How do you control chaos at the bird feeder?
rochesterroseman
8 years ago
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Comments (17)
rochesterroseman
8 years agolast modified: 8 years agoRelated Discussions
What Type of Feeder Do You (or your birds) Prefer?
Comments (12)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....See MoreHow many feeders do you have?
Comments (10)I agree with that totally. There were definitely a lot of hummingbirds here before we put up feeders, every summer. It was because we were seeing so many, but never up close, that we got the feeders. No doubt they would be fine without them, but in trade for coming close enough for us to see them, I'm happy to maintain/fill the feeders. There are where I want to see hummingbirds, and for the first time this year, they are coming "inside" the porch to visit the tiny flowers on potted plants. They've always visited Coleus blooms out in the yard, but never on the front porch while I was sitting there. Wish I knew what they were saying when they stop in mid-air a few feet away, looking directly at me, chittering up a storm. I've also added a lot of Plectranthus 'Mona Lavender' to porch pots this summer, can't say enough about how much they like these flowers! My neighbor a few doors down has a large patch of Zinnias and at any particular moment, there's several flitting around that, sometimes a lot more. If any Lantanas are hardy where you are (or you are into buying them as annuals,) that's what has always attracted them around our yard, even years ago before I started getting rid of grass and adding any other plants....See MoreWhat do you do for bird control?
Comments (8)Christopher, With corn, I mulch the area lightly with hay. You also could use grass clippings except they're less likely to be available at spring planting time, although they would be for fall planting time. The corn grows up through the hay, but the crows don't seem to recognize green corn seedlings in the middle of tan-to-buff-colored hay the same way that they recognize green corn seedlings in bare soil. I almost never lose a single corn seedling. Another old trick, but one that I think is much harder to pull off is to sprout garlic cloves indoors in flats early in spring and transplant it to the area where you're going to seed corn. The birds see the garlic sprouts, think they are corn (especially if you grow the corn in the same place every year), pull them up and discover--yuck!--they are not corn. Then you come back a couple of weeks later and plant corn which the birds leave alone because they think it is garlic. I think the success of this is more variable because you could have birds visit your corn who missed the round of garlic earlier. Some people swear by it though Beans are harder because everything here in the country wants to eat beans, and if I mulch them with hay, it just gives bean-sprout-eating insects a place to hide. So, I start every single bean inside in paper cups and transplant them outside. Tedious? Definitely. Time-consuming? Absolutely. However, as long as I put Slug-Go Plus or an equivalent product on the ground around the newly-transplanted seedings, the pillbugs and sowbugs (my biggest pest in spring) don't eat the seedlings. I do put a toothpick very close to each seedling at planting time to deter cutworms too. And, the garden is fenced, so rabbits generally can't get the bean seedlings. I don't think I've ever had birds bother bean seedlings. If I transplant carefully and I don't lose any seedlings due to my own clumsiness, then I have nice full rows with no gaps so that is a plus too. Until I started transplanting bean seedlings I had a huge problem with all the wild things getting the beans and/or young bean seedlings. I don't have those issues now. One way to protect any newly seeded bed from birds is to hammer in a few stakes and string fishing line in a random pattern (imagine a man-made spider web although not with the precision patterns seen in many spider webs) between the stakes. The lighter/less visible the fishing line the better because you want the birds to fly down to steal the seeds or seedlings and be 'spooked' by hitting the fishing line instead. This works best if the line is fairly close to the ground to the birds cannot land on the ground and walk under the line. After the seedlings are up and rooted well enough that the birds can't yank them up out of the ground, you remove the fishing line and stakes. I also 'bribe' wild birds of all types to leave my garden alone by putting little piles of bird seed just outside the garden fence. They feed daily at the seed and leave my plants alone, although some of them stick around, sit on the tomato cages and catch bugs. I use hen scratch, cracked corn and black oil sunflower seeds in rotation so the birds never know exactly what to expect, but you could use any wild bird seed mix. I have a scarecrow--in fact, 2 of them, made by a friend with whom I've shared garden produce for years and even though the scarecrows are a nice addition to the garden, the birds are not the least bit afraid of them. With some birds, one of those sprinklers that is motion activated scares them off, but I think other birds set it off on person so they can play in the water. Anything that moves, like bird flash tape, pinwheels, fluttering pieces of surveyor's tape, dangling aluminum pie pans or CDs, etc., the birds seem smart enough to figure them out and lose their fear of them after a while. My cats don't even keep all the birds out of the garden. I think it is because I feed a lot of wild birds and scold the cats if they 'stalk' them, and my cats know they shouldn't bother the birds. Some people have garden cats that keep birds out of the garden, but my cats just don't do that, although they do keep rodents away. That's about all I can think of other than bird netting, which is moderately effective, but sure can be a hassle for the gardener. Good luck--I hope you find some workable solutions. Dawn...See MoreHow cute is this? Bird feeder.....
Comments (7)What a nice neighbor you are..we should all try being as kind everyday as you are!! I love the website you provided, although I do not have a heart, I have a big doxie dog, cat, santa and bell. Any of these would be great as they are bigger than normal cookie cutters and I am sure the birds would not mind "eating the cat". LOL!!!...See Morerochesterroseman
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