Tag Archives: bird feeding

Baby Monitors for the Birds

Buttoning up windows for winter is great for energy conservation but no longer can you hear the “toot” on the Red-breasted Nuthatch or the chatter of Common Redpolls.  Rich Guthrie, who write a great birding blog, discovered a simple solution to this dilemma several years ago.  He writes:

By putting a baby-room monitor outside, I can listen to those sounds – even as I sit here at my desk, day, or night.

Now I can hear the distant Pileated Woodpecker calling from the island across the way, or the nuthatch taking another sunflower seed from the porch feeder. What a delight!

The set-up consists of plugging in the “baby” part outside, and the mommy listening device inside. Fortunately, I have a covered porch so I can keep the thing out of the weather.

These monitors are fairly common at yard sales or thrift shops and come cheap. I wouldn’t lay out more than $5.00 for a set.

As a different dimension to my yard list, I should have kept a list of the many different species I’ve heard and identified via the monitor. But I already know that the list is long. I can recall hearing Snow Geese flying over in the dark of night or picking up on the flight calls of flocks of Brant winging up the river. There’s a flock of Canada Geese that comes in to the same beach each evening – usually just before dark. I get to hear them now and then through the night. Other nice nighttime  revelations picked-up  include Screech or Great-horned Owls hooting, coyotes singing away, or  raccoons squabbling in the dark.

It’s so nice to be here in the comfort of home and share the joy of a melodious Song Sparrow welcoming the warmth of  sunrise on a frosty morning. Or to learn that a flock of siskins has decided to stop in for a snack.

Cornell Project Feederwatch folks wrote:

Steve Maley, a master Jack-of-all-trades and volunteer at Braddock Bay Bird Observatory, suggests rigging up a baby monitor for a low-cost solution that lets you hear the birds all year long.

Steve writes, “Cold weather has come to Rochester, NY, the windows are closed, and the bird hordes come to the feeders. Your home insulation keeps you warm, but silences the noisy blue jays, the woodpecker calls, and the goldfinch chatter. But you can still enjoy those bird sounds from your warm living room. Pick a window with a good roof overhang, and hang a $20 baby monitor outside near the top of the window. The receiving unit can go inside wherever you want to hear the birds. Plug in the 9 volt DC transformers, turn on both units, and once again enjoy hearing the birds from inside your living room or kitchen. My monitor has been on since last spring, and the receiver gets turned on only when I want to enjoy ‘being outside’ to hear the birds.”

 

Does Your Bird seed Get Eaten or Stored?

All fall, we have watched birds flock to our sunflower seed feeder, our thistle feeder, and our suet containers.  As I wrote last month, our feed store folks love us — we are going through a lot of bird food.

Where does all this food go?  I know that some of our visitors are eating it on the spot but many seem to fly away with one or more seeds in their craw.  Recall our discussion of Common Redpolls and their “pocket.”

It turns out that birds have three options to make it through the time when there is little food.

  1. They can “get out of Dodge” by migrating to places where there is food
  2. They can scratch and scrounge and nearly starve, or
  3. They can store food and hope it’s there when they need it.

White-breasted Nuthatches and their red-breasted brethren also store food for later dining. I often see them nabbing a large seed and flying off.

Our most frequent visitors to the feeders are Black-capped chickadees which are well known for their food-hoarding behavior.  Usually they hoard seeds but they are also known to store insects and spiders may be stored as well.  I’ve seen hundreds of chickadees grab sunflower seeds and pieces of suet from bird feeders. They remove the husk of a seed before caching it.  I’ve seen a few stashing seeds in the bark of our white pines.

The number of seeds stored is staggering. Over 1,000 items may be stored in a single day and, over the course of autumn, 50,000 to 80,000  seeds may be cached.  Sites for food storage are varied. Typical hiding places are cracks or crevices in woody vegetation, under bits of bark (particularly birch bark), in clusters of conifer needles, in the ground and even in the snow.

