When is the best time to eat hummingbirds on my back porch? The hummingbird feeder at my house gets a lot of traffic, but I noticed that there were bursts of activity followed by long periods without hummingbirds. I wanted to map out what times were busiest in order to make a smartwatch face for savvy cats who want to eat hummingbirds but don’t want to waste time waiting. Although I do not own a cat, I really enjoy their company and wanted to lure some locals to my porch. I figured that if my hummingbird feeder became a safe bet for a snack, I could turn it into a cat feeder, and get all the cat companionship I could want. To gather the data, I attached a motion sensor to the feeder that was hooked up to a small computer that wirelessly uploaded occurrence data to an online database (io.adafruit.com). I took a week’s worth of data and found that, like I had noticed, there were high occurrence periods and low occurrence periods. I wrote a program that mapped the daily occurrences, from noon to midnight onto a watch face. The fluttering dots, which surround the watch face, each represent a singular occurrence of a hummingbird recorded during the week. Using the density of the dots, a cat could make an educated guess as to the best times to wait by the feeder to eat on a given day (in this case March 7th, 2022).
