Oh no!

 

We’ve been dealing with an issue.  We’re wondering why the food in one hummingbird feeder goes down faster than the other.

 

It could be that the hummingbirds prefer one feeder over the other and drink more from that feeder.  It could be that they prefer one location over the other and drink more from that location, regardless of which feeder is there.  It could be that the change in fluid level does not reflect a difference due to drinking, but is the result of some other factor, like evaporation due to difference in position relative to sun exposure.

 

So, what to do next?  Our decision; pick a variable, change it, and test the effect.  We chose flowers.  There were red flowers under one feeder and purple under the other.  We emptied and cleaned each feeder, reloaded them with exactly the same amount of food, and returned them to the places they were.  Then we switched the baskets of flowers underneath them.  Now the feeder on the north has red flowers under it instead of purple and vice-versa.  What difference will that make?

 

Right in the middle of our experiment about how hummingbirds choose feeders though, the river of migrating hummingbirds dried up.  Yesterday morning we saw our usual ten or fifteen birds.  This morning we saw a total of one hummingbird come to the feeders.  Suddenly we’ve got a lack of data.

 

 

 

There is slightly less food in the feeders now, but we can’t tell any difference between the two.  The more the level in each feeder goes down, the clearer any result will be, but it doesn’t appear that we’re going to get enough information to make any determination this year.  We might have to wait until next year’s migration to figure out our mystery.