Other food hogs at the feeder are Blue Jays which are energetic hoarders, storing acorns and other nuts but even invertebrates, small vertebrates or bits of meat. Favored storage sites are cracks and crevices of tree trunks, amid the needles of conifers and in loose soil.

A blue jay can carry up to five acorns at once to be stored. The acorns are swallowed and stored in the upper part of the esophagus. The acorns can then be regurgitated intact when a suitable hoarding site is found.

Several Western birds are known for their hoarding.  Pinon Jays and Clark’s Nutcrackers both rely heavily on hoarding to get through the winter.  Both species store pine seeds, which they laboriously remove from pinecones.  A single Clark’s nutcracker can store up to 100,000 seeds in the fall.  Both nutcrackers and pinon jays do not raid their hoarded seeds until most of the fall seed crop is depleted. One researcher has determined that up to 90 percent of the winter diet of Pinon Jays comes from stored seeds.

Western Scrub Jays take a lot of precautions with their food. When another jay is watching, a scrub jay will store food in difficult to see places (far from an observer, behind a visual barrier, etc.). Often, if observed while hiding food, later, when unobserved, it will move food to another location.

How does a long-term hoarder like Clark’s Nutcracker recover stored seeds when it needs them? Ornithologists at first thought that the food was stored only in certain kinds of areas, and that the birds rediscovered it by later foraging in the same areas. But research shows that individuals can recall where they have cached seeds. The birds remember where the seeds are in relation to certain landmarks, such as rocks. If the landmarks are moved, the areas the birds search are displaced an equivalent amount.

Out of all the species of woodpeckers, only 10 are known to hoard food.  Our Downy Woodpeckers and Hairy Woodpeckers are among the ten but only infrequently store food.

As I noted before, Northern Shrikes store food in an interesting way. Small mammals or birds are killed and then impaled on a thorn or barbed wire fence for later consumption, hence the reason for calling these hoarders “butcher birds”.

As we head into serious winter conditions, it’s comforting to know that many of our prior visitors have stashed food away.  in case our buddies are having a brain cramp and like us, forgetting where they put things, we’ll keep the feeders clean and full.

Have you observed a bird hoarding food?  Tell us about it with a comment below.  You should sign up by RSS feed or via email to have future articles sent to you.  Thanks

White-breasted Nuthatch by  Dawn Huczek

Blue Jay by Ingrid Taylar      Western Scrub Jay by jessicafm

The Supply-side Economics of Bird Feeding

Ever watch a Black-capped Chickadee or White-breasted Nuthatch pick away at the feeder, discarding stuff left and right until a sunflower seed pops up?

Eat the millet — it’s good for you!

I have a deck littered with millet and other rejected seeds as Nuthatches, Chickadees, and finches select the good stuff.  So why did I buy bags of mixed seeds?  It seemed to be an economical way to feed birds but the only folks happy are the chipmunks and red squirrels, and an occasional night-time raccoon who vacuum up the leftovers.

Last week, Mary got sick of sweeping the deck (as did I)  so she bought a bag of black oil sunflower seeds — the feed we have used in years past — and the birds no longer have a choice.  (Well, they still do because I have to integrate the rest of the mix into the feeder — but of course, even camouflaged with sunflowers, it still gets left there.

When I read this article from BirdWatching Magazine, I thought, “Well, I think we did the right thing.”   Here’s an excerpt:

As a result of this year’s drought and high temperatures, agricultural prices are expected to reach record-setting levels. Economizing on bird feeding is a priority. Below are tips that will help you do so while increasing both your enjoyment and your feeding’s value to birds.

Sunflower-seed prices are high, for sure, but switching to cheaper mixes that include a little sunflower seed and more generic “bird seed” is an excellent example of being penny wise but pound foolish. Most birds ignore a lot of the seeds in mixes, especially inexpensive ones, and not only are those filler seeds a waste of money but some attract nuisance wildlife such as rats. Just as bad, seed that doesn’t get eaten rots, exposing your birds to disease-causing bacteria and fungus.

