Thank you! I'm saving this info so I can do this sometime in the Spring, whenever the weather decides to warm up :) !! pkponder ...do you have a picture? Would love to see it. I want to include a Birdhouse and a Birdfeeder. My Birdfeeder is very large and I hung it last summer and was still out till recently when it needed seed and found out the thing broke at the top where you take it off to add seed ... so I'm mounting it on a pole and it will be just fine that way. It is VERY heavy so I can't have a tall pole for it. I included a picture of my bird feeder. It is 13 x 13 and has 9 feeding stations, 11lb capacity. I want to have a birdhouse separate but not too far away. Have an idea to put these alongside our ramp ... will look nice with some vines I think. :) Also, I know this bird feeder can be pole mounted because a couple people told me about how to do it. I saved that info and it says The pipe needs to be no wider than 7/8 of an inch. Anyway, looking forward to mounting that and I have to find a nice bird house to also mount on a pole. We have lots of cats around here (including ours that goes outside) and squirrels, so I might have to figure a way to keep them out.

You can always try hanging the feeders independent of the trees. A post set into the ground with hooks for the feeders or the shepherd's crooks they sell specifically for this purpose would prevent any damage hanging feeding appliances directly to a tree might incur. As to the pros and cons of feeding birds.......I agree with Dan on this one. Expanding development has restricted/removed many of the natural habitats and food sources and encouraging birds to the garden is overall a very good thing - they are the best natural insect control available! Plus, they are infinitely entertaining. Planting to encourage habitat and to supplement food sources is desirable, but nothing wrong with feeders either. They can bring the birds up close and personal :-)) If you want songbirds, try a "no-waste" mix. Even if it gets scattered on the ground, it gets eaten too fast to hang around to attract rodents. And sapsucker damage to trees is generally more cosmetic than particularly harmful. Since they have a 'preferred' tree menu, you can always avoid attracting them by not planting the trees they like. And as they tend to limit their diet to insects and tree sap, with supplementation from fruits and berries - the seed feeders are unlikely to create additional problems.

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 almost posted an observation along these lines several weeks ago. In a one-week span I noticed three separate cowbird chicks all being attended to by blue-grey gnatcatchers. There was always a single cb chick to each set of birds, and never any sign of additional BGGC chicks vying for the food. In that same time span I also noticed a CBchick being fed by a pair of indigo buntings. It's not hard to find them as they are very raucous and conspicuous. I am curious how the numbers and densities of birds most typically affected by CB predations are doing here because we have hordes of cowbirds, yet I always hear/see vireos and thrushes and others that are prime targets for parasitism. I check my nest boxes regularly and destroy any CB eggs in the hopes that at least my small wooded acreage can better sustain songbirds in a time of decline, but we live in farmland with any remaining wooded areas being highly fragmented. Flocks of winter 'blackbirds' are usually groupings of redwings, starlings, grackles and cowbirds fattened up on a steady and readily available farmland diet. I only wonder what our songbird demographics will do in the next few decades.