Help, I need advice quick. There is a Hummingbird in our house. It is flying around the 18 food ceiling. How can I get rid of this thing. I don’t want to wait for it to die, I want to get it out while it is still aliive.
I throw a towel over birds when they land, and can pick them up.
Open the door and windows. They head away from people when they see them. Cover window areas that you can’t open, perhapes with some newspaper and masking tape.
Maybe a small bowl of sugar water with red food coloring in your biggest fully open window? That is what they drink.
I’d get rid of some of those foods on your ceiling. Probably what lured the poor thing in to begin with.
Do you have a vibrator? Attach a rope to it, paint it bright colors, spin it over your head and yell,“Come 'n git it!” Hopefully, the bird will get the message and try to mate with it. If not, at least your neighbors will get a good laugh from it. 
I don’t know about the towel trick – hummingbirds are exceptionally light and delicate. Maybe if you had some cheesecloth or something very thin…
I think Shagnasty has the right idea. Put some red flowers in an open window.
Harmonious might have a good idea. They maneuver a lot more…rationally than other birds.
I have a hummingbird feeder with food right outside the door, which is the largest opening in the room to the outside. Right now it is getting dark, and I have the lights on in the room (ceiling lights). Will they be attracted to the light, or try to get away from them. Should I turn on the outside lights and turn the inside ones off?
I would turn off your inside lights so they see brighter light outside.
As others have said, make the way out of the house brighter than the inside.
Here is what happened. I took an 18 foot pole and duct taped a pond skimming net (the only net I have) to the end. With that we managed to chase it into the kitchen. Not a good thing, since the kitchen, while only having a nine foot ceiling leads to the rest of the house. I cut the net off the pole, and my wife, looking somewhat like a character in a 3 Stooges movie managed to snare the bird and let it outside. This is not an easy to duplicate feat and I doubt it should go down in the annals of how to save a Hummingbird. But I thank everyone for their quick responses. I was all for opening everything and letting it find it’s way out, but my wife wanted to take the more proactive course.
I am glad you were successful, dauerbach.
But just for the sake of hijack beowulff, I believe the avian display I saw at the Memphis zoo had the area where the birds were brightly lit, and without any barrier, a very dark area to observe them from; the birds would not fly into darkness.
Great job! That can’t have been easy.
As others have said most birds will head towards a lighter area rather than a darker area (owls and other nocturnal birds would probably be an exception). Of course it can be difficult to block off all the unopenable windows in a house very quickly.
[Bird geek mode]Do you know what kind of hummingbird it was? Where do you live?[/Bird geek mode]
I live in Baltimore, Maryland. I have not the slightest idea what kind of hummingbird it was, but, boy, was that sucker nimble. I felt like I was in a deleted scene from “To Kill a Mockingbird.” I mean, I can’t think of a more sinless bird than a Hummingbird, and I thought I remembered reading somewhere that it had to like suck down its weight in nectar every 24 hours, so I was really afraid it was just going to die on me. Plus it was just flying and flying, using up calories at an enormous rate. We liberated it at just about dusk, so I couldn’t test out the light thing.
We have two Hibiscus outside near our kitchen door, and they seem to like them, so today when my wife was doing some cleaning it flew in through an open door.
I’m just glad it survived it’s brief visit into our home.
Almost certainly a Ruby-throated Hummngbird, since that’s the only kind that’s common in the eastern US.
There you’re wrong. Hummingbirds are one of the orneriest critters in the universe, so much so that the Aztecs named their bloodthirsty god of war and human sacrifice, Huizilopochtli, “the hummingbird from paradise.” Males at least spend most of their lives fighting with other hummers and trying to chase them away from food.
Hummingbirds, and most birds, will fly toward a light in an effort to escape from an enclosed area, so the best thing to do is turn out the ceiling lights and open all the windows. While I haven’t tried it myself, putting something red in a doorway could help to lure it out too.
I have occasionally found hummingbirds that had been trapped indoors after they had already become exhausted and fallen to the ground. They look like they are goners, but they can often be revived. Mix up a little sugar water in a ratio of 5:1 water to sugar, and put some in a tablespoon. Pry the bird’s bill open at the tip. (This is often the hardest part - you may need to do it with a fine needle.) Stick the tip of the bird’s bill in the sugar water. It will usually reflexively start to stick its tongue out and lap up the food. Keep sticking the bill in until it won’t take any more. Then hold it in a dark warm place that is too small for it to fly (a small thin cloth bag is ideal) until it recovers, which may take 20 minutes to a half hour. Release it outside, and it will usually fly right off.
As Colibri explained, before they die they “run out of gas” and become sluggish, making them easy to catch. They will certainly need food before they are fit to fly off.
In my two experiences with this I clearly caught things at the right moment, as there was no need to pry open the hummer’s bill - they happily went for the sugar water. In a short while they started to “rev up” and were soon flying again.
They are certainly pugnacious, but very endearing nonetheless.
I caught one once at my parents’ old house. They had a sort of semi-enclosed back patio for the hot tub, which meant that hummers would sometimes swoop in and batter confusedly against the windows trying to get back out again. Since they tended to stay at the window, they were pretty easy to catch with just your hands. It was about the lightest thing I’ve ever handled, certainly the lightest bird, and it sure looked cute peeking out from the circle of my finger and thumb. He chirped irritatedly, but was pretty calm, and flew off promptly when I showed him the way out, three feet to the left.
I love hot tub hummers.
We see this all the time yet because of their high speed, near invisible wings it always looks so strange, like two little creatures on airborne Segways.