Well any bush or small tree that is spiny (if this is not an issue with young children around) is sure to attract desirable nesting birds such as the Song sparrow. Check if the one or two Berberis species (commonly nammed barberries) that are native to the USA are now clear with your local laws. (They used to be banned because they transmitted wheat rust disease to crops.) An Hawthorne also makes an excellent nesting bush for small birds, but they are slow-growers. Song sparrows and Red cardinals also love any dense thicket of Red cedar (which the waxwings and robins will also devour the fruits from) or arborvitae (White cedar) to nest inside and get cover for sleeping during those nasty winter weather spells... We have two large Sambucus canadensis, fruiting heavily in the sun, two other ones that strive under dense shade(Sort of as an experiment... last year they had sprung from the ground just like a perennial, seemingly dying to the ground in the fall... But this spring the buds are forming higher on the old fall branches, so maybe these two will recover and become full-fledged shady spot shrubs... we'll see). Then we have a specimen of Sambucus pubens, and this other native species indeed grows fast (gotta be careful about root competition at first though) in the shade, flowers in its first couple of years, then fruits almost as soon as it flowers! Fruits are shining bright red in the shade and are a very pretty sight in early summer, but these do disappear fast with the birds!! I am surprised that you seem to have problems finding those plant species at the nurseries. Here in the Montreal area and suburbs, at some points in the season they come almost a dime a dozen! I suggest you shop around a little more. And don't forget that if you buy small potted plants from Internet dealers (search here in the archives to find those reliable dealers), in the case of Sambucus, they grow so fast and easy that this should not be an issue for you.

Ok...so I believe Google helped me ID this as a zebra finch. Looks like it's native to Australia! Must be someone's escaped pet? Wonder how he's doing today? He's a long way from home here in NE FL.

Great slideshow! Really enjoyed it. Want to share one with you too. My buddy did this clip, but he's a little bit shy to share his work, so i do it for him :) It's about butterflies, and it's very beautiful, i hope, you'll like it :) Here is a link that might be useful: My buddy's butterfly slideshow

It took the birds 6 months to find my nyjer feeder when I first put it out. When they finally found it, the goldfinches attracted other birds to my other feeders. I had them hanging off the bottom of our seldom-used 2nd story deck, so they were semi-shaded. I also made a "bird bath" out of a boot tray - it was less than an inch deep and a good 2' long and about 16" wide. It was black, so I wouldn't put something like that out in the sun. I changed the water and scrubbed it out every day, and "sterilized" with vinegar (and rinsed and scrubbed again) about once a week. I sterilized the scrub brush in a bucket of bleach water overnight before sterilizing the "bird bath" the next day, so that the brush was fresh and clean for the post-vinegar-bath scrubbing. So - the night before, on cleaning day - I dump and scrub the bird bath; then fill it with vinegar; put the brush in the bleach water. Next morning, dump the bleach water and the vinegar thoroughly rinse the brush and let it dry in the sun (helps drive off any remaining chlorine). scrub out with the sterilized brush Thoroughly rinse the bird bath; start over again This winter I hope to make a large ceramic platter (I'm an amateur potter) with a glazed interior that will tolerate being sterilized with a bleach solution. I plan to bury that to it's lip in one of my raised beds and keep it filled with water via a dripper line. I'll make something similar for use as a butterfly puddler. Having a water feature can only help in attracting birds, but patience will help as well. One thing I would suggest is to get rid of the "songbird mix" and feed only black oil sunflower seed, safflower seed, and nyjer (in a tube feeder), in the way of seed. Every "songbird mix" I've ever seen has a high proportion of "junk" seed in it which attracts house sparrows, to your peril. At my former residence, they weren't much of a problem, but here they have mobbed my feeder to the point where I had to stop using it. They even scared my hummers away, as well as the mountain jays, mountain blue birds, and quail. Sadly, their seed scattering ways seemed to actually ATTRACT pigeons, LOL! I'm going to try to put the sunflower seed (which has to be hulled due to the former owner of this place having put in Astroturf - impossible to clean sunflower hulls out of) in a mesh feeder that only clingers can use and see if that helps. Otherwise, it's hummingbird feeders and the quail block, and the nyjer mesh feeders I have, and that's all I'll be able to put out here. Maybe an upside-down tube feeder. But nothing for the house sparrows!