Weekend Feeder Birds

Despite the sometimes cold/rainy weather, last weekend offered several good birding opportunities, both in the backyard and in swampy woods.

My mom’s feeders are as busy as Starbucks on Times Square, with the antics of at least two or three feeder birds in view at one time.

American Goldfinch, male

American Goldfinch pair

This Blue Jay really wanted us to believe he was a Red-tailed Hawk that day.

At least five woodpecker species visit Mom's feeders on a regular basis: Red-bellied, Hairy, Downy, Northern Flicker, and Pileated.

Mom also has a pair of nesting bluebirds. She offers them a suet dough recipe called Bluebird Banquet. The birds ignored the mix last year, but this year they are devouring it like mad. She offers it in pan crafted from a plastic drip tray for houseplants. The ‘banquet’ is hung about 4 feet from the nestbox in a more private part of her yard, near the apple trees.

Bluebird Banquet is a mixture of cornmeal, chopped raisins, peanut butter, flour, sunflower seed chips, and peanut hearts drizzled with melted suet. Hungry yet?

A female Eastern Bluebird enjoys the Bluebird Banquet recipe.

Her mate grabs a mealy half-raisin...

...and eats it before flying off into the woods.

Mom is happy to offer bluebirds a pad to rent and some chow.

I can’t help but be envious to Mom’s feeders. If hers are the Starbucks on Times Square, mine are a Dunkin Donuts on a lonely stretch of Highway 66. A few rogue elements drop in from time to time, but they look a little rough (you know, black bibs and splotchy tattoos), and they don’t stay long. I once lived in a rural area in the southern tier of New York, where the constant motion of feeder bird activity was my TV entertainment, my panacea, my grounding force.  Hours could pass in front of that picture window, where I needed little more than a chair, some bins, and my dog at my feet. We all must get our birding in somewhere, so now I take it on the road a little more than I did in the past.

Next up: I’ll post a few images from a walk we took at The Rookery, a swampy, 450-acre nature preserve in Geauga County, Ohio, a truly magical place.