Henry,

I have to agree with the additional wildlife,since my gardens are maturing I see more birds in my gardens also. I feed the birds, have a pond, and have put many birdhouses in my yard for them to nest. I don't have too much of a problem with slugs and I attribute that to the birds.

I put out my Oriole feeder a couple weeks ago and placed a little cup of grape jelly out. It is amazing to watch the birds feast on the jelly. Right now I have a catbird that thinks he died and went to heaven. ha ha ha. He is constantly stocking up on the grape jelly.

It is so peaceful and just wonderful to see and enjoy the fruits of our labor. At times, when I'm doing all this hard physical labor, hauling mulch, manure, constantly weeding and having to keep the gardens watered by hand as I don't have a sprinkler system I wonder if I've lost my mind. I have 3 to 4 acres in gardens and boy...I may have bit off more than I can chew.

We have had a very long cold winter with very little Spring to speak of and I don't see any rose buds yet. A lot of my roses are just breaking ground. My german bearded iris have not bloomed yet and are just beginning to throw up so many big plump flower buds.

I have some friends that are not into gardening or nature at all (including my husband). It just amazes me. When I see something exciting taking place in my gardens, at times I can't tell some of my friends as their eyes just glaze over and they can't quite understand my excitement. I wish I had a friend I could pick up the phone and just share that amazing event with and they understand the excitement.

It's good to have this place as an outlet to read other peoples joy with the same interests. So with all of that said, I understand your excitement Henry. It's wonderful you are fortunate to have all the wonderful wildlife to entertain you while you are tending your gardens.

~Tj~

Tj, You said it so well. Gardening is such a labor of love. Right now I not doing much but I used to put in 20-30 hours a week in the spring and early summer. It is a huge job to build a garden and a lot of maintenance even when everything is going well but it is such a joy during that magic six weeks from late May to early July and again in the fall. The garden has floodlights and I used to have a sound system and many a night I have stayed late out there in an absolute state of wonderment. And a couple of glasses of wine makes it just perfect. Henry

I know what you guys mean..but 3-4 acres? Good lord. I have a small patch...

just this year i got interested in birdwatching; birds and gardens go hand in hand. i put up a few simple feeders and some suet and i couldn't believe the amount of different species that came to eat. as i write this , my resident pileated woodpecker just flew over my head...
i live in a townhouse complex and unfortuneately, the strata council muscled me into removing my feeders because they say that that is the reason for some of the rats that have gotten into peoples' houses...
i wasn't breaking the rules, but they certainly made me feel like i was.
now the birds are gone- however...
i saw a hummingbird earlier this evening fly right up to my container of scentsational and shoved his beak into one of the lovely blooms- so maybe its not all lost.

Joe, I hate that! But in case you weren't reading my posts last year...we moved to Gig Harbor..right by a greenbelt. A wonderful home and well deserved after hubby and I cared for his handicapped, widowed mother for 7 years.

Well...me the CITY SLICKER..I put bird food out. I was enjoying the critters as were you. First the neighbor warned me that seed brings RATS..Sure enough..we saw a rather large female..we caught her in a rat trap that's how I knew it was a she..anyhoo..I started flashing the light on the patio real fast at night..trying to see something. Well there was a large neat-oh wood-packrat thing shaking the beejeebers out of the suet feeder in the maple tree off the patio. I ran to get my wildlife book and was trying to figure out what it was. The shape of the ears and so on...LOL. When I got to the description of the TAIL..I realized I was face to face with a LARGE NORWAY RAT. Then a few nights later hubby saw about 5 running through the back yard at dusk. We had to hire an exterminator..as it turns out the crawl space door was flimsy and the rats were under the house..however not real bad. We had to use those closed poison things..the safe ones..except for rats that is. We had the door fixed on the crawl space. We had to move the food way to the back of the property. I have been watching and watching...no rats so far as I can tell. We have cool red-ish squirrels. Chip and Dale..and grey squirrels. Hummingbirds and flickers. Lots of Goldfinch, and little beep-beep birds. We are enjoying the wildlife on the property. Strange, last year we saw lots of raccoons..none so far this year. We even have some fancy pidgeons that show up to the feeder. They all look alike..the Gig Harbor bird store owner knew what kind they are..Anyhoo...I know how you feel about having to move your feeders..but rats are around. Did you guys know that rats have no bladders? So that's why they always smell. Urine just runs out of their bodies. EWWW. Also the term WHARF RAT..is just a term for a large Norway Rat.

