2018

April 30, 2018
Winter was cold and very little snow at the ranch although across the valley the High Uintah’s received quit a bit of snow.

The first hummingbird sighting was April 28 when a Black Chinned male was seen buzzing around where the feeders usually hang. Their arriving a bit early this year so it looks like its time to put out some feeders so our little cuties don’t freeze to death over the cold nights. Today as I write this [April 30] it is lightly snowing outside but the temp is 37. Nectar is on the stove.

RODENT UPDATE:
With such a rodent problem last year, we put out a lot of poison grain under rocks and inside areas that the rodents could get to but the birds would not.

It looks like that did the trick. They cleaned up all of the grain within 24 hours and they had what they thought was a great winter snack. We have only seen a few rodents over the past two months so it looks like the population is much lower this year.

HORNET UPDATE:
Last fall the yellow jacket hornets were the worst we’ve ever seen. They were everywhere, in everything and they actually killed all of our beehives by just swarming the hives and overloading the bees.

I learned a nice trick to cull the hornet population.

The hornets spend the winter in ground burrows and in tree trunks where wood peckers have been. The queens and all of the emerging queens survive the winter eating their workers that die due to the cold. I believe the queen hornets have some serious antifreeze in their systems as they start flying when the temp is just above 40F while the bees won’t fly until its above 50F. So the queens emerge from their burrows and start searching for a food supply to sustain them while they build or rebuild their colonies.

Knowing this, I put out 10 hornet traps and filled them with rootbeer. Then I hung the traps where the beehives were last year when they were killed by the hornets. Long before the temperature ever got over 50F I caught hundreds of hornets in the traps and I’m betting they are ALL queens. So every queen caught in the trap is one less colony to have to deal with.

May 5th, 2018
For the past few weeks its been in the mid 60’sF and we haven’t seen a hornet anywhere.

July 20th, 2018
Summer was hot and we had a normal showing of a few hundred hummers but then the Dollar Ridge Fire in our county popped up on Sunday July 1, 2018 at about 1300hrs.

The fire started about 14 miles west of the ranch but in two days with the wind blowing 20-40mph straight east (toward us), it was within 4 miles of us. It quickly consumed 40,000 acres and it was looking like it would make it to us in just another day or two. Then it happened. The wind shifted blowing West and the fire changed directions away from us. It started then burning south on the south side of the fire and west on the north side of the fire. As of this writing it is still only 85% contained and has consumed over 56,700 acres.

A Spike in Hummingbird Numbers
What we immediately noticed was a huge SPIKE in hummingbird attendance at the feeders. We had feeders out at the time which had about 1.5 gallons in capacity and the birds were draining those in less than a day.
We quickly brought out ALL 16 of our feeders with a total capacity of 768 ounces (6 Gallons) and the numbers of hummingbirds grew and grew by the hour.
We usually don’t see this many birds until the fall migration starts and they all stop in for a rest for a week or so before heading to Mexico but our numbers are already in the thousands.

It seems that the loss of 50,000+ acres just a few miles west of us displaced a great number of hummingbirds.

How Often are we FILLING the feeders (replacing 6 gallons of syrup)?
Right now we’re filling every feeder every other day now about 3 gallons of sugar water (syrup) a day.