Sunday, February 25, 2007

Feeders for window birding

Posted by Rosemary Drisdelle
The easiest place to watch birds is through your windows. Place good birdfeeders in good places and then watch the show.

The best places to watch the birds are not always the easiest places to watch birds, and it would be hard to find an easier place than right outside your own window. For completely effortless bird watching - except for the work of turning your head - place birdfeeders strategically outside windows where you tend to spend a lot of time. My feeders are outside my office window and outside the window above the kitchen sink, two of my well-worn places. In the summer, I also put a hummingbird feeder on my front deck near my honeysuckle and often get a visit from a Ruby-throated Hummingbird if I sit quite still. (Read about hummingbird feeders in my article Hummingbirds are Migrating.)

If you've got the perfect window, but no perfect place to put the feeder outside, get one of the ones with suction cups that you can stick right on the windowpane. (Consider, though, where it will land if it falls!) Ideally, feeders will also be where you can reach them easily to fill them. If you get a lot of snow in winter, you won't want to be plunging through drifts to fill the feeder. Likewise, high in the branches of a tree is not too practical unless you have some easy way to lower the feeder.

The feeder outside my office has a couple of hooks; in winter, I usually hang a suet feeder and a tower with several seed compartments. I regularly use a songbird mix in two compartments, and niger seed in the third. In the spring, I take the suet in and hang a basket of wax begonias. And for a while, I switch to two seed compartments of niger seed in preparation for the crowds of Goldfinches and Purple Finches I know are coming.

Most days, there's enough activity at my feeders to keep me distracted. This morning the birds are arriving one by one: an American Starling with a startlingly yellow spring beak, a Dark-eyed Junco, a Black-capped Chickadee, and an American Goldfinch.



http://birds.suite101.com/blog.cfm/1456