asks for documentation every time one turns up — in the committee's own words, Rufous "occurs almost every year in Michigan." If a feeder-visiting hummingbird looks fiery orange-red rather than green-backed this month, there's a real chance it's a Rufous.
If one bird is chasing everything else off, that's Rufous behaving exactly as expected.
Rufous is genuinely territorial, and a single feeder with a swing beside it tends to become one bird's guarded patch — it perches on the swing to watch the feeder it's already defending. A second feeder and a second swing, placed out of sight of each other, gives the next bird its own station to claim instead of a fight over yours.
Shop a second swing →December: The Last of the Stragglers
December carries the tail end of Michigan's Rufous season, with scattered, low-level reports continuing through the month — and, as January shows, the story doesn't necessarily end when the month does. Michigan's two Anna's Hummingbird records are both winter birds: an adult male and an adult female found at Grand Marais, Alger County, in early October 2010, where the male stayed until 11 November and the female held on all the way to 18 December; and the Arcadia male fourteen years later, which had been quietly using a heated feeder since at least November before anyone identified it. Both were birds that turned up where somebody was still paying attention in the cold.
The Year at a Glance
| Months | Statewide Activity |
|---|---|
| January | No Ruby-throated; one of the better Rufous weeks of the year opens the month |
| February — March | None — deep winter quiet; watch for one-off rarities only |
| April | First scouts, late in the month, southern counties only |
| May | Fast statewide arrival; reliably common everywhere by the second week |
| June — July | Steady; nesting through fledging, activity building toward August |
| August | Statewide peak (~26%); a handful of thin Rufous reports, but not yet the season |
| September | Sharp decline statewide; southern Michigan leaves noticeably slower than northern |
| October — November | Ruby-throated gone; peak Rufous-watching window |
| December | Rufous tapering; rare winter visitors still possible |
Frequently Asked Questions
When do hummingbirds come back to Michigan?
Late April in southern Michigan (Detroit, Grand Rapids), early May in northern Michigan and the Upper Peninsula. Our data shows real, sustained arrivals don't begin until the very end of April even in the south — earlier feeder setup is a safety buffer, not a sign the birds are already here.
When do hummingbirds leave Michigan?
Most of the state empties out fast through September, with statewide reports dropping more than two-thirds between the first and last week of the month. Southern counties (Wayne, Kent) hold on a bit longer than northern ones (Grand Traverse, Marquette), but nearly all Ruby-throated Hummingbirds are gone by early October.
When do hummingbirds leave northern Michigan?
Earlier than most people expect, and earlier than southern Michigan. Grand Traverse County drops under 2% of checklists by the last week of September, and Marquette County in the Upper Peninsula is effectively empty by then — while Wayne County near Detroit is still holding around 8%. Northern Michigan arrives last in spring and leaves first in fall.
How long do hummingbirds stay in Michigan?
Roughly five months for the typical Michigan yard — arriving late April to early May and mostly gone by early October. Add the fall Rufous season, which runs October through December some years and can reach into January, and the practical "hummingbird watching" window stretches closer to eight months.
Why is my Upper Peninsula feeder still empty in late April?
Because the UP is genuinely the last part of the state to see activity. Our Marquette County data shows a flat zero for every single week of April — not a trace — with the first scattered reports in the opening days of May and the real arrival landing in the second week, about two weeks behind Detroit and Grand Rapids.
Should I keep a feeder up through a Michigan winter?
If you want a real shot at Rufous, yes — October through December is your best window, and the first week of January is worth watching too. The Michigan Bird Records Committee no longer asks for routine documentation of Rufous, though it still reviews some species that turn up at unusual times of year, so a genuinely odd winter bird is still worth reporting. True winter rarities are a long shot in any given year: Michigan has exactly two accepted Anna's Hummingbird records in its history, fourteen years apart.
Why We Built This Calendar
Pop's Birding has been helping hummingbird lovers for three generations. One of the questions our customers ask most often is "When do hummingbirds arrive and leave my state?" — we built this calendar to give a direct, sourced answer, not a generic one. Most timing advice online gives a single date for an entire state, which is exactly wrong for a place the size of Michigan: Wayne and Kent counties get real arrivals a week or two before Grand Traverse and Marquette do. A single statewide date would be genuinely misleading for roughly half the state. We wanted a calendar that tells you the truth for where you actually live, not an average that's wrong everywhere.
How We Built This Calendar
We pulled eBird bar chart data (Cornell Lab of Ornithology), 2016–2025, for Michigan statewide and four counties across both peninsulas: Wayne (Detroit, Ann Arbor), Kent (Grand Rapids), Grand Traverse (Traverse City), and Marquette (Upper Peninsula). “Reliably common” means 25% of a region's own seasonal peak. The genuine finding: despite a one-to-two-week arrival gap between south and north, every region becomes reliably common in the second week of May, and by late May Marquette shows a higher share of checklists than either southern county. Broad-billed Hummingbird has two accepted Michigan records (1996 and 2000), both before our data window, so it isn't charted. The county comparison is our own analysis of the raw eBird data.
Sources
- eBird bar chart data, Cornell Lab of Ornithology — Michigan statewide and county-level (Wayne, Kent, Grand Traverse, Marquette), 2016-2025. Source for all month-by-month seasonal figures and the regional arrival/departure pattern.
- Michigan Bird Records Committee, Michigan Checklist. Source for official species status for every hummingbird on Michigan's state list.
- Michigan Bird Records Committee, Anna's Hummingbird records, and the committee's 22nd annual report (Actions for 2011). Source for the dates and details of both Michigan Anna's Hummingbird records.
- Zenzal & Moore, “Stopover biology of Ruby-throated Hummingbirds during autumn migration”, The Auk 133:237–250 (2016). Source for the pre-migration fat-load figures in the August section.
- des Lauriers, J. R. (1994). Hummingbirds eating ashes. The Auk, 111(3), 755–756. Documents five nesting female hummingbirds eating wood ash; no males were seen doing so in that study.
- Adam, M. D., & des Lauriers, J. R. (1998). Observations of hummingbirds ingesting mineral-rich compounds. Journal of Field Ornithology, 69, 257–261. Source for hummingbirds' greatly reduced medullary bone and for the mineral-rich materials they eat.
- Werning, S. (2018). Medullary bone is phylogenetically widespread and its skeletal distribution varies by taxon. Journal of Ornithology, 159, 527–543. Source for medullary bone being confirmed in hummingbirds.
Know before they arrive
You don't have to keep this calendar taped to the fridge. Insider Birding Access members get seasonal notes timed to your region — when to have feeders out, what the birds are doing right now, and what's worth doing in your yard this season. We take the guesswork out of the calendar. Joining takes about thirty seconds, and there's 10% off your first order in it.
Join Insider Birding Access →Free to join. 10% off your first order.
Shop Michigan's Hummingbird Favorites
Bethany Sloan has served as General Manager of Pop's Birding since 2010, continuing the legacy of her grandfather, William "Pops" Sloan, inventor of the Original Hummingbird Swing. A lifelong hummingbird enthusiast, educator, and independent researcher, she leads the company's educational content, including its 50-State Hummingbird Guide series, Regional Guide, Species Guide and Hummingbird Learning Center. Bethany combines scientific research, regional migration data, and more than 16 years of hands-on experience to create trusted educational resources for bird enthusiasts across North America.
