Feed The Birds

A 50-pound bag of sugar!

When we lived in San Diego we had one maybe two hummingbirds that came by to drink from our feeders. We ended up throwing away most of the food when we had to clean the feeders as they hadn’t come close to emptying them.

Now we live in Mariposa where there are no carefully manicured flower gardens with lots of food options for the hummers. Once things begin to dry out, we are the food option. We estimate that we have somewhere upwards of 60-70 hummingbirds eating all day, all the time. The feeders are never idle except for nighttime.

What this means is simply this, we are making 2 gallons of hummingbird food every other day and sometimes on back-to-back days. For each batch we use 8 cups of sugar which means in a normal week we go through at least 32 cups (sometimes 40) cups of sugar. The funny thing was we started out with the idea of giving the hummers organic sugar which costs nearly double versus the plain white variety. That didn't last very long and they don’t seem to notice the difference. We now buy 50 pound bags of commercial sugar at Costco and pre-measure them into zip lock bags and store them in our cupboard. With all the bags of sugar stacked up it appears as though we are drug dealers with bags ready to sell.

What this also means is that we can never leave the property for any length of time as they will go hungry and depart to someplace else. We like having hummingbirds and do not want to see them go elsewhere, it is feast or famine, either we have hummers or we don’t. So they feast…All the time.

What you see here are seven hummers vying for four feedings positions