Winter Bird Feeders Entertain as Well as Nourish | Gardener's Path

One of my favorite things to do during the winter is to put food out for the birds.

Not only does this activity nourish the birds during the hardest time of the year, but I find it immensely entertaining to watch who comes in for dinner.

For several years, I served as one of Cornell Ornithology Lab’s “backyard scientists” by counting and identifying the many birds that hung out at my feeding station.

I poured a generous line of black oiled sunflower seeds along the four-inch-wide railing around my patio and counted as nearly a hundred grosbeaks feasted on the seeds. If disturbed, the whoosh of their flight sounded like a jet engine.

Mountain chickadees also dared to fly in, grab a seed, then take it to a safe place to crack open and eat at their leisure. These intrepid little birds stayed the entire year in the mountains, while the grosbeaks were visitors from lower elevations.

The key to attracting a wide variety of birds was the seeds. Standard wild bird seed contains milo, which attracts ground feeders, but most birds in our neighborhood ignored it.

The richer the seed, the more kinds of birds appear at the feeder.

What they came for was the oily, tasty and substantial black oiled sunflower seeds.

That’s all I put out for almost a decade and we had juncos, chickadees, Stellar’s jays, evening grosbeaks, and pine siskins. I got so I could identify them by their sounds as well as their appearance.

Most people believe that human development encroaching upon animal habitat destroys food sources and shelter, but that’s not necessarily the case.

When we lived in Truckee, California, it appeared that wildlife actually increased its presence as more houses filled in the landscape and the