May 24, 2024
It’s fairly early in Hummer season, but they’re already here in large enough numbers to be interesting.
Of course we keep track of the hummer numbers! At the left is part of the spreadsheet where we keep some numbers for calculations. Stuff like the average weight of a hummer, how much a cup of sugar weighs and so on.
The daily part of the spreadsheet is below. We set out the first two feeders on April 22, 2024 and when we changed them out after 6 days (that’s about the longest we leave syrup out) we found that we already had about 40 birds up! A hummer eats about half its weight in sugar per day, so figuring out daily sugar consumption, in this case 1 cup of sugar out - 1/3 cup of syrup brought in divided by 6 days gives us 38 full time hummer equivalents.
We’re now up to 6 window feeders and about 140 birds.
Here’s what it looks like at 1080p for those who have high bandwidth internet.
And a low res 480p version. They’ll both look similar because this lower res version is scaled up locally.