Beautiful bird! I've never had one at my feeder, but I'm not in a great location. Lately, lots of Palm Warblers, Yellow-Rumped Warblers, Blue-Gray Gnatcatchers, a pair of Phoebes, Red-Bellied Woodpecker, Blue Jays, Cardinals and Dove (mostly White-Winged). I still have a resident Red-Shouldered Hawk patrolling the area, but he's now been joined by a Cooper's Hawk. The song birds better keep looking up! Hope your bunting stays with you awhile! wt

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 :)

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!

Make the railings around the edges of the platforms solid from top to bottom and you might have fewer seeds going over the sides and onto the ground. My squirrels would move in A friend had a renter feeding birds with a platform feeder. Whenever I visited I saw a carpet of ejected seed on the ground beneath it. After the resulting rat effects were discovered under the house the contractor engaged to deal with them charged $7000. A little less than a pest and insulation company just charged me to replace rat soiled insulation and ground cloth, plug rat holes in two attics and one crawl space. The existing yellow insulation pulled out and bagged up by the crew had so many turds on it it looked like raisin buns. The couple that I bought the house from last fall had been feeding birds both mixed seed and sunflower seeds by the garbage can fall using 2 platform feeders with small bases. Rats had tunneled under the foundation and been caching the sunflower seeds in the crawl space.