One of my simple joys in life is Feeding the Neighborhood Birds.
Simple Sparrows,some with white-crowns,Finches,which the
6-year old accross the street calls,“Red Jays” and Lots of
Mourning Doves,which I call Roof-Soldiers because they look
like they’re marching around in little Gray uniforms.
Bad News, a Coopers Hawk regularly stops by to Plunk one of
my Little buddies for breakfast.I throw Acorn-type nuts at him
to Shoosch him away. How’s your little Backyard Heaven?
Whenever I pop popcorn, I throw the remainder out on (or near) my porch.
If I let my bread get stale (usually just a few slices), I put it out, too.
I want to see some birds evolve into dinosaurs, let me tell you…
Our little piece of heaven consists of Robins, Blue Jays, Sparrows, Wrens, Flickers, Nuthatchs, Titmice, Woodpeckers, Juncos, Chickadees, Finches and Hummingbirds. We love to feed the little fellas.
We used to feed peanuts in the shell to the BlueJays on the patio. One night we noticed something large on the patio. We turned on the light and found the largest raccoon I had ever seen pounding down peanuts. He just turned to look at us and continued to chow down. He didn’t leave until we invited him to do so with a baseball bat.
Since we have a 6# Yorkie, I was scared to death that the raccoon would have him for lunch so we stopped feeding the birds on the patio.
My sweetie and I used to sit on our back porch and watch the birds. We didn’t know the names of them all so we would make up names, like the “blue dotted bug snatcher.” Great fun.
We used to have a bird feeder up, but we also had the greatest hunter in the world disguised as a cat living with us. We didn’t feel she needed any additional help.
The cat has gone to that big safari in the sky so now I would like to make those peanut-butter-and-birdseed-covered pinecones to put outside for the birds. Has anyone tried this project? How’d it work out?
On a good day, a pair of Cardinals, a sprinkling of Goldfinches, Housefinches (purplish pink) and a couple of Eastern Bluebirds look like shiny satin Christmas ornaments at my feeders.
Constant visitors consist of Titmouses (Titmice?), Chickadees, various sparrows, the occasional Red-winged Blackbird and sassy Blue Jays- also House Wrens, dizzy, clutzy Doves, and my favorite: Towhees that scratch the ground beneath the feeders like tiny crazed chickens.
Suet cakes bring Ladder-back woodpeckers, nuthatches (“peent, peent”), and giant Red-Headed woodpeckers.
Wish I had a link to a sound-clip- I wake every morning identifying each bird by song, before I open my eyes.
I also have 2 cranky fat-bottomed Pekin ducks, but they look more like walking dinner than graceful winged ornaments.
Yup. We have a bird feeder filled with “wild bird” seed and an extra helping of sunflower seeds, and two of those little suet ball thingies outside right now. Mostly we get sparrows and different kinds of titmouse, some bullfinches, and now and then a magpie.
When we mow the lawn or dig something up we get visits from the seagulls, too, but I don’t think that counts as “feeding” them.
If you place your birdfeeder on the ground, rather than in a tree,
you MAY refer to it as 'Cat feeder", instead.
We hung a bird feeder off our back deck, which opened out onto a patch of woods, when we lived Maryland, and had a wonderful assortment of birds come to visit. One notable Christmas day we even had a falcon stop by briefly – it was an amazingly gorgeous raptor, hooked beak and all, simply spectacular! That was a great Christmas, we also had a red fox come wandering by. This in the middle of the D.C. metro area!
We rapidly discovered there is no such thing as a squirrel-proof bird feeder, although we made it hard for them, so that one squirrel in particular was pretty much the only one who managed to figure out how to hang by his back toes and shake the feeder to get the seed out. He did so well at it he started off thin and scrawny and ended up being renamed “Porky” by Papa Tiger; he also used to sit at the back patio door and tap on the glass to make the dog go crazy. It took a couple of months for the dog to get tired of barking at him when she realized she could not get at him no matter how hard she tried.
But Porky also knocked a lot of the bird seed onto the ground, so our back yard became the gathering point for all the neighborhood doves. The cat caught an occasional sparrow, but preferred chipmunks, although she did have a wonderful time hiding under the barbecue grill cover watching the birds landing and occasionally leaping out to scare the living daylights out of them.
It was better than TV any day!
We used to keep a couple of bird feeders up, but all we ever attracted were grackles and squirrels. Squirrels are cute, but the grackles are mean and noisy, so we quit putting out birdseed one summer.
I also didn’t like the bird lime all over my car. We had to have the birdfeeders in the front yard, because our dogs like birds VERY much indeed.
Every morning I give the sun conure who lives in my living room a piece of dried pineapple. If I don’t, he’ll scream his orange little head off. 
I give his pal the cockateil some Special K cereal because she doesn’t like pineapple. She doesn’t scream, but she is a great big beggar.
I change their food every morning, and dump their dishes into a container that I use to feed the birds outside.
Outside, I have sparrows, starlings, morning doves and the occasional blue jay who pick through the parrot food.
