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scienceBuilt by Claude2026

Hummingbird feeder tracker

I wanted to know how many hummingbirds were visiting my feeders. Counting them is hopeless, so instead I log what I can measure (each feeder's weight or nectar level, the time, what the birds were doing) and a small desktop app works out the rest:

  • Consumption from the change in weight over the nectar's density, cross-checked against the drop in level wherever there are both.
  • Bird counts from 3 to 7 ml of nectar per bird per day, carried through as a range instead of averaged into one confident-looking number, because that rule of thumb is the biggest uncertainty in it.
  • Feeding time measured to civil twilight, not by the clock, since hummingbirds sleep through the night.
  • Spoilage accumulated hour by hour from the local temperature, pulled from Open-Meteo.
  • Seasonality for the region from GBIF's bird records, divided by all bird records for the same week, so that it measures birds rather than how many people were out looking.

It was the first thing I built with Claude Code's ultracode, its multi-agent mode.

Above: the Charts tab, comparing my feeders' season (orange) with ten years of the region's ruby-throated hummingbird records (blue).