Hello, Protego! You'll find that hummingbirds and butterflies enjoy lots of similar plants. They both feed on nectar sources, and hummingbirds hunt for small insects that are attracted to the nectar sources as well. I'm so glad you are enjoying gardening. It will be a therapeutic escape you can take advantage of for the rest of your life. Martha

black oil sunflower seeds probably attract more birds than any other feed. you can use a tube feeder or a mesh wire feeder or even a hopper feeder. Suet is a great treat in winter but some birds eat it year around. you can use a suet cage and buy suet cakes or make your own suet mix. there are lots of old posts on here making suet. if you like doves and juncos and other ground feeders the seed mixes with cracked corn ot millet do good but they also attract blackbirds and starlings and cowbirds which lots of people don't want around. the summer song birds such as tanagers and orioles and grosbeaks like fruit or berrys or drink from necter feeders. or plants with berrys or blooms and blossoms. the woodpeckers i get here love nuts and suet and cracked corn and millet. robins and bluebirds like mealworms or grubs or earthworms the tits and chickadees and nuthatches like suet or hulled sunflowers or boss or nuts.

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!

the sparrows don't show up here but when its stormy and usually after daylight. the juncos are often here before it get light even and stay off and on all day till dark. the sparrows show up in flocks fly in and eat in a hury and are gone and might not be back for days. Only one scraggly ground squirrel here and he seldom climbs anything and stays on the ground mostly and has a tunnel under a shrub in a neighbors yard. Have not seen him since it started snowing. the juncos favor the cracked corn and millet and the sparrows the millet and milo.