We have a lot of birds too. The hummers have finally arrived en force. I have to be careful spraying fungicide because I have a few roses that have nests in them. The mocking birds tend to dominate my yard, but I also have a lot of cardinals, chickadees, tit mice and other birds. I'll have to try the jelly. That sounds like fun.

Lots of birds also here.
Humminbirds are considered exotic here, Buford, so you are very lucky to see them, but there is one family of magpies, many blackbirds and many turtledoves. They are very "daring", as they are not scared by anything.
I have one big old cherry tree which is now full of cherries, and they are very busy at eating, and it seems they don't care for the few humans around them.

It is allowed to hunt where I live, and for the most there are fields, so in my garden the birds find trees and a no-hunting zone. Maybe some of them have learned that here it is safe to stay. And there is food, oh yes, plenty of worms, fruits, and hips.

I like to go in the garden and hear them singing, and I like to know the garden is alive. My colleagues however think I am crazy if I speak about that, so I usually shut up.

I too am loving my birds this year (as I do every year). I don't set out feeders, because I have cats and feel that it would be cruel to set up an "ambush". So I just enjoy them when they visit. Seeing the usual robins, blue jays, cardinals, woodpeckers, also seeing lots of orioles and eastern bluebirds--the bluebirds sit on my power lines and telephone wires, swoop down for bugs, swoop back up to the line, all day long. I have a fairly open yard, and I'm one of the few houses on my street that still has above-ground lines (as opposed to buried lines) from the telephone pole, so I am richer in bluebirds than most--who knew there'd be a benefit to overhead lines? I have swallows that like to follow the lawn mower as it stirs up bugs, have a northern flicker that walks along "drilling" the ground with his beak, ruby-throated hummingbirds that love my nepeta, even have wood ducks that visit the bur oak trees behind us in the spring. Yep, a good year for birds.

I miss the birds so much. We had them all at the old house, here at the new I'm not even getting them at my birdbaths. Don't see them in puddles either. I hope they eventually come.

I just came in and my foot is getting so much better that I can almost stand on it. I can't wait to actually be able to work. Just a few notes... I think that the catbirds are getting all the rose slugs and anything else they can find. They endlessly search through the roses looking for bugs. Normally I worry that the cats will get the catbirds because the catbirds are so tame but the cats can't get in the garden this year. Also, there are no aphids so I wonder if the birds are getting these as well. Something must be because there are no ladybugs that I could find. There is no midge what-so-ever so I believe I am safe in saying that putting down the Ortho lawn grub control did the job as I thought it would. Midge is the worst thing you can get but just about the easiest to control. This year we also have these big dragonflies swooping around I assume catching flying insects. They like to buzz the pond and they almost hit you but they never do. Henry

Our house was built a few years ago on an old cow field, so there were no trees to speak of--and very few birds, As the plants grow, the birds are really coming back. We have some rufous hummers (I think they're nesting nearby) that buzz us pretty regularly. The white crowned sparrows are getting used to us. They run around in the flower beds and get pretty close up. I don't know who is more surprised when they try to land where you're on your hands and knees weeding--you or the bird! My favorites are the pine siskins--they are such brazen little birds--you can practically get close enough to touch them while they're pigging out on the feeder. Then they go zzzzzzZZZRPP! and blow a raspberry at you. And of course, the male goldfinches are flying around like little yellow dogfighters. We've sure been using our Audubon books figuring out who all these little guys are.

Zyperiris, it's not just the rats that will raid your feeder. At our old house, a whole feeder full of food would disappear over night. Then one night we found the culprit at work--a big ol' raccoon had climbed the feeder pole, and was shaking everything onto the ground so he could climb down and feast.

Every once in a while I'd find tender shoots on the ground and wonder who the culprit was. I was a observing a sparrow one day and found out: The sparrows were picking aphids off the new growth, but sometimes they got overzealous and their beak would pinch the shoot off. Oh well, I'd still rather have the birds :)

Also, my birdbath has been adopted by the local robins, they love it! I usually have to refill it every day because the splash all the water out. They actually wait on me to fill it up.

