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The Kitchen Table

What Kinds of Birds Come To Your Feeder?

16 years ago

I seem to just have the common birds here, for now, cardinals, blue jays, tufted titmouse, mourning doves, nuthatches, different sparrows, yellow shafted flickers,juncos and hairy or downy woodpeckers. One time had a pheasant come and eat off the ground. I only saw him one year. What comes to your feeder?

Sue

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Comments (15)

moonie_57 (8 NC)
16 years ago
We don't feed the birds anymore because of the cats. Feel like I'd be leading them to slaughter.
lydia1959
16 years ago
I get the same birds you get Sue as well as a red headed and red-bellied woodpeckers...plus the Pileated comes once a day sometimes bringing his mate.

That reminds me I need to go put out more suet.
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Maybe the tree just needs to get bigger ? I remember tons of birds and tons of cherries my growing up years at grandmas. Her trees were large, but we could use ladders and I climbed waaay up. We had plenty to make pies and put up for winter. My tree now is so old and huge, the only way I get any cherries are when the birds are kind enough to drop a few for me to pick up. I try to remember to always say thank you. As it stands, you have nothing to loose by experimenting with adding feeders. Currently I'm mostly winning in getting the squirrels to leave my finch feeders alone by feeding them separately each morning. They have me well trained. ;) This post was edited by plaidbird on Sun, May 11, 14 at 16:17
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Last year, I bought a feeder at the store that was made of green glass, and shaped like a pear with a hole at the bottom. There was a black rubber stopper stuck in the bottom of the glass pear. The stopper had a hole in its center, and an angled glass tube was inserted into this hole and hung downward. The end of the glass tube had a collar of red plastic. It was cute looking, but what a terrible feeder! The vacuum inside the glass receptacle prevented the solution from travelling down the tube, and the tube was so long that it would take millions of years of hummingbird evolution to find a bird that would evolve a bill shape to use it. Their bill would have to be curved upward, like a godwit or something! Anyway, I got so disgusted with this that I decided to make my own feeder. I got a small glass liquor bottle (maybe 4 oz or so) and found a red rubber stopper at Wild Birds Unlimited. The stopper fit perfectly into the opening of the bottle and had a hole in the center that was meant to receive a bent glass tube. Instead of using the tube, I made a flower out of Sculpey clay (or is it, Sculpy?) and poked a skinny hole in the center of the flower with a bamboo skewer that seemed the right size. The sculpey clay itself is supposed to be non-toxic, and I glued it to the red rubber stopper with epoxy. The epoxy is on the outside, and never touches the solution. Finally, I found some very fine gold wire and fashioned a sort of harness to hold the bottle. The bottle hangs diagonally downward at an angle of maybe 45 degrees, or a bit less. The ants I have trouble with are great big carpenter ants (man, can they bite!) and they are too large and clumsy to climb down my very slender gold jeweller's wire. I don't know if it would work with tiny ants, but I haven't seen a single ant on the feeder, so it seems to be working. The feeder is small enough that the nectar gets used up quickly, so I seldom have to worry about nectar going sour. When I do clean it, I just pop off the stopper/flower and toss it, and the bottle into a pot of boiling water. Easy! To be sure, there are more elegant feeders to be found, but the hummers seem very comfortable with it. The sugar solution stays up in the bottle, and the bumblebees that have visited it seem to have trouble reaching the solution, so don't linger. The hummingbirds, with their longer bills, have no trouble at all, and just probe deeply inside to get at the sugar water. My fake sculpey flower looks kind of like a cardinal climber flower, and I guess it's convincing enough that the hummers have no trouble seeing it as a possible food source.
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We get whopper orioles! They are the most furtive of birds and they make a "chuck chuck" ugly noise I learned to recognize and when I hear it I dash to the window to see if I can spot one, it's tough because they won't even let me look at them through the blinds. We use the glass 27 oz feeders and the orioles hang upside down with their feet around the plasticized wire the feeder hangs from to use the feeder. They must be able to get something like this because they keep coming back. They are really gorgeous and huge.
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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.
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sue_va
16 years ago
Right now mostly snow birds (Juncos) but I have seen a couple cardinals and a bluejay.

