Gldno, great photo; what kind of camera are you using? Count me in as another birdwatcher/birdfeeder, though like Mimi, I don't set the table year round. At Thanksgiving I start putting out black oil sunflower seeds in several tube feeders and will also hang suet or tallow if it's really cold. I take them up by St Patrick's. We have many mature trees and several shrubs around the house as well as a number of boxes and birdhouses and I've noticed that fighting over the feeders interferes with nest building. So, I'm happy to help out in the winter, but once it's spring, they're on their own. I only feed BOSS; the Finches like it as well as the considerably more expensive Thistle, and I figure if the birds are just hankering for corn, they can (and do) flit down among the chickens for a little scratch. Our Grandson usually makes a couple of peanut butter pine cone bird feeders each year for Christmas too. Have you done Cornell's Great Backyard Bird Count? It's a four day, nationwide event that consists of individuals simply looking out their window and counting how many birds (and what species) are hanging around. You don't have to count from your home; anywhere you see birds is good. You can spend as little as 15 minutes on one afternoon, or several hours each day if you have the time. You fill in a different report for each day which is why there are two reports for Bowlegs, although I was the only person participating. I'd like to change that this year, and get the local school science class or at least the 4H group involved. We live on a farm with a good pond, surrounded by open fields and woods that sits at least a half mile from the nearest house, so we have a nice diversity of native birds all winter, everything from Roadrunner and Turkey Vultures to Juncos and Goldfinch. When you add in all the domestic chickens underfoot, it's pretty lively out there. :^) Here is a link that might be useful: Great Backyard Bird Count FAQ

Hi, sorry, a little late to the party. I just moved to CO and this is my first winter here, used to live in MI. In MI, I rarely saw a finch in the winter. Here is CO, I have a lot of finches (red right now but some were yellow in the fall). I also get titmice (titmouses?), chickadees, downy woodpeckers, and flickers on a daily basis. Anyway, I have both black oilers in a tube and suet basket. The finches, titmice, and chickadees seem to like the suet. They eat both the seed and the suet, but the suet is what attracted them in the first place.

I only get a few House Sparrows here but would find a horde of them intolerable and would remove the feeders (especially during the summer/fall, when food is more abundant for birds). There are more active measures you can take if you are willing. I have a BB gun but have never been able to hit one, however I have trapped a few with an inbox trap when Bluebirds were nesting in my yard. I would definitely remove the English Sparrow nests and discourage them from nesting in the Arborvitaes. Another thing I read you can do, is flush the birds from the arborvitaes on very cold nights. They will be unlikely to find new cover after dark and will be vulnerable to predators and hypothermia.

We switched to feeding safflower, thistle and upside down suet feeders along with fruit, jelly and nectar, after our first year living in the country. We moved from the city to a rural area in Wisconsin and decided to put nest boxes out for bluebirds and wrens, our first year we had mostly HS but we also had one set of bluebirds and one set of tree swallows. Before the little ones had a chance to fledge the HS killed them and nested on top of them, we were sick over this. I removed all the nest boxes and started researching on how to keep the non-native and rough birds away. The switch to the foods we place out on our property was the biggest part of not attracting the non-natives and rougher birds. When the HS try to take over the nest boxes in the spring I shoot them, it is the best way to keep them out of the box, plus it gets rid of another non-native invasive bird. I tried removing their nests at first but they are persistent and do not give up until you get rid of them. We now get one or two nesting pair of bluebirds and usually four to five nesting pair of tree swallows and a pair of nesting wrens(all have fledged within the last week and a half) the few starlings that come in the yard to feed on bugs in the grass do not stick around long ( they get shot as well). This is not intended to offend any bird lovers ( we are bird lovers at our house ) it is only to tell how we deal with the invasive non-native birds that are taking over the territory of our native song birds.