Hummingbirds and Water Tanks
Things have definitely slowed down at my hummingbird feeders. There are still quite a few of the little birds coming to my porch, but nothing like the flock that have been coming since at least May.
It’s hard to estimate the number of birds coming to my hilltop, but from the amount of sugar water they’ve been consuming on a consistent basis for many months, it’s been a large number. I wait to fill until the majority of the feeders are empty, or at least nearly so. However, if there’s any liquid left in the bottom, I open the feeder over a container, to be put back into another. If there are any bugs or ants in the left-over juice, I have a fine-screened strainer to pour it through before it’s returned to the next feeder.
By the time I fill all eight of my feeders, I use close to two gallons of fresh sugar water. Six of these are the onequart size, and two of them are the new quart and one-half size. For the past several months, every feeder has needed to be filled every other day.
During previous summers, the heaviest rate of use would pick up in June, and peak in late August or early September. By the middle of September, the big numbers of birds were gone, allowing me to wait another day or two between fillings.
Only within the past three or four days have the big number of birds finally moved on. I filled on Thursday this past week, assuming I’d have to fill late Friday. I knew I would be gone most of the day on Saturday at the Apple Festival in Springville, and I really didn’t want to come home and have to fill the feeders after a long day.
When I looked at the feeders on Friday, I could see the they were still full enough to not need my attention until at least Sunday. I was actually able to wait until later in the day Sunday before refilling all the feeders. Apparently many of my resident hummers have begun their movement to Mexico.
I also checked with my friend from Terra Bella to see if his porch feeders are as uncrowded as mine have become. However, he’s still feeding a large number of hummers and filling everything quite regularly.
When I wrote in this column about Dan Warren and his excavator, we were preparing to replace the storage for our domestic water supply. The excavator and backhoe dug the flat spots, then hauled the 5,000 gallon plastic tanks up the hill and placed them in position.
We now have to connect the new tanks to the existing pipe carrying water down to the barn, where it supplies a watering trough for the animals. From there the pipe continues on to both houses for our domestic water uses, such a drinking water, baths, toilets, and of course, lawn irrigation.
The existing storage facility on the hill is of concrete block and is both leaking and deteriorating. If we hadn’t begun the process of replacing the storage of our spring water when we did, I fear we’d have been doing it under a great deal of time constraint. Though we’d probably never have totally lost our water supply, we might well have been limited in how much water we had available for daily use.
The pipe carrying water out of the old cistern to the house has a valve on it. It’s broken and we can’t shut off the water coming to the house. Under normal operation of our water system, this is not a problem. However, now that we want to change over to the new system, it would be nice if we eliminated the presence of significant quantities of water. In order to do that, we need to empty the old cistern, while we collect water in our new tanks ready to provide an uninterrupted flow when we get the lines changed over.
Monday morning we plumbed the spring into the new tanks, and removed it from the old cistern. Tuesday morning, 22 hours later, we had roughly 1,200 gallons in each of the new tanks, and the old cistern had only dropped by about six inches.
It appears there’s sufficient water so we will be able to use from the old cistern for at least four days. This will allow the accumulation of several days of water in the new tanks before we change over by connecting them to the lines to the houses.
There are no unions visible in the old line, so the only way to connect is to cut out a section of steel pipe. If there’s water remaining in the line, even under a small amount of pressure, the cutting will quickly become a wet and sloppy job. Thus, we will wait until we’ve used most of the water currently in the cistern before we attempt the change-over.
Unless we run into unforeseen problems, on change-over day it should only take a couple hours. All we have to do is sever the pipe leading from the old cistern and reconnect it to the new tanks. Of course, those unforeseen problems always seem to make the age-old axiom ring true. “As designed, and as built, are two very different things.”