Winter Bird Feeder

Keep Them Coming Back

One of the chief pleasures of winter in a colder climate is to be inside a warm house and look out at the wild birds at the feeder. You can feel generous and virtuous in comfort. And you get terrific entertainment all winter long.

What do birds want?

If you're new to feeding birds, you might wonder what to offer. In short, offer seeds and water. Many of the birds we see in winter are seed eaters. They have to be: insects are hard to come by in areas that experience harsh winters. However, the trees, grasses, and wild flowers have just finished their yearly production of seeds, and this is the main kind of food our wintering birds live on.

By setting up a bird feeding station, you're taking your cue from nature, offering the kind of nourishment that the birds are adapted to. You provide a generous, reliable, source of food, and the birds gladly come and help themselves, up close, where it's convenient for you to watch them.

Where to feed them?

So do locate your feeders where you can see them, perhaps from your living room or dining room (or from the kitchen sink). Put several feeders at varying heights to accommodate the preferences of different birds. The simplest feeder is the ground itself. Sparrows, juncos, doves, and bobwhites prefer to feed on the ground, and all you have to do is scatter the seed there. A tree stump or a knee-high table will do as well.

Other birds, such as purple finches and evening grosbeaks (shown at right), will flock to a raised feeder. For these visitors, you can sink a pole into the ground topped with a wooden platform, at a height you can comfortably reach. It helps to nail an edge on the platform to help save the seeds from rolling off. Alternatively, you can place the platform on a second story porch, or attach it to a windowsill.

You can also purchase enclosed feeders designed to mount on poles. Because such feeders help to keep the feed dry, you can put in a several-days' supply at one time. I don't use this kind of feeder, myself, because I enjoy putting out the seed, and the squirrels have chewed up all the ones I've tried.

Small hanging feeders that swing in the breeze are attractive to many small agile birds. You can make a hanging feeder from a coconut shell, or purchase one made of transparent plastic.

This winter, a red-breasted nuthatch makes me laugh, the way he walks down the chain that suspends our coconut-shell feeder. One advantage of such feeders is that they discourage (though they can not entirely defeat) the squirrels, who will otherwise carry the food off by the bushel, leaving none for the birds.

Which foods to provide?

The hands-down favorite bird seed is sunflower. It attracts cardinals, woodpeckers, blue jays, goldfinches, purple finches, chickadees, titmice, and nuthatches. I offer black sunflower seeds in the hanging coconut feeders.

Get the black sunflower seeds, sometimes called oil seeds. Birds prefer them to the grey-and-white-striped sunflower seeds sold off the candy rack for people, because they're higher in oil content. They are softer shelled, hence easier to crack open. They're also cheaper than the grey-and-white ones.

Another essential bird seed is niger. Goldfinches adore niger. You may have dozens of goldfinches visiting your niger feeder at once, which is quite a cheering sight on a winter day. Niger is a black seed, so tiny and light you can blow away a handful with a gentle breath.

Niger is also expensive, over a dollar a pound, so you won't want to waste it. Buy a hanging tube with tiny holes, designed especially for niger, and hang it where you can see it from your best viewing window. Up close to the house, even under the eaves, is fine. Goldfinches will become very tame and won't mind your standing two feet from them, on the other side of the window, while they eat.

One of my favorite seeds for birds is safflower, a white seed, slightly smaller than a black sunflower seed. Squirrels don't like it. Neither do grackles, blue jays, or starlings. (I did, however, once watch an overworked mother starling stuff safflower seeds into the mouths of four nearly-grown babies that were screaming for food. The adult wouldn't eat it herself, but it shut the kids up.)

I bit into a safflower seed myself once and found it extremely bitter. Cardinals, titmice, chickadees, and downy woodpeckers munch it like candy, though, so I keep a good supply available on the platform feeder. The squirrels don't bother to climb up there any more.

