Goodbye to bird feeders?

 It may be time to take down my bird feeders for good. I’ve been feeding birds in the garden for at least 30 years. I love watching our local downy woodpecker feeding upside down on the suet feeder. When a goldfinch happens by in spring and perches on the nyjer seed feeder, it makes my day.  

 

Goldfinches like small seeds of coneflowers and (thistle-like) nyjer-photo Rob Amend

    So why change this longstanding habit? First I learned that I could be poisoning hummingbirds by offering them infected or moldy sugar solution unless I emptied, cleaned and refilled the feeder every couple of days. That was more than I could promise, so I took that feeder down. 

Hummingbirds are safer on native cardinal flower than at my feeder

Then I stopped filling the seed feeders in the warm months. I read that I could feed birds more sustainably by choosing plants that produce seeds they can eat. That gave me a reason to add more native plants to the yard, always a welcome opportunity. And more diverse native plantings did seem to attract more birds.

 

Native coralberry will attract lots of birds-photo Servernjc

    This winter, though, I told myself that birds could use some extra seed to sustain them through the cold months. I filled my favorite feeders: a big oblong hopper with a weighted bar to close off the seed supply when a squirrel lands on it and a house-shaped suet feeder with a mesh-covered floor for clingers who feed upside down, like nuthatches and woodpeckers.

 

This battered bird feeder does keep squirrels out

Once the food was on offer, birds soon arrived, alighting on tree branches and inside twiggy shrubs, checking for predators and competitors before darting over to the feeders to grab a quick meal. 

    Unfortunately, my bird feeders could be superspreader locations, where birds come in contact with deadly infectious agents. Wildlife observers are reporting increased deaths of migratory finches caused by salmonella infection, possibly an unintended consequence of homebound bird lovers filling more feeders during the pandemic. Disease-causing microbes shared at bird feeders include bacteria, protozoa, fungi and viruses.

 

Pine siskin, one of the affected species-photo Cephas

 
    To avoid spreading infection, experts advise cleaning your feeder every one to two weeks, scrubbing it with soap and water and then soaking it in diluted bleach. Seed and seed hulls that fall to the ground, they declare, should be swept up in case they carry disease. Ideally, I shouldn’t put out more than two days’ worth of seed at a time, so that it’ll stay clean until it’s eaten. Even that stone birdbath I’ve been keeping filled is supposed to be scrubbed out and sterilized regularly.

 

The bird bath in May

    When I found a dead junco on the ground, I got the message: this is serious. I like feeding the birds, but I don’t want them to die for my amusement. 

 

Dark-eyed juncos visit frequently in winter

 I know myself well enough to realize I’m not going to bring those feeders indoors to clean them every two weeks through the winter. And I’m uncomfortable about the environmental impact of manufacturing chlorine bleach. It’s time to let our birds forage for themselves. In future, I’ll leave the bird feeders to those more committed to cleanliness. Instead, I’ll be planting more shrubs and perennials with berries and edible seeds.

 

American black elderberry offers lots of fruit for birds

 

Not starving, but thanks anyway

Is my face red! I just understood why scientists at Cornell Lab for Ornithology look down on backyard bird feeding. An article in the Native Plant Trust’s magazine finally put it in terms I couldn’t misunderstand. Birds aren’t starving, even in winter.

House finch in the snow-photo Steve Ryan

    Christopher Leahy of Mass Audubon surmises that the idea that wild birds need food was promulgated in the late 19th century, when conservationists wanted the public to think kindly about birds and stop killing them to decorate ladies’ hats with their plumes. 

Feathers in hats used to be de rigeur-photo Christies

Now we Americans buy 3 billion pounds of food for wild birds annually. Leahy says it’s OK to fill your birdfeeders if you wish, as long as you understand that you’re doing it for your own amusement, not because the birds can’t get by without the food.

Backyard birds like this blue jay are fun to see up close-photo Frank Schulenburg

    I have to admit that was a letdown. I’m a feeder—one of those mothers who expresses love by preparing loved ones’ favorite dishes. So I easily convinced myself that birds needed my help. Hearing that habitat loss was affecting birds just added to my conviction. I’d hate to have to spend the winter outdoors, since I hate to be cold. Wouldn’t the birds feel the same way? And what could they be finding to eat?

Food is love

    Fortunately for the birds, they’ve evolved strategies to get through the winter, as I’d have realized if I’d thought about it. Leahy assures readers that birds aren’t freezing out there. They have insulating feathers. And they’re used to gathering provisions from their winter habitat.

Northern mockingbirds finds berries to eat-photo Matt MacGillivray

    What I can do for backyard birds, Leahy reminded me, is to imitate wild places when I plant and maintain my garden. He argues for messiness. I’m with him there. Thickets and tangles of tree branches provide shelter and protection for birds. Some birds can find insects in those piles of leaves I’ve left on the ground. Others eat fruit from native shrubs, trees and vines. Still others like to find flower heads gone to seed on stalks that haven’t been cut down. Hummingbirds collect nectar from trumpet-shaped flowers.