Mostly chickadees and sparrows, an occasional cardinal or jay – I’ve seen goldfinches on the echinacea seed heads.
Sometimes in the summer I get hummingbirds.
For those who don’t like to feed the squirrels:
Put safflower seed in your feeder instead of sunflower or other seed. Squirrels don’t care for it.
We get the same birds that Ruby mentioned, along with mourning doves in the summer and the occasional cedar waxwing in our chokecherry trees.
Sometimes in early summer, we’ll see scarlet tanagers.
We have a screech owl that nests in our neighborhood every summer.
We have something new this year: a family of kestrels nested in one of the elms, and they do a bit of hunting in our backyard. I figure we can spare the sparrows, and the chickadees are too smart and quick to be taken.
Not sure how many non Uk people will recognise of these.
In the last 6 months these have graced my garden since I started putting out seeds and nuts:
Robin
Wren
Dunnock
Blackbird
Thrush
Collared Dove
Wood Pigeon
Sparrow
Great Tit
Blue Tit
Greenfinch
Chaffinch
Goldfinch
Greater Spotted Woodpecker
Nuthatch
Starling
Jackdaw
Magpie
Carrion Crow
Jay
Sparrowhawk
Siskin
I do wish they would learn how to behave though. They tend to leave behind al kind of little offerings.
V
Of course that last sentence was meant to be:
All kinds of little offerings
V
We’re a little, well, eccentric. We have 4 bird feeders, 3 hummingbird feeders, 3 suet feeders and a preemptive corn feeder for the squirrels and a bird bath. I never set out to feed all the birds in the Pacific Northwest, but one thing lead to another and now I am doling out about 50 lbs. of seeds every two weeks.
In addition to the beautiful yellow goldfinches, starlings, grackles, sparrows, Stellar’s Jays, robins, grosbeaks, crows, nuthatches, tanagers, warblers, doves and hummingbirds, we also get all kinds of woodpeckers, had a owl the size of a basketball land on our deck and see the occaisional bald eagle soaring around.
Yeah. I know.
I like to keep a feeder. I feel like King Haggard watching the unicorns. The birds fill me with happiness.
However a squirrel broke it recently (@!#! little buggers) and I have to buy another one. I read somewhere that a way to keep squirrels out (though not a nice one) was to mix cayenne pepper in with the seed. It doesn’t bother the birds, but it does bother the squirrels, who wash their faces (and eyes) after they eat. With their paws. Mwahahaha.
When I was living in the North End of Boston, a very congested area, I put a bird feeder outside my kitchen window – hanging from the railing of the fire escape. I got mostly sparrows and pigeons, but one day I looked up from my lunch and saw a kestel! Male, to judge by his glorious plumage. He left in a flash when he caught the motion of my head. But that was so cool – to see a kestrel only a couple yards away.
My grandparents feed birds. A lot. Ten feeders total (mostly regular birdseed, but there’s a suet deal and the red liquid stuff, too).
They hate crows, grackles, and squirrels, to the point of propping up a pellet gun next to the sliding glass door which leads out to the deck. Gramma was up to 22 squirrels and assorted crows/grackles one summer. We took to calling her Little Orphan Grannie.
For the past couple of Christamases I’ve been eyeing the ultimate squirrel-“proof” birdfeeder. The perch is a horizontal wheel set on ball bearings. The store has a freakin’ hilarious video of squirrels attempting to hang on to the perch only to end up clinging for dear life as the wheel spins around, eventually flinging the hapless squirrel out of camera range (especially tempting since the feeder would be about 20 feet off the ground at gramma and grampa’s place). Alas, they’re still selling it for 110 bucks, so I sprung for the 90 dollar version with the collapsable perches: anything larger than a typical songbird will slide right off the sucker.
I will sell videos.
Psalex…
If you google on bird songs you’ll get a number of websites you’re wishing for. Here are a few to get you started:
http://www.math.sunysb.edu/~tony/birds/
Very sorry. I gave you a dupe in that threesome. Oh well, here’s a keeper (I hope).
http://www.mbr-pwrc.usgs.gov/id/songlist.html
You all might consider getting a platform feeder. We did a month or so ago, and it’s wonderful. At feeding time, the platform, which hangs under the eave in our den, swarms with birds of different species.
And when the weather is bad - blizzard or heavy rains, it’s nonstop birds all day. This feeder is square, about 13" on a side, and maybe 1-1/2 to 2" deep. Also under the eave is a house-shaped feeder with the roof on hinges. But the roof often casts a shadow that prevents us from seeing the birds in the best light. The platform feeder is roofless, of course, and we see the birds up close in all their glory.
Squirrels are a problem now and then, but I have a pellet gun and cull the rodent population every two or three years. Sounds cruel, but they have no natural enemies to speak of.
I started this culling of our squirrels when I saw 13 of them feeding on the seed I’d put down for my ground feeders. For a couple of weeks I knocked off an average of 4 a day. That brought things under control - for a year or two, anyway.