Can you not stand sitting feet away from amusing hummingbirds as they steal sweet nectar from your feeder? Inventor Doyle Doss solved the age-old problem by devising a red face shield that serves the sugar water from a tube between your eyes. Since 2008 he says he’s sold about 700 of these. So while people may be freaked out to see one, hummingbirds may actually begin to recognize what they are and come right over.

Doss has some serious, boring inventions and then a side-line in goofy stuff like the face feeder, which he came up with after a hummingbird hovered in front of his red bird.  “A hummingbird came out of nowhere and just hung there, two inches from my nose,” he says. “My immediate response was, I froze. I never forgot the experience. It was such a magical type of thing.”

Decades later, Doss took a professional welding face shield and covered it in a red pattern that hummers love. Then he put a rubber tube between the eyes to be filled with sugar water. The birds came. This isn’t the first attempt at a hummingbird helmet. This adorable video shows a little girl watching hummingbirds in the more popular variety–and initially flinching and scaring them away.

The face shield serves to draw hummers in (they love red) and to make humans confident they won’t get their eyes poked out. Hummingbirds are so agile, they’re not going to go bumbling into your face.

Doss says the tube was the hardest part to figure

Keep reading 700 Helmet hummingbird feeders floating around North America