Hummingbird sipping nectar from cardinal flower

    Last summer I planted a cross-vine (Bignonia capreolata) for this very purpose: to provide nectar and pollen for hummingbirds and native insects. I read that this vine will grow vigorously, so I planted it against the garage where it can get at least a half day’s sun. I’m hoping that in a few years, the garage and a nearby pergola over the garden gate will be covered with the vine’s waxy leaves and orange flowers with yellow throats. Cross-vine is native farther south, so a winter cold snap could kill it to the ground, but I’m told it will recover fast and keep on blooming.

I hope my cross-vine will look this good-photo David J. Stang

    I’ve already got two trumpet honeysuckle vines (Lonicera sempervirens) that are growing strongly and producing trumpet-shaped flowers. A trumpetcreeper (Campsis radicans) promises to add some yellow trumpet flowers once it gets old enough to bloom. I hope last summer’s hummingbird will be back to claim these vines next year.

Trumpet honeysuckle

 

 

Happy New Year!

Feeding the birds

With the trees bare, I have more opportunities to see the birds that are flitting around my leaf-covered backyard. On one memorable afternoon, I saw a flock of dark-eyed juncos foraging in the leaves on the ground while two blue jays flew back and forth from the birdbath to the big oak near the garage. 

I usually see juncos in flocks

A chickadee hopped along the oak trunk, jumping between the protective horizontal shoots of a climbing hydrangea. Meanwhile a cardinal couple appeared and disappeared among the dense evergreen needles of a large nearby yew.

This husky hydrangea vine provides cover for birds even after its leaves drop

     A week later at twilight, my attention was drawn to a loud chirping from the newel post of the front steps railing. I was able to identify the small bird that perched there, vocalizing officiously, as a house wren, Troglodytes aedon. 

House wren - photo JanetandPhil

This is not a rare species, but it’s not one I’ve seen in my yard before. I was proud to read on the Audubon Bird Guide app that this bird feeds on insects and likes to forage on the ground where there’s dense low growth—like here! 

     The house wren reportedly has a distinctive bubbling song. What I heard instead was its “excited chit call.” Listening to a recording on the app confirmed my bird identification. House wrens spend the breeding season all over North America, from southern Canada to the Mexican border. My wren may have been on the way to winter grounds in the southern US or Central America, migrating by night. How a five-inch bird weighing a few ounces can accomplish this long journey remains a wonder to me (For more on birds’ amazing powers, don’t miss The Genius of Birds, by Jennifer Ackerman).

     All these bird sightings seem to vindicate this year’s plan of piling up fall leaves on my garden beds. The reason for doing this instead of sending them out as yard waste or shredding them for mulch was to provide shelter for insects through the winter. When I see birds busily foraging in the yard, I can believe that leaf litter is doing its job.

Insects weather the winter among the fallen leaves--unless predators find them

     It turns out that those chickadees I see on the oak trunk are champions at coping with the cold. They can’t put on a lot of extra fat or a down layer like larger birds, because that would mess with their aerodynamics. Many small birds adapt by fluffing up their feathers, huddling together, and shivering in a special way by activating opposing muscle groups. Chickadees go further, dropping their nighttime body temperature by as much as 22° Fahrenheit in what’s called regulated hypothermia.

Chickadees are ready for the cold - photo USFWSmidwest

     How can we not want to help these birds with some winter calories to keep them warm? I’ve stopped filling my bird feeders during the warmer months, but now they’re back in action, and birds are using them. It’s encouraging to see them also hunting insects in those piles of fall leaves. This is the balance I’m aiming to achieve.

 

Coming soon

I'm off to visit the kids. See you in the New Year!

To deadhead or not to deadhead

Lots of flowers in my new bed means lots of decisions about whether to deadhead, or remove spent blossoms. 

Ox-eye sunflower and butterfly weed

Conventional garden wisdom rates deadheading as a necessity. It neatens up the garden, and more importantly, it’s intended to trigger the plant to make more flowers instead of channeling its energy into transforming fertilized flowers into seeds.

    As the flat yellow yarrow blossoms (Achillea ‘Coronation Gold’) turn brown, should I leave them to go to seed? 

Yarrow flowers this week

A trusted reference on perennials, Tracy DiSatabo-Aust’s The Well-Tended Perennial Garden, firmly dictates deadheading these flowers and promises they’ll be followed by new blooms from lateral buds and possibly from the plant’s base too.

Deadheading-photo Helen Harrop/Flickr through a Creative Commons license

    More flowers will provide more pollen for native insects. Jessica Walliser, in her book Attracting Beneficial Bugs, explains that native common yarrow (Achillea millefolium) is favored by lacewings, ladybugs, syrphid flies, parasitic wasps, and damsel flies—all predators that consume leaf-eating insects, keeping the garden’s insect population in balance.

Green lacewing, a beneficial predator

     My yarrow is related to fern-leaf yarrow, a European introduction (Achillea filipendula). I hope it attracts most of the same bugs as the native. Jess observes minute pirate bugs, very active predators, living in the flowers of this cultivar. Insects benefiting from the flowers add reasons to go ahead and deadhead the yarrow in hopes the plants will flower again.