Eric

my achilles heel was this solitary squirrel before i took the food away.
i do not miss the starlings however...
to date, i had a pair of pileated WP's, a pair of northern flickers,a hairy WP,black-capped and chesnut backed chickadees, a spotted towhee,white and golden crowned sparrows, house sparrows, american goldfinches, house finches, oregon juncos,a brown-headed cowbird, one robin, rufous hummers,and many common sparrows i couldn't identify, and that was just the birds that came to eat; not counting all of the other species that flew around...

Joe, I have never seen a Pileated WP. We have all those birds as well. The towhee loves the bird bath..We have a baffle on the bird feeders and the squirrels and chipmunks can't get to it. What's wrong with one lone squirrel? Alvin has to eat too.

If you ever have the opportunity to see a pileated woodpecker, you won't forget it. Those suckers are HUGE! And you know when one is going after a tree. Regular woodpeckers sound like "tap tap tap". Pileateds are "THUD THUD THUD". Great birds to have around.

No squirrels at this house, and hubby misses them. He had a grey squirrel that used to wait for him to come home from work every day to give her peanuts. If he was running late, she'd start coming up the front walk to find out where he was.

i agree with lucretia- watching that pileated wp come in to my suet feeder ten feet from me was amazing. the thing is with these birds, is that you hear them long before you see them - they are very loud in their call.
oh yeah- and we also had a pair of stellar jays...

This is the first year my garden is hosting nesting pairs of Robins. Two pairs. The first nest was atop the 7' tall trellis/pergola . There were 2 hatchlings. Mom was feeding them non stop it seemed. They were growing fast. Grackles struck killing them and carrying them off. I found one wee body in the lawn. Now there is a nest right in the crown of my Iceburg rose. It is an old climber that is 3' above the railing of our raised deck. This nest is well hidden from the air with all the rose buds. There are 4 eggs. By the time they hatch about mid June, the rose will be in full bloom and add to the cover. To be on the safe side I erected a "spooker" 2' from the nest on the rail post. It is an old wire plant hanger with shinny CDs that dangle from wires. Mom has overcome her fear of them to sit on her eggs. Here is hoping the Grackles stay afraid of it for the sake of the Robin family.

We have robins here too. Last year I went to add water to the bird bath and there were baby bird parts in the water. The next few days I watched the crows bring their baby kill to the bird bath..to wash I guess. Nature is brutal sometimes

zype, we call that "Nature showing her fangs". We get barn swallows every year---they insist on building their dried-mud nests under the roof of our porch. And they also insist on laying more eggs and starting the hatch cycle again, long after it is too hot for anything to survive under that roof. So then we either get overheated eggs that they've pushed out of the nest to crash on the floor, or unfledged baby birds that got so hot they leaped to their death. It is absolutely gross.
But the rest of the birds put on sort of an avian circus. We have enough songbirds that a hawk has staked out a claim on the yard and watches for small victims, in addition to the frogs caught from the pond. Hawks---I like how they look, but that's another instance of Nature's bloody fangs.
Laura

Well nature reared it's ugly head this evening..We spotted a rat coming from under our fence..The house on the other side is neglected and overgrown..and the rats come from there. We set a trap along the fence..hubby will pull the trap tomorrow morn to protect the squirrels. Put it back up again in the evening

Have lots of different birds around the house, also. I've had the feeders out all winter, so all the locals (lots of different kinds) are use to me being around. I had a hummer buzz the front porch the other evening so it's time to put out their feeder. I never saw this many different birds in SE FL. I love it up here at the foot of the mountains. Ya'all need to learn how to hand feed your birds. It's something you'll never forget.

hi, everyone, I just started to pick up this thread...A week ago I posted my "how to balance a garden organically" with interest in attracting more varieties of birds, butterflies in my "poisonous" neighborhood...Hope you won't mind if I ask which is everyone's favorite bird feeders (esp. for hummers) and bird feed (seed) that you would recommend. All there is is blackbirds (grackle) and just a few spare robins and I forgot, a few mourning doves, but that's it... I hardly see any sparrows either... I would love to see a cardinal, or even the pesky blue jay (I've always that it had "character" and lovely coloring)...and my favorite, the hummingbird...

