Hi Maureen, How are you. We havent talked for quite a while. I have a suet feeder with a suet cake in it. Its got a copper colored top and has 3 little glass beads that hang off the bottom. I hung it up for a month and it was completely ignored! Lol! I guess I will just stick to regular birdfeeders. If you are still looking for one just let me know. its great talking to you again! Darla

I have found 9-pound bags of a mix of mostly millet with some sunflower seed and, I think, safflower seed, at a dollar-type store here called Big Lots. $7 per bag. Birds gobble it up in winter, but in the winter they'll eat anything; in the spring they are picky, kicking out the milo for the pigeons and doves, so I stop feeding them and concentrate on hummingbirds and, this year, suet for Ladderback and Downy woodpeckers. Also I have nyger thistle feeders (both metal mesh feeder and sock feeder) out for our sweet, tiny lesser goldfinches. To complete my first post in this forum, I spotted and got pictures of a male Northern Cardinal this morning, a rare sighting for our area (Albuquerque). A similar male bird (the same one??) was reported a few miles further north back in February. I also photographed a rare Vermillion Flycatcher in April. Maybe more birds are moving into my state -- and I'll have figure out how to feed them if they visit my apartment complex :)

They are constantly checking their territory for new food sources, so one or two of them blunder into the feeder and start eating, other birds see them eating and it's been discovered.

In my many many years of bird feeding, it's the 'unnamed small round seeds" that get kicked out. I used to put a row of feeders, tube platform and lantern at the edge of a garden that got lettuce and tomatoes in the summer. Every spring I would shovel out easily an inch of wet moldy icky seeds that had been kicked out while they were digging for the seeds they like. so now I only feed black oil sunflower, niger and suet cakes....with a handful of cracked corn tossed out now and then if the going gets hard....deep snow, long snow cover. Sparrows have a purpose, if only as Cooper's hawk food to keep them from murdering the cardinals. It is also my experience that most "new to feeding" bird feeding people mistake everything that isn't a cardinal, blue jay, chickadee or woodpecker as a "sparrow". Gold finches in winter garb are often called sparrows. Pine siskins are often called sparrows, rosy finches are often called sparrows....as are all the native sparrows which are labeled as nuisances. Rochesterroseman, it's pretty cruel to put out feeders and then when birds become dependent on them, take them in. If you have no feeders out, you will have no birds. Either you feed birds, sparrows, starlings and all or you don't. Not feeding because you have sparrows tells me that you have nothing that is favorable for birds other than sparrows, no open water, no fruit bearing trees or shrubs, no dense stands of shrubbery, no evergreens to shelter birds during the winter. and you are feeding seed that doesn't attract the birds you want to see. get some place for the birds to hide, feed a variety of foods....and wait. You can't expect to put out some suet and sunflower seed and a week later see cardinals and woodpeckers. It takes weeks and in some cases months for the birds to find the food source. Feeding the birds is fun....keep trying! They will bring a lot of joy to your winter days....and if you feed in the summer too, your winter population will be larger.