Many of the smaller seeds in mixes are popular with birds that don’t need subsidies from us and cause problems for native birds. Although it’s counterintuitive, in the long run, you’ll spend less by offering sunflower seed alone. You’ll still be providing food for the widest mixture of native birds, including chickadees and nuthatches, finches, small woodpeckers, jays, and doves…

 

We’ll feed sunflower seed, niger seed for the finches, and suet for the woodpeckers.  That should keep our birds, and our farm supply store, happy this winter.

Smart Birds Stash Stores, Thwart Thieves

We know that squirrels make the most of fall’s plenty by hoarding nuts for the winter, but the fact that birds also store, or cache, food goes largely unappreciated. Through clever observation and experiments, biologists have found that food caching (from the French cacher, “to hide”) has developed to a high art in some birds.

Take the chickadee, for instance. Chickadees put tens of thousands of food items a year into short-term storage. They usually retrieve and eat the food in the space of several days. Each food item is cached in a different place to make it difficult for thieves to steal all the food at once. When hiding a new item, they remember their previous storage sites and avoid placing caches too close together.

The Black-Capped Chickadee hides seeds and other food items to eat later. Each item is placed in a different spot and the chickadee can remember thousands of hiding places.

Chickadees remember each hiding place for around a month, even though they may be scattered widely across a bird’s territory. Research shows they use visual cues to navigate back to each of their cache sites by a combination of larger landscape features, particularly verticals, and use of the sun as compass. Smaller local details are not as critical, probably because these often change in a forest. When retrieving food, they remember which sites have been emptied, either by them or by robbers, to avoid fruitless searching.

How does a tiny bird have such brain power?

Chickadees begin to store food at the onset of fall, when seeds become abundant. At the same time, the region of the brain that handles spatial memory (part of the hippocampus) starts to grow in size by producing new brain cells to handle the huge amount of cache data. It continues to grow as more food is cached. Come spring, reliance on food stores drops, caching dwindles, and the brain area shrinks. Brain cells use a lot of energy, so to conserve resources the extra cells last only as long as they are needed. Brain growth is tied to food availability, since captive chickadees that receive plentiful food year-round do not undergo seasonal brain changes…

(Read whole article by Li Shen, an adjunct professor at the Dartmouth Medical School and the chair of the Thetford, Vermont, Conservation Commission)

Image by qmnonic

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Project Feeder Watch Starts Soon

The 26th season of Project FeederWatch begins November 10, and participants are needed more than ever. By watching your feeders from November through April and submitting what you see, you’re making it possible for scientists to keep track of changing bird populations across the continent. New or returning participants can sign up anytime.

After unusual winter weather in some parts of the country last season, many participants found themselves asking, “Where are the birds?”—but the story might be different this year.

The AccuWeather long-range forecasting service is predicting some big storms in the Northeast this winter, so FeederWatchers in that region may see more birds at their feeders than they did last winter. Forecasts also call for another year of below-normal snowfall for the Midwest, above-normal snowfall and below-normal temperatures for the central and southern Rockies, and a wet winter with above-normal precipitation for the Gulf Coast and Southeast.

“We’ll have to see if those predictions pan out and how they might affect feeder-bird numbers,” says David Bonter, project leader for FeederWatch. “The one number we definitely want to see increase is the number of people taking part in FeederWatch. It’s easy to do, and the information is incredibly valuable in helping us better understand what’s going on in the environment and in the lives of the birds we enjoy so much.”

Other things to look forward to as the season approaches:

  • A new photo gallery featuring some of the many photos FeederWatchers sent in during the 2011-12 season.
  • This year’s Winter Finch Forecast shows it could be a great winter for birds at feeders—so don’t miss it! Red-breasted Nuthatches, Red Crossbills, Evening Grosbeaks, and other birds are likely to be on the move after a relatively poor summer for cone crops. Read the full forecast for more details.
  • Winter Bird Highlights is the annual summary of the previous season’s results. The 2012 issue is being mailed to Canadian FeederWatch participants in their kits and will be mailed to U.S. participants with the fall issue of Living Bird News (late October). You can also get a PDF version online and read it immediately.

