Hummingbird Cooler

No, Humminbird is not the latest CPU from Advanced Micro Designs. Although, now that I think of it, "AMD 1.5GHz Hummingbird" does have a nice ring to it. Maybe I need to copyright that name as pertains to CPUs...

We have a couple of hummingbird feeders and like watching the little buggers chase each other around. After a recent storm, we found ourselves in possession of one baby hummingbird. Being kindly folks, not to mention high into the "gee whiz" factor of actually holding one of these babies, we took it in. We've been raising it on sugar water and the occasional small insect. So far, so good, though I have no real way of measuring his health or progress. At night, we keep him in a little house out we made him out of an old plastic peanut butter jar. During the day, we sit him on this little perch and feed him with an eyedropper. The little fellow (we assume) has taken to buzzing around the house and will come up and land on people.

The only problem so far is that it has been very warm here lately. As I mentioned in one of my other projects, we don't have air conditioning. We'd find the poor little fellow in his little house in the morning, his little beak open and his little toungue lolled out. We decided there wasn't enough air getting into the peanut butter jar, but didn't have anything else handy, and we certainly didn't want him roaming free at night when we couldn't keep an eye on him. He tends to get tangled up in cobwebs, caught behind furniture, etc.

Luckly, I had an extra CPU fan left over from my Voodoo3 3500 TV cooling project. I decided that this was just the right size to fit in the center of the jar lid. I punched a few extra holes, so that the fan could circulate more air, but not so many or so big that he couldn't stick his beak into the fan. He tends to stick his beak into everything.

I think it turned out nicely, and he seems to like it, so we're in business!

As a few people have written in about this article lately, I thought I might update it. I originally wrote this article in late August of 2000. The article is something of a joke. Yes, we did briefly adopt a baby hummingbird that summer, but we never cooled him (or maybe her) with a computer fan. We were too afraid he'd get something caught in the blades. It just seemed funny at the time to hint that we'd overclocked our hummingbird and required extra cooling during the hot summer months.

We no longer have the hummingbird. Not too long after I wrote the original article, he simply disappeared from the house. He'd been trying for some time to slip out the door with us, so we assume he finally made it one day. I figure if he could fly well enough to make it past a self-closing screen do, he could probably make his own way in the world.