This spring have seen an increase in birds dropping in to the garden but activity seems to taper off. I don't but up bird feeders because I don't like the mess but I've been reading about this butter stuff that you smear on tree that might fit the ticket. Anyway, I've seen birds that I have never seen before, one so small running through my garden that I thought it was a mouse at first. I had two that had brightly yellowish orange on there breast that were attacking my iris so I thought. I was mad because they torn one that barely to shreds. It took me awhile to realize that were going after the aphids. I've also noticed that aren't that many aphids this year. My red twig dogwood would get them bad every year. But this year, I've yet to see a one on it. I usually have to spray it with a natural bioinsecticide which I mix with a fungicide to treat bs on the roses plus whatever on the crabapple tree. Also used it to treat my neighbor juniper tree that has bagworms.
So its been nice having the birds around not so great for my car but there is always a trade off. Now if I could get some nice hawks to take care of the rabbits.....

Also has any noticed an increase in bee activity?

"Also has any noticed an increase in bee activity?"

My roses were sooooo slooooww to bloom this year that I have not had opportunity to gauge bee activity. I do notice, however, that there seem to be a very large number of sluggish, "stupid" honey bees crawling or lying on the driveway. I have only seen a couple actually flying around. Doesn't seem good to me; I had never witnessed this behavior before.

oh, no, Greenhaven... I hope you haven't been using Neem oil... it is a notorious bee killer and will leave tons of bees dead or "lying in the driveway"..

please guys I need name brands of favorite hummingbird feeders, and what is this butter stuff, where can I find a link?

On a celebration note! I found my first bee of the season and it was having a fun time with my hot pepper-sprayed Gemini roses! I thought for sure no bees would want to visit because of the spray, and swore that as soon as I got a flush of prolific roses I would stop the pepper spray (keeps the thrips at bay) ... but to my delight, the sweet Gemini fragrance really attracted the bee! It was definitely a bee, not a wasp... Had the fuzzy stripes on its body and on its face... I haven't seen a bee for ages. then the next day the bee (maybe the same one) visited my 3rd blooming Gemini blossom...

I love my birds, and sometimes do some crazy stuff to accomadate them! I have a robin that nests on top of my garage door opener every year for the last 3 years..if i am doing anything in the garage she sits on the ledge and just bickers at me until i leave, so i do what i am doing, then leave every so often so she can get in there and feed her babies...i enjoy her..she follows the mower and grabs whatever she can after the grass is clipped..i get a kick out of her.
i have a pileated woodpecker that comes every night at dusk and grabs huge chunks of a stump and just flings them over his shoulder..he is very skittish, and if he sees me he is gone for the day. i should have gotten rid of that stump years ago, but he seems to like it, so it stays...
i have hummers all over..i just love them.
2 years ago, i had a pair of mourning doves make a nest right in the middle of my gravel driveway...so i moved it off to the side, and they went back to it and raised their chicks...i put traffic cones around it so nobody would accidentally run over it...it was the highlight of my day to see them..they drag their wing and act wounded to lure you away from their nest..every morning and every night, i watched them play wounded..they are still here, but further from the driveway now, so i don't get the show that i used to!
i also get a huge kick out of the humminbird moths..they are all over my bee balm every summer..once you get used to spotting them, they are easy to find, and they aren't afraid at all, you can get them to sit on your hand..they look like mini hummingbirds..
i never just look at my roses..i always look at what supports them, and what they support...i am glad that i don't use chemicals..Donna

Mrs Catbird has her nest in a Viburnum not fall off my backyard patio. The wrens are feeding babies in the nextbox and Mockingbirds just fledged this past week. Lots of birds here.

Each morning if I look out my front window early, I can see the birds all around and in my roses in the front yard checking around all the leaves. Must be looking for bugs. They probably do it on the side yard too but I don't see them.

Living in the midwest and out in the country, it's like living in the middle of an aviary. American robins, finches, canaries, cardinals, blue jays (boy, are they LOUD!), red wing blackbirds all sing their sweet songs when dawn breaks. I really miss it when winter comes; it's too quiet and silent.

Last weekend I saw 3 birds I've never seen before; they had bright yellow heads and black bodies and are about the size of cardinals. They've been hanging around one of my rose gardens with one of their youngsters. So far I haven't been able to identify them in any of the on-line bird books. They are really gorgeous.
-terry

Terry,

Google "Yellow headed blackbird".