Backyard Bird Watching

Recently the woodpeckers around my house have been giving me fits. A lot of this is my own fault due to my personal gardening habits, but I can still complain, can’t I? I have woodpeckers. They fly about the woods on my property happily, eat bugs, batter away at logs and generally partake in woodpecker activities. My frequent fliers are the pileated, red bellied and a little hairy. Well none of them come to my feeders. Of course they don’t! I have left them with too much natural food. I leave dead trees that are no danger to the house standing just for them. They are wonderfully full of bugs and the woodpeckers love them. They have built homes in them, it’s beautiful. I have also taken down a couple of smaller trees and just dropped them where they are, left to rot. These are high bird activity spots, in particular the pileated brought her babies to these where they foraged daily. I have also planted a lot of native berry shrubs for bird food. I even left a big ant pile that’s out of my way for the flickers. Yuck.

So as a result, the woodpeckers are quite happy with all of this natural food and ignore the canned stuff supplied by me at the feeding stations. It’s no big deal if they don’t land on a feeder so long as they are about, right? For some reason I want them on my feeders, go figure. So what I did was to take a dead bit of log and drill some shallow holes in it, stick a hook on the top and call it a bird feeder.

Method: Take a log about 3"-4" in diameter and 12" long, and drill some randomly placed 1"-1 1/4" holes in it. Make the hole about 1/2 to 1" deep. Stick a hanging hook in the top, and there you go, a suet plug feeder.

I placed this next to my "official" suet feeder in hopes of luring woodpeckers to the suet, but no go. They are landing and feeding from the log, but still ignoring the suet feeder. Those rascals. I even have a recycled plastic plug feeder with the same food in it but again, no go, they land on the log. The food I am using is Peanut Butter Spread Bird Food, available through Wild Birds Unlimited, and they seem to love it. So do several of the smaller woodland birds.You can also make your own with this easy recipie:

1 cup peanut butter
1 cup crisco shortening or other shortening
4 cups yellow cornmeal
1 cup white flour

Just mix it well and store in the fridge. I have also cut up store bought suet cakes and smashed those into the holes, they work well. Some people smear peanut butter on tress - not me, to many bugs here and squirrels!

The log feeder is a bear to clean, they do get gunked up so I am hoping my woodpeckers adapt to the much easier to clean suet stations and I can take the log down. But if woodpeckers will not come to your feeders, yet you know they are out there, try the log. It’s a natural for them.

Go see Songbird Bird Houses, Winter Roosting Boxes for products. After someone has been a backyard bird watcher for a time and been feeding wild birds and providing them with fresh water, people then naturally progress to wanting to provide nesting sites so birds can build their nests and raise babies in the backyard. There is a learning curve when you begin to get into the hobby of providing bird houses and nesting boxes for backyard birds, next thing you know, you are up to your eyes in dimensions, perfect placement, and all sorts of mess! And then you find the birds are gong to do whatever they want anyway! So here are a few basic tips when buying a bird house that actually will attract species to nest in your yard.

 The number one thing I have found is that people get bird houses where the entrancement is too small. There are a zillion opinions and a bunch of numbers you can go over, but I have found that an entrance of 1 1/2" is about right for the widest variety of smaller songbirds. Yes  1 1/4 is good for chickadees and wrens, smaller nuthatches, but that can not accommodate titmice, larger nuthatches and bluebirds. Chickadees, with only one brood per season, usually nest first. Great! They have built a nest and raised their family, the baby birds fledged, and now the box is empty for the summer. If the entrance was 1 1/2", then the box can be used again that season. Bluebirds can have as many as three in a season. Titmice nest after the chickadee.

Don’t paint a birdhouse. Just don’t. Common sense tells you this isn’t natural. If you honestly want to provide a safe habitat for wild birds but insist on something decorative, check into the type of paint that is used carefully and go ahead and add some pretty boxes, but then be sure to provide some good, solid boxes of pine or cedar that are left natural. The wood is eventually going to turn a beautifull silver gray as it ages and be stunning anyway! Plus it is what is best for wild birds along with what is most natural for them. Cavity nesting birds don’t seek out homes in the wild based upon color, and dead trees that have natural cavities or  make good potential homes aren’t painted.

 Lastly, a handy idea is a winter summer convertable roosting box. You can have not only a birdhouse that is perfect for smaller songbirds and bluebirds, but in the winter you can flip the door over so that the enterance is on the bottom, insert perches that come with it and instantly it becomes a winter roost that birds can use to stay out of the freezing weather, cold rains or snows. These are a teriffic idea!

I bought myself a window bird feeder and I am not really sure why, after all, I have a slew of feeders in my backyard already so another one was not what I needed. I’ve also never been into window feeders because of bird window strikes. Now thank goodness I have not had this happen except on very rare occasions and the birds have always survived, but I didn’t want to invite trouble by attracting them towards the glass. Then I read that if you have window strike problems a window feeder can help since it gives dimension to the otherwise smooth reflection in the glass. Okay so this maybe was my rationalization. It was a whim. So, thinking that I was really smart, I purchased a two-in-one style feeder. I bought the one pictured below. (you can buy them at : Window Bird Feeders) It’s pretty nifty because the top comes off and in the winter you can put bird seeds in it, then in the summer use it for a hummingbird feeder. I put it out and used peanuts in it. This gave me the chance to feed peanuts to the smaller birds without having them at my main bird feeding stations, therefore the larger caching birds don’t wipe out the peanut supply rapidly. So far it has nuthatches (white breasted, brown headed) and titmice in it all day long. Oddly my Carolina chickadees don’t visit it. Go figure!