    On the other hand, in Gardening for the Birds, George Adams writes that many birds eat the seeds of common yarrow. He adds that some cavity-nesting birds harvest its foliage to line their nests. It seems that the strongly scented foliage repels parasites, so by making this choice, the birds as “self-medicating.” 

My yarrow's fern-like leaves

    But George Adams also notes that birds feed on the insects that are drawn to yarrow flowers. This summer and last, following his advice, I’ve put a moratorium on filling bird feeders with seed. This way birds are supposed to turn their attention to eating seeds and insects they find in the yard, rather than just birdseed I put out.

    Last summer I noticed that birds continued to visit the yard without finding seed in the feeders. One side benefit was the disappearance of European house sparrows, nonnative birds notorious for muscling aside native species and hogging all the food. I guess the sparrows aren’t interested in foraging for food and prefer to go where the pickings are lusher.

European house sparrow

    This is one of those environmental decisions with pros and cons on both sides. I can deadhead to offer more flowers for the insects, or let the flowers go to seed for the birds. If I deadhead, I should get to enjoy some more of the pretty yarrow flowers.

'Coronation Gold'

     You can probably tell which way I’m leaning. I think I’ll deadhead now and call it a scientific experiment. I'll see how many more blooms I get after deadheading. I’ll plan to let the flowers go to seed at the end of the summer, leave them standing, and see if I spot birds eating the seeds. That way we all win.

Common yarrow

Winter rations, summer forage

Coming to you through the miracle of voice recognition software, I thought I’d reflect this week on changes I’ve made in my policy toward feeding birds. For several years I filled two bird feeders every week. Then I read Gardening for the Birds, by George Adams.

    Adams recommends growing plants that feed birds and provide them with shelter. 

Cedar waxwing eating fruit of a native serviceberry

He’s not a fan of bird feeders in the warm months. He points out that bird feeders can attract aggressive birds and invasive bird species like European sparrows that hog all the food and drive away shyer birds. Rodents attracted by birdseed may eat eggs and baby birds.

    To tell the truth, I was beginning to feel that birds were eating us out of house and home. Flocks of European sparrows showed up every time I filled the feeders and snapped up all the food within a few hours. While I regard individual sparrows as having a legitimate right to live, even if their ancestors are not from North America, I was attracting too many of them and not feeding other species I’d like to welcome to my yard.

One sparrow is endearing. Twenty take over a bird feeder.

    Following Adams’ advice, I started to emphasize trees, shrubs, and perennials whose fruit and seeds would provide food for birds. I already had some of them: balsam fir (Abies balsemea), shadblow (Amelanchier arborea), trumpet honeysuckle (Lonicera sempervirens), and lowbush blueberry (Vaccinium corymbosum). I added American elder (Sambucus canadensis) and American cranberry (Viburnum trilobum) for more bird-friendly fruit.

Mockingbird finds winter berries

    While I was choosing native perennials to attract native insects, I threw in some Eastern purple coneflowers (Echinacea purpurea), sunflowers (Helianthus species), and milkweeds (Ascelepias species), whose seeds birds could eat.

Purple coneflower seeds feed goldfinches

    One of Adams’ warnings was that birds might become dependent on food from feeders. If I suddenly stopped putting out seed, perhaps they would starve. I was interested to read an article in this month’s Atlantic that cites a Wisconsin study showing this didn’t happen in a population of black-capped chickadees. 

Black-capped chickadee--photo Alain Wolf

Researchers compared mortality among birds accustomed to getting some of their food from feeders and birds that foraged completely on their own. When feeder food stopped being available, the birds that had been fed did just as well as they had before. They were only taking 21 percent of their food from the feeders, continuing to forage widely despite this food source.  Bird feeders did help the chickadees get through the worst winter weather.

Bird feeders help birds survive the coldest days

    Scientists have also found that birdseed provided by humans is influencing birds’ evolution. Species are developing heavier beaks for opening sunflower seeds they find at feeders but not in their natural habitat.

    This year I’m putting out birdseed only in winter. I was happy to see that the native birds soon reappeared at the feeders this December, but the European sparrows aren’t back. I can’t judge yet whether more birds or bird species have been attracted by my plantings. All I can say is, there are lots of birds flitting around in spring and summer. I hope I’m heading in the right direction.

A sight I'd like to see

Mouths to feed

On a cold, snowy winter’s day, it’s lovely to see wild birds in the backyard. Last week I spotted nuthatches and a woodpecker at the suet feeder, chickadees hopping around the big hydrangea vine, and a female cardinal scoping out territory for this spring’s nest. Although my garden doesn’t attract rare, shy birds (or if it does, I don’t know enough to spot them), I like the idea of providing food and habitat on my suburban lot.

Thistle seed attracts small birds, including goldfinches

So it was a jolt to read in Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s magazine that “. . . although feeding birds may not be harmful to the species that use feeders the most, it also isn’t helpful to the species that most need our help.” Emma Grieg, leader of the lab’s Project FeederWatch, goes on rather condescendingly, “But don’t take down your feeders in despair. One of the most important impacts of feeding birds is that it allows people to feel