Awwwww, thanks guys!! It was so much fun putting it together (I just hope it stays that way ! LOL) Garden2garden, my hubby said I should put the other one on top with it being deeper but the one I did use for the top is such a beautiful plate. I just wish I could've used something else as the base as I would've preffered to use that bottom one as a top for another project but it's all so heavy it really needed a heavy sturdy base. I also thought about a bird or two, I'm on the look out for some glass ones and I'll attach one or two later. Desertrat, I used 6 pieces, 2 large plates, 2 tall vases, a round vase and a small plate (upside down under the round vase) I think all up they cost about $12 - $14, I picked them all up from garage sales. Thanks for the tips on photo uploading, I'll give it a try now so I can show you this from another angle. (((hugs))) Tracey

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

The cheapest way to get rid of a cat is to do something to make it remember your yard as a no-go zone. In other words, scare the crao out of it. I had this orange cat stalking around in my yard, trying to catch my birds. One day I looked out, saw the cat in the bushes between my deck and the lawn, so I grabbed an air horn, and slowly sneaked up behind it, and blasted the air horn right behind hit. I've never seen a cat jump so high in my life, and it ran, and ran, and ran, and I've never seen it again. I guess I traumatized it! Joe

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!