Another important seed is white millet, which is even cheaper than sunflower seed. I scatter it on the ground for sparrows, juncos, and mourning doves. One February the Lincoln's sparrow, which is rare in Iowa in winter, came to my yard every day for two weeks and ate the white millet.

You can buy these seeds at feed stores, nurseries, supermarkets, and some hardware stores. I buy everything except the costly niger in 50-pound bags and store them in the garage in mouse-proof metal trash cans.

What not to buy

One caution. I'd like to warn you away from bags of mixed birdseed. These mixes usually contain a lot of filler, such as red millet. Most birds won't eat it. They rummage through the seeds in the feeder and kick the red millet onto the ground, where at best it lies until it rots and turns into pretty decent fertilizer for the grass. Mixed birdseed is not a bargain. Buy the seeds you know your birds want.

When starting up a feeding program, be patient. It may take as long as several weeks before the birds discover your feeders. While you wait, be sure to keep the feeders filled. Eventually, the birds will come.

Helping or hurting

Sometimes conscientious people are concerned about whether feeding the birds will harm the birds. Will the birds become dependent on the handouts? And it's often advised that one should only start feeding birds if certain that the feeding can continue uninterrupted all winter.

However, the evidence indicates that feeding is not likely to be bad for birds. They don't settle in and dine at just one place. Goldfinches, for example, follow a circuit each day, visiting a number of feeders and wild food patches, as we know from studies of banded birds that can be identified individually.

With many households feeding birds, it's unlikely that a bird will starve because one feeder goes empty. All the same, birds that come into your yard at dusk on a cold evening are hungry, and one does not like to disappoint one's guests. It's my pleasure to make sure that they always find something to eat in my yard.

Plants for birds

If you want to do something even more significant to help the birds, something that will benefit them whether you are home to fill the feeders or not, then you can enhance the natural habitat in your yard. You have to have some plants in your yard anyway, so why not choose plants that are useful to birds?

The berries of the Washington hawthorn (at right) will attract birds through most of the winter. Viburnums also are good landscaping shrubs, because they can provide berries all winter.

And what about planting a patch of native flowers, such as coneflowers, and allowing them to go to seed and stand through the winter? You may look out some snowy day and see a flock of goldfinches on the seed heads. Another bird-friendly tree is a dense evergreen that will provide chilled birds with a refuge from cats or hawks and a place to get out of the wind.

Such amenities will attract uncommon species of birds to your yard and add considerable excitement to looking out your windows. There is no reason that urban habitat should be sterile and useless to wildlife. Indeed, a habitat that provides naturally for the needs of wild birds is a very pleasant place for humans, too. This kind of landscaping can add greatly to the value and enjoyment of your home. And if you ever want to sell, there's nothing like a yard full of singing birds to give a house curb appeal.

Why do we feed birds?

I love to refill the feeders in the morning after a storm, brushing the snow off the raised platform and pouring out my gifts to the birds. They know what to expect and start flirting into the bare trees around the feeders as soon as I open the door.

If I'm wearing my heavy gloves and boots, and if I've remembered to put on two pairs of socks, I may stand outside for a while, to enjoy a closer look at how the chickadees' feathers are fluffed out to increase their insulating properties, and the better to hear all the small conversations between juncos and woodpeckers and titmice and tree sparrows.

Sometimes that red-breasted nuthatch I told you about comes to a branch close by and looks me over, apparently as interested in me as I am in him. Exercise a little patience, and it's possible to have some of the birds eating out of your hand.

I think kindly on such demonstrations of confidence, consider them high compliments. Birds are constantly evaluating their environment, both for danger and for benefit. It pleases me when they decide I'm one of the good guys.

More information

Water! Sometimes the birds suffer more for lack of water than food. And they need it all year around, including in the winter. There are wonderful bird baths available for providing unfrozen water in winter, as well as in summer.

Who are these birds? Half the fun of feeding birds is figuring out what their names are. There are several excellent books (birding field guides) available to help you identify the birds.