AT HOME Beak Experiences

“Hope is the thing with feathers.”

-EMILY DICKINSON



THE FIRST DOCUMENTED CASE OF A BIRD-feeding program in the United States came in 18%, when a Vermont housewife used barrels and window ledges as bird feeders to serve suet, sunflower seed, hemp, finely cracked corn, nutmeats, and corn-bread. She recorded 20 species of bird visitors that winter and early summer.

One hundred years later, feeding the birds has become almost a national frenzy, with more than 80 million Americans participating in a pastime second only to gardening, according to the U.S. Department of the Interior.

Not that much has changed about the process, Although you can spend $1,000 for a finely crafted copper feeder, you can also crumble stale cornbread on the driveway and be rewarded with colorful, jaunty songbirds. Most bird lovers opt for the middle ground, installing an inexpensive feeder or two in the back yard, within view of a kitchen or breakfast nook window.

Armed with a little bit of information, however, the choices you make in feeder and food selection can greatly enhance the variety of birds attracted to your property.

Bird-feeding professionals-specialty retailers who sell bird-feeding equipment and food-will tell you that the most important step you can take has nothing to do with installing feeders or providing seed. Instead, offering fresh water will bring in the most species of birds, including insect-eaters who won’t eat seed, no matter what you offer.

“Any birdbath works, as long as the water is kept fresh,” says Tom Norwood, a bird-feeding specialist and former owner of Wild Bird Center, a nature store. “Birds can taste the difference between stale water and fresh water. Recirculating water stales out.” Norwood prefers what’s called a dripper station, a device that hooks onto the side of a birdbath and slowly drips into the basin. Birds are attracted both to the sound of dripping water and the sight of water rippling on the surface.

“Research indicates you can get nearly twice as many species if you add a dripper station,” adds Norwood. “That gets both seed-eating and insect-eating birds. They all have to find a source to serve that need.”

While the need for water is a simple fact, deciding what to feed and how to feed can be complicated. There are hundreds of styles of feeders in a range of prices and materials to bombard the beginner. You can buy a finch feeder and a month’s supply of seed for about $10, or you can spend hundreds and string your back yard with feeders like so many paper lanterns.

Alas, there is no single feeder that will attract all the bird species that visit Dallas’ backyard buffets. “The type of food you put out has a tremendous bearing on the type of bird you get,” explains Norwood. “So does the type of feeder you put up.”

However, if it’s variety you want, a platform feeder is considered the best choice. A fine-mesh screen tray trimmed in wood and mounted on a pole, the platform feeder will serve both clinging birds (such as chickadees and titmice) and birds that feed on the ground (cardinals, doves, and blue jays). To date, Norwood has identified 21 species of birds at his platform feeder.

Offer a seed mix that includes foods birds prefer; black-oil sunflower seed, millet, and nutmeats. Most generic mixes sold at grocery stores include fillers such as milo, wheat, and oats, which just get kicked to the ground. Experienced feeders suggest putting out a ration of seed daily rather than leaving a mountain of it. Few people want to feed English sparrows, grackles, starlings, and cowbirds, and that’s who will respond to a plentiful supply.

Other feeder styles are more bird-specific. Just like the hummingbird feeders thar go up in the summer, thistle feeders should come out in the fall and stay there until May. Regulars look tor-ward to goldfinches, popular visitors who are a brilliant canary yellow by the time they leave for their nesting habitat in the spring. At this time of year, the thistle feeders will attract more of the pretty yellow finches as they pass through Dallas on their way up north from Houston.

The finches’ preferred food is thistle, which is dispensed through specially designed feeders whose tiny openings accommodate the finch’s bill but not those of larger birds. A woven thistle sock is a less expensive way to dispense thistle seed, and it holds a flock of goldfinches, hanging every which way to extract the seeds. The one drawback to a sock is that squirrels sometimes take a fancy to its soft threads and will rip it apart to use in their nests.

Norwood, installs three finch feeders in his back yard every year, which allows 60 birds to get adequate food. David Hurt, owner of Wild Birds Unlimited on Lovers Lane, has counted 120 goldfinches feeding at one time at his house. He pulls out photo albums crammed with his customers’ amateur snapshots showing goldfinches in varying stages of plumage as they visit backyard feeders.

“It’s a real fun way to get started in bird-feeding,” says Hurt, who admits to a lifelong interest in birds. He even planned his honeymoon around bird watching by choosing Costa Rica-a birder’s paradise-as the wedding trip destination.

“I’m obsessed with birding. It’s a problem,” he admits sheepishly. His wife, Kim, an engineer by training who works alongside her husbandin their store seven days a week, rolls her eyes at his understatement.

Both Norwood and Hurt caution enthusiasts to position finch feeders at least 10 feet away from other feeders. Goldfinches can be intimidated by larger birds; or, as Norwood puts it, “Goldfinches don’t like other birds in their space.”

To thwart English sparrows, considered a voracious plague by backyard bird hobbyists, some people install feeders that the sparrows cannot use. A feeder with no perches attracts chickadees, titmice, and finches, birds who can cling upside down to extract black-oil or shelled sunflower seeds from it.

A suet basket is another specialty feeder thai attracts birds who otherwise would shun artificial food sources. Suet cakes are usable in Dallas during die colder months to attract both seed-eaters and insect-eaters. No-melt suets are available for hotter temperatures, and both come in a variety of flavors, enhanced with dried fruits, nutmeats, seeds, even insects.

“If you have trees, you ought to be using suet,” says Hurt. “All the woodpeckers love it. We get downies and red-bellies every day of die year. In the spring, we get Carolina chickadees, mockingbirds, and blue jays.”

Ideally, suet feeders should be mounted on a rough tree trunk, where birds can reach the suet by clinging to the bark rather than trying to get a toehold on the wire-mesh feeder itself. Hurt advises his customers to be patient when introducing suet to the back yard.

Sometimes it takes two or three months for the birds to find it.

Peanuts also attract colorful birds. There are feeders designed to dispense shelled peanuts and offer peanut butter, but you also can throw peanuts onto the platform feeder and smear peanut butter onto the trunk of a rough-barked tree.

From winter well into spring, Hurt scatters millet onto fallen leaves every night, after the despised English sparrows and grackles have retired for the evening. The results, he says, are gratifying: “At first light, the native sparrows and juncos are out there scratching.”

Norwood puts apple halves out for mockingbirds, house finches, and blue jays. Like the suet, it may take the birds some weeks to learn to accept your offering. “And if you’re really into it,” he adds, “you can serve live mealworms.”

Feeding the birds does not have to be an expensive hobby, if you can hold your enthusiasm in check. Both Norwood and Hurt tend multiple feeders all year, and they have customers who go through 50 pounds of black -oil sunflower seed weekly,

“In the spring, the natural food supply has dwindled,” says Hurt. “The birds start coming into our yards and using the feeders more.”

He urges parents to involve children in bird-feeding projects, whether it’s building and maintaining a feeder, or keeping fresh water in the birdbath.

“When I was a kid, everybody wanted a BB gun to shoot the birds,” says Hurt. “Now, we’re seeing little kids come in asking for a pound of our deluxe mix for their own feeders .”

“When I was a kid, everybody wanted a BB gun to shoot the birds. Now, we’re seeing little kids come in asking for a pound of our deluxe mix for their own feeders.”

-David Hurt, owner, Wild Birds Unlimited