To learn more about joining Project FeederWatch and to sign up, visit www.feederwatch.org or call the Cornell Lab toll-free at (866) 989-2473. In return for the $15 fee ($12 for Cornell Lab members), participants receive the FeederWatcher Handbook and Instructions with tips on how to successfully attract birds to your feeders, an identification poster of the most common feeder birds, and a calendar. Participants also receive Winter Bird Highlights, an annual summary of FeederWatch findings, as well as the Cornell Lab’s quarterly newsletter, Living Bird News.

(Project FeederWatch is a joint research and education project of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Bird Studies Canada.

Image: Dick Mansfield

Bird Larders – storing up for winter

I’ve been watching birds cache food this week. The days are shorter, and the birds are preparing for the next season. The nuthatches prefer the hulled sunflower, and they’re choosing the heavier seeds as those are the ones higher in fat content. Their activity begins very early in the day. The titmice are taking one seed at a time and seem to cache higher in the trees than the nuthatches. The chickadees are caching in the middle of the day, and their pantry of seeds is in a knothole in a maple.

This caching behavior has its advantages. They’ll retrieve the larder of seed on days when the weather isn’t suitable for them to for forage. Their warehouses are available when the long winter settles upon them and other sources are no longer abundant, and yes, their memories are sharp!

(written by Sue McGrath of Newburyport Birders)

Stock up on Niger Seed, the Siskin Boys (& Girls) are in town

Pine Siskins at thistle feederWe take in our feeders at night to avoid bear and raccoon problems. (A big raccoon visited two nights ago, startling me as I went out to check a noise on the back deck.  It was a eye level – but fortunately the dog didn’t see it in the dark.

A few mornings earlier, as I hung up the bird feeder and thistle feeder at daybreak, I immediately had a dozen Pine Siskins flitting about, waiting for me to leave.  The same thing has happened all week — we have an onslaught of Siskins — as do other parts of New England in reading the eBird reports and list serves.

Pine Siskins are fun to watch but rather drab, after months of American Goldfinch watching.  

Here’s what the Cornell Lab of Ornithology says about them:

This nomadic finch ranges widely and erratically across the continent each winter in response to seed crops. Better suited to clinging to branch tips than to hopping along the ground, these brown-streaked acrobats flash yellow wing markings as they flutter while feeding or as they explode into flight. Flocks are gregarious, and you may hear their insistent wheezy twitters before you see them.

A Canadian ornithologist, Ron Pittaway, each year issues a  Winter Finch Forecast.  He notes that there is a “widespread tree seed crop failure in the Northeast” this year.  We may have a lot of visitors this winter — we’re already seeing a lot of Purple Finches and Dark-eyed Juncos.

This is the first winter in the last four that we are staying in Vermont — might be a good one for winter avian visitors.  My feed store friends are going to love me.  

Stock up on Niger Seed, the Siskin Boys (& Girls) are in town

We take in our feeders at night to avoid bear and raccoon problems.  Early yesterday morning, I hung up the bird feeder and thistle feeder and immediately had a dozen Pine Siskins flitting about, waiting for me to leave.  The same thing has happened all week — we have an onslaught of Siskins — as do other parts of New England in reading the eBird reports and list serves.


Pine Siskins are fun to watch but rather drab, after months of American Goldfinch watching.  

Here’s what the Cornell Lab of Ornithology says about them:

This nomadic finch ranges widely and erratically across the continent each winter in response to seed crops. Better suited to clinging to branch tips than to hopping along the ground, these brown-streaked acrobats flash yellow wing markings as they flutter while feeding or as they explode into flight. Flocks are gregarious, and you may hear their insistent wheezy twitters before you see them.

A Canadian ornithologist, Ron Pittaway, each year issues a  Winter Finch Forecast.  He notes that there is a “widespread tree seed crop failure in the Northeast” this year.  We may have a lot of visitors this winter — we’re already seeing a lot of Purple Finches and Dark-eyed Juncos.

This is the first winter in the last four that we are staying in Vermont — might be a good one for winter avian visitors.  My feed store friends are going to love me.