Until this year, we never felt
compelled to place bird feeders near our house.
At our previous homes we always had mature specimen trees and shrubs to
provide shelter and food. We left up
seed-rich plants and other ‘natural’ food sources. And, we didn’t want to encourage normally
migratory birds to stick around on our account.
Our lone concession to the need for supplemental nutrition was to hang a
slab of beef suet in a squirrel-proof wire frame suspended between two trees.
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| Our 'feeding station' has four stops, and has accommodated as many as eight birds at a time |
We started with a blank canvas
at our new home; or at least one-third of a blank canvas. The front half-acre of our land was an
ecological desert of climax pines, burning bush, and swallowwort. No self-respecting bird would have had
anything to do with it. We created, from
scratch, a new landscape of native trees and shrubs. The birds followed almost immediately and gorged
themselves on seeds, fruits, and worms.
We set out a hummingbird feeder and promptly attracted three families
that waged incessant aerial warfare and conducted strafing runs to win the
right to our station.
But as October turned cold and
our perennials collapsed, all that was left were eight or nine immature ilex
and snowberry shrubs; hardly a welcome mat for our avian friends. Maybe we needed to re-think our ‘no feeder’
mindset.
As it turns out, we had all of
the elements of a feeding station. Betty
gets invited to a lot of garden club events – she attended more than a hundred
of them this past year. As president of
the state garden club Federation, no one ever asks her to pay, even though
meals or big-time speakers may be involved.
Conscious that she’s a guest, Betty always makes a point of buying
tickets for Opportunity Drawings (the IRS-approved terms for what used to be
called ‘raffles’).
The problem is, if you attend
150 events and buy ten Opportunity Drawing tickets at each event, the math says
you will walk home with a certain number of items. And so a corner of Betty’s office and some basement
space is dedicated to storage for items she won but for which she has no
immediate use.
When we went looking to create a
bird feeding station, we needed look no further than these storage areas. She had won several Audubon-approved bird feeders,
a worm feeder (complete with ten packages of freeze-fried meal worms), and a
suet cage. Thanks to our hummingbirds, we
already had one tall pole on which to hang a feeder. To set up shop we
purchased a second pole, a 50-pound sack of striped sunflower seeds, and some
suet.
We had company by mid-day of our
formal opening and we apparently got good reviews on the avian equivalent of
Yelp! because the crowds kept coming back.
Curiously, we would have times when the feeders were deserted. Apparently there are other feeders in the
neighborhood, and the birds felt a need to frequent both their older haunts as
well as their new favorite.
Our biggest initial problem was
squirrels. They are voracious consumers
of anything that even looks like food, and they’ll empty a feeder in minutes;
dumping the contents on the ground for easy pickings at their leisure. After watching them climb our poles with an
easy, athletic grace – and awakening to empty feeders that had been topped off
at dusk – we settled on a squirrel-proofing idea that will likely horrify the
Nature Conservancy: we greased the
poles. There was a certain satisfaction
watching squirrels take a flying leap three feet up a pole, only to slowly
slide down to the bottom with no hope of traction. We also noticed that after two or three days,
they stopped trying.
So, we’re now officially in the
bird feeding business and that first 50-pound bag is nearly finished. Now, our task is to figure out what to do
with the sunflower seek husks: they contain a chemical that inhibits the growth
of anything except sunflowers. Do we
rake them up and take them to the transfer station? We’re not sure, and ideas are gratefully
accepted.
