Birders and Eclipsers,

A few notes from our hood early on:

Screech-owls across the street were chatting 0400-0430 hrs

Our troop of 20-30 Mallards began foraging 0630, and range from
slight/partial leucistic thru melanistic, i.e., a motley crew

First Black-chinned Hum (BC) showed up at our humfeeders 0639 hrs, followed
shortly by a hatch year (HY) Rufous (RU)

First Black-chinned Chickadee 0704 hrs

We spotted a Calliope (CA) 0715 hrs, our first in two weeks, looking most
like a HY male

Red-breasted Nuthatch 0718

House Finch 0730

etc., etc.

I notice RU (when present) leaf-bathing many mornings on large wet leaves of
our grape plant, apparently dampened by one of our sprinklers 3x a week
(Mo,We,Fr)

Haven’t noticed any of our BC etc. doing this, but RU often tries to own
everything in the back yard, including humfeeders (8), salvias (Wendy’s
Wish), and these wet grape leaves along the back fence

Also noticed we still have an adult male BC, but he’s been confined by RU to
a back corner feeder that is not easily defended

Our humfeeders are purposefully scattered so RU can’t own everything. Note
that in areas with many more hums, like AZ, NM, CO, it may or may not make
any difference to scatter the feeders (I’ve been fiddling with this for 25+
yrs) 😉

Our current hum population estimate (back yard only) is 10 BC, 1 RU, 1 CA

As an aside, when I was searching nation-wide for the largest humfeeding
operations (1990s), the toppermost place I found was near Nogales AZ, where
hums peaked (in fall) at 16 gallons of 1:4 sugar-water (SW) daily, and at
night we either removed feeders or covered them to defeat fruit bats from
draining them, because Steve and Ruth Russell, et al., were doing a
quantitative study of SW consumption to better understand energetics, and
they were attempting to get an idea of relative numbers of hums vs.
consumption rates (allowing for SW “thieves” and other variables). Over the
years, loose “conversion factors” have ranged from 400 to 1000 hums per
gallon of SW per day, so we might readily appreciate how many hums they were
feeding at the Nogales location, eh?

Just for fun,

Larry

Awaiting max eclipsage here in west Boise…