Backyard Birding

The first book I purchased about bird feeding was Stokes Birdfeeder Book : The Complete Guide to Attracting, Identifying, and Understanding Your Feeder Birds by Donald and Lillian Stokes. I purchased it for 50 cents from a book sale at the library, but it has remained one of my favorites. It is short, written in a very conversational manner and contains a wealth of information for the new backyard birder.

It has the practical information that I was looking for when I first decided to set up our feeders, including a basic description of feeder types and the seed preferences of the birds I was most likely to attract. It goes over the basics of bird identification, and it was from this book that I learned to not reach for my field guide first upon encountering an unfamiliar bird. It also has a lot of basic information about the life stages of birds and the different behaviors you might notice.

Stokes Birdfeeder Bookhas everything you need to get started, and enough information to pique your interest for more.

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We have a Heath Multi-Purpose Platform Feeder, made of redwood which has been one of my favorite feeders. That may not be a very meaningful statement coming from me, however. I love all my feeders. Let’s say it was a surprise to me just how much I would like it. It got added to my wish list after reading several books on bird feeding, although I had never previously seen much use for one. What does it offer that is not offered by the hopper feeder and the ground feeder?

I may not see much of a difference, but the birds certainly do! Ours has a large screw in the middle of the feeder to hold a corn cob. The squirrels do not pay very much attention to this obvious ploy to fill their tummies with something besides sunflower seeds. Blue jays and red-bellied woodpeckers, however, seem to love it. When the orioles first arrived, I tried placing orange slices on the screw, but this did not appear to be successful. The male oriole seemed to prefer to eat sunflower seeds off the ground and the female preferred a suet feeder that was hung in the pine tree. Birds which favor this feeder (from our experience):

goldfinches
house finches
blue jays
cardinals
purple finches
red-bellied woodpeckers

Our sparrows, cowbirds and grackles will eat from it when the ground feeder is empty, but they generally leave it alone.

We have tried safflower seed in the platform feeder, but without success. Since birds can be leery of new foods, I am not sure if we lacked the patience, or if safflower truly is a second-rate seed in the eyes of our birds. We fill it predominantly with black oil sunflower seed, and occasionally add some dried fruit or other tidbit we think the birds might like.

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To appease our squirrels, we have a homemade squirrel feeder consisting of a board with two large screws in it. This is nailed to the tree where they nest. Ears of corn slide neatly onto the screw and it is fun to watch the squirrels hang out on the feeder, defend it from one another and occasionally take time to actually eat from it. The blue jays and red-bellied woodpeckers also love the corn.

To save a little on corn, we decided to try out a Squirrel Log, which promised to be the equivalent of 12-24 ears of corn. They slid onto the screws in the feeder nicely. It took a few days for the squirrels to sample it, but they seem to like it just as well as the regular corn cobs. The blue jays haven’t touched it, but the red-bellied woodpecker still frequents the squirrel feeder. And our white-breasted nuthatch has returned! I haven’t seen it since Spring began and now it visits the squirrel feeder daily.

The only difficulty we have had is that the squirrels tend to eat the center out of the log. The end then falls to the ground. We either need a different design for our feeder, or longer screws which go completely through the log. They definitely last a lot longer than the ears of corn, so I think it is worth looking for a solution. For the moment, we are just throwing the ends of the logs into the ground feeder for the squirrels to munch there. I may try putting them on the screw on the platform feeder as well.

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