Loraine Chandler photograph by Charles Harris

When Loraine Chandler hears the first squeak of a hummingbird in the spring, she starts bouncing with excitement. Immediately, she puts up her feeders. At dawn and dusk during the peak of summer, she’ll have up to 50 of the birds at her feeders at one time, buzzing like little motors. “And after a rain,” she says, “they’re just like a swarm of bees.”

Chandler initially fed songbirds at her home in Charlotte. After seeing a hummingbird, she put up her first feeder that was just for them. But it wasn’t until she married her husband and moved to a country home outside of Burlington in 1992 that the birds really started to show up in droves. The more feeders she put up, the more hummingbirds came. Now, Chandler has 10 feeders and fills them three times a day, going through 20 pounds of sugar a week during the height of the season. Her way with birds led friends and neighbors to dub her the “hummingbird whisperer.”

Chandler gets a great deal of joy out of her feathered friends, estimating that she spends about two hours a day watching them. “They’re like little bejeweled blessings,” she says. “I’ve always said that I would like to be a hummingbird in my next life. To consume that amount of sugar without any kind of bad effects has got to be heaven.”

For now, the birds bring her a little slice of heaven here on earth.