I was quite surprised with how much I enjoyed having a window feeder from day one. I love it! But I wasn’t thrilled with the black metal holder - this is entirely a personal preference. There is not a darn thing wrong with it. But being me, I bought a different one. See below, Now this model I like better. The little tray sits inside the holder and lifts out without having to take the feeder off the glass, it is a nice thick plastic and I put the removeable tray part in the dishwasher. Same as the black metal bracket model but still, I prefer the one below. There are no drain holes in the tray of course as it is supposed to be used as a hummingbird feeder and hold nectar but I haven’t found this to be a problem. It sits under eaves and the rain does not come from that direction so all is well. Of course we are in drought so rain is a memory which help keeps it dry.

 
 What I have had a problem with is the dang suction cups sticking to the glass. I think it’s my glass though, no fault of the feeder at all. I have weird windows and I’m not even completely convinced that they are glass. Anyhow, after it fell down several times on me, I bought a second suction cup, drilled a second hole in the back of the feeder and had two suction cups holding it up. It fell down. By this time I was loving the feeder right at my window, and the birds were having fits when it fell down, attempting to hover where their feeder should be. I was determined to keep it up, after all, the squirrels could not get it, I could feed peanuts and the birds were fussing at me. I ended up using a small piece of double adhesive velcro on the back of the feeder. I didn’t want to do this thinking that this would be tacky, but the strip of velcro is small as the feeder itself is very light and it does not show. It hasn’t fallen down since. My titmice have stopped screaming at me to get their dang peanuts back every time I walk outside.

 There are several styles of window bird feeders on the market but I do recommended when you by one, make sure that it lifts off easily without removing the suction cups. I haven’t found a need for a larger capacity than the one above, it is located right outside my door and a quick fill, but perhaps you would like to fill less often. I love the two-in-one models and recommend them! They also have similar in oriole instead of hummingbird feeders.

 The red headed woodpecker is one of my favorite birds. i used to see them often years ago, but now i have not seen one in years. When they say that a bird is on the decline I believe it. You don’t really notice things that go missing. Please help these birds.

This is from the Audubon Bird Watch List: 

Threats

At one time the Red-headed Woodpecker was targeted by sportsmen because of its brilliant red plumage, as an agricultural pest, and for damage to telephone poles. Its population has decreased as a result of food source losses, as evidenced by population declines in association with the decline of beech trees and the disappearance of Rocky Mountain grasshoppers. Collisions with automobiles were particularly common in the mid-1900s and the species is considered a rare victim of tower collisions. Nest failure occurs when nests are excavated in telephone poles recently (within 3-4 years) treated with creosote. Competition for nesting sites with European Starlings was thought to decrease reproductive success, but recent studies show that this may not be the case. The mere fact that starlings nest earlier than this woodpecker suggests that Red-heads may not be vulnerable to starling invasion. Habitat has been degraded by the harvesting of snags, clearcuts, agricultural development, channeling of rivers, regeneration of eastern forests, fire suppression, monoculture crops, and the loss of small orchards.

Conservation
The Red-headed Woodpecker is listed as a vulnerable species in Canada and is listed on multiple state threatened species lists in the United States. Habitat should be managed so as to provide large forest fragments (>2 ha) with large snags for nesting and open areas for catching flying insects. In addition, selective thinning has been shown to increase the likelihood of occurrence and nesting in Ohio. Controlled fires have negative and positive impacts. While they open up the forest (providing open space for fly catching) and create snags, they can also destroy existing snags used for nesting.

The Red-headed Woodpecker is listed as a priority species in Partners in Flight’s Bird Conservation Plan for the Upper Great Lakes Plain (http://www.partnersinflight.org). One of the objectives of this plan is to increase Red-headed Woodpeckers by 3% per year in USFWS Region 3 from 1980-2010 as measured by the Breeding Bird Survey.

What Can You Do?
Audubon’s Important Bird Area program is a vital tool for the conservation of Red-headed Woodpeckers as well as other species. To learn more about the Important Bird Area programs in New York and Colorado, and other states with breeding populations of Red-headed Woodpeckers, and how you can help, visit: http://www.audubon.org/bird/iba/

Volunteers are crucial to the success of programs that monitor the long-term status of wintering populations of Red-headed Woodpeckers and other bird species. Audubon’s Christmas Bird Count (CBC) is one of the longest-running citizen-science monitoring programs in the world and has helped to follow changes in the numbers and distribution of Red-headed Woodpecker.
Information on where Red-headed Woodpeckers occur and in what numbers is vital to conserving the species. Help in monitoring this and other species by reporting your sightings to eBird. A project of Audubon and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, eBird is the world’s first comprehensive on-line bird monitoring program.
The Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology and the USDA Forest Service coordinate Birds in Forested Landscapes, a citizen-science project that links volunteer birders and professional ornithologists in a study of the habitat requirements of North American forest birds, including Red-headed Woodpecker. To learn more about Birds in Forested Landscapes, and how you can participate in the project, visit: http://birds.cornell.edu/bfl/