A quick look at the 2023 Hummingbird data

Reading time: 3 minutes

It’s the start of a new year, and so time to check the hummingbird data collected over the past several years. Our cameras have captured over 700,000 images of the feeder since we installed it in the spring of 2021, with the latest data capture ending in November of 2023. We have been improving our neural network which detects hummingbird species and gender over this time. It seems to work quite well, but is still not quite perfect. One issue is that it cannot distinguish between immature males and female birds, and it can also get confused if it is shown ONLY the back of a female. It is also more challenging to identify birds when they arrive in near darkness, around dawn or dusk. (It now recognizes people walking by as well, but we don’t use that data except to prevent it from calling someone’s hat a hummingbird!). Currently our YOLO neural network to identify birds is a couple years out of date, so will will consider all data collected so far to be preliminary.

When the system identifies a hummingbird, it draws a “bounding box” around the bird in the image and saves this information to a file. This allows us to identify not only the species (and gender if mature) of the bird, but also the time that of the picture and the birds apparent location and size and the “confidence” that the system has that its call was correct. Finally, we have also trained the system to identify the rim of the feeder and the water level, so we can quantify the rate of feeding without having to weigh our feeder regularly. So, what do our results to date say?

Well, out of the ~67,500 images identifying hummingbirds to date, a total of 46,800 met the criterion of being high confidence calls (p>0.7). There were 5293 male Rufous identified (11.5%); 21,127 female (including immature males) Rufous identified (45.8%); 6473 male Anna’s (14%) and 13,201 female Anna’s (including immature males) (28%). This is quite a showing by the Rufous, since they are only in the area from for about four or five months of the year. The Annas are present year-round, but probably a bit scared off in the peak Rufous summer months (highlighted in red).

---

ID	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec	Total
Rufous Male	1	16	211	2319	1095	1466	67	9	11	29	2	67	5293
Rufous Female	20	7	86	4119	4117	6908	5338	182	190	36	89	35	21,127
Annas Male	518	338	841	1351	309	142	212	882	962	156	413	349	6473
Annas Female	198	146	932	2100	689	1034	897	2625	2348	371	1059	802	13,201
Total	744	513	2116	9978	6374	9615	6626	3804	3574	614	1581	1261	46,800

A quick summary of the visits is shown in the table below, where months with a “-” have no available data. Note that the small number of apparent calls of Rufous visits from August to February mostly represent “miscalls” which currently need to be manually removed. Some of these are bound to occur when one examines hundreds of thousands of images, but there is probably room to improve our neural network in 2024.

---

Year	ID	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec	Total
2021	Rufous Male	-	-	-	254	380	23	8	2	1	0	-	-	668
2021	Rufous Female	-	-	-	547	2936	4576	1745	83	36	1	-	-	9924
2021	Annas Male	-	-	-	128	195	14	65	138	314	18	-	-	872
2021	Annas Female	-	-	-	6	348	328	240	1155	993	27	-	-	3097
2021	Total	-	-	-	935	3859	4941	2058	1378	1344	46	-	-	14,561
2022	Rufous Male	-	-	33	676	178	914	15	2	4	7	1	67	1897
2022	Rufous Female	-	-	19	2445	238	687	959	22	17	14	60	35	4496
2022	Annas Male	-	-	255	497	55	99	76	311	274	93	369	349	2378
2022	Annas Female	-	-	48	718	60	363	321	836	306	165	860	802	4479
2022	Total	-	-	341	6105	591	1836	2315	1191	614	286	1349	1221	15,849
2023	Rufous Male	1	16	178	1389	537	529	44	5	6	22	1	-	2728
2023	Rufous Female	20	7	67	1127	943	1645	2634	77	137	21	29	-	6707
2023	Annas Male	518	338	586	726	59	29	71	433	374	45	44	-	3223
2023	Annas Female	198	146	884	1376	281	343	336	634	1049	179	199	-	5625
2023	Total	737	507	1715	4618	1820	2546	3085	1149	1566	267	273	-	18,283
Grand Total		744	513	2116	9978	6374	9615	6626	3804	3574	614	1581	1261	46,800

There have been roughly 15-20,000 “high confidence” bird identifications per year, which has been relatively stable when correcting for the differing number of months of monitoring in the early years. The next step will be a manual review of late summer Rufous identifications to confirm the exact dates of arrival and departure of the Rufous in 2023, and to correlate this with the birdsong recordings and the rate of feeding.