I can't get out to my feeders because we still have deep snow out there.

I don't know what they are finding, but they still peck around.

Hurry Spring!!

Sue
Marilyn Sue
Original Author
16 years ago
We have cats too, but when they put this feeder up, I had them to put it high and it has a baffle on it. I have to use a step stool if I am to fill it. Yes, there is still plenty of snow here too. It is on a metal pipe made for feeders and the cats can't climb it. It is around 20 here today.

Sue
marlingardener
16 years ago
Last Saturday, the 9th, we had 19 species of birds at our two feeders and in the pasture. It has been unusually cold here, so we may be benefitting from that. We have white-crowned sparrows, Eastern bluebirds, red wing blackbirds, a red-tailed hawk, a red-bellied woodpecker, chickadees, tree sparrows, killdeer, and three kinds of doves. We feed black oil sunflower seed and a wild bird mix. We also supply water, which isn't easy when it keeps freezing! Amen to Sue's Hurry Spring!
Silverdove
16 years ago
I get mostly sparrows, chickadees, mourning doves, juncos, cardinals, and blue jays.

Unfortunately, I also get deer, who clean out the feeders with one lick. The deer usually come at dusk, or after dark, so I put only a small amount of bird seed in the feeders each morning, so there is not much left for the deer by evening.
moonie_57 (8 NC)
16 years ago
marilyn sue - we also had our birdfeeder up high but the seed would inevitably end up on the ground. We are up to 6 cats now, the newest arrival being a young female probably about 5 months old. She needs to be spayed before going into heat. I have been laid off and been putting off making an appt for her. Wish cats would quit finding their way to my house. (Not really)

BTW, anyone have a good bird ID site?
sheilajoyce_gw
16 years ago
My only feeder is a hummingbird feeder, and we get good numbers of them every day. Since the crows arrived in our neighborhood in large numbers over 10 years ago, our other birds have really diminished in population. I used to have so many doves in our yard and on our fencetop daily, but they are rarely spotted here anymore. We would have so many doves on our fence that I was reminded of Alfred Hitchkock's move The Birds. They will show up with some of the other birds when our Liquid Amber trees drop their pods and the seeds sprinkle all over. Those must be some tastey seeds!
susanjf_gw
16 years ago
as i was driving up i saw what looked like a robin?? that's crazy, right? i mean robins in jan in michigan? we have a fmaily of 6-10 doves, and an assortment of the smaller birds...and a squirrel or 2-3, lol...
tobygirl
16 years ago
Same birds as you, Sue, but no flickers this time of year. Earlier in the season, we had purple and gold finches, too.

Lucky you, Lydia, with the Pileateds.
frostedc
16 years ago
My list of birds visiting my feeders, is the
same as the rest of the posters, with an occasional
Towhee, added to the mix.

I like the Bird Guide at Cornell, for identification.

Here is a link that might be useful: bird guide
phyllis__mn
16 years ago
I get the usual chickadees, sparrows, blue jays, purple finches, nuthatches, goldfinch. I took a pic of a robin in one of my trees on Dec. 27, silly bird....this is MN!!

The biggest thrill was seeing cardinals for the first time up here. They are rare this far north, so I was pretty excited to see a pair...
jel48
16 years ago
Right now, I have mostly red breasted and white breasted nuthatches, juncos, chickadees, blue jays, and a few starlings. Other times of the year I have several kinds of sparrows, Pine Siskins, goldfinches, purple finches, and redpolls. I also have the occasional downy woodpecker. I might have missed a few. My memory isn't the greatest for things that aren't happening right now :-)
socks
16 years ago
We don't seem to attract too many birds when we put out a feeder. We do have some black phoebes which frequent our yard, but they are insectivores so I suspect they are after gnats or something in the yard.
Marilyn Sue
Original Author
16 years ago
Amber just saw a robin in our woods the other day. I wonder what they eat this kind of weather? As it gets spring there are other birds that join in. I don't put water out as they can fly to the pond, it has a heater and keeps a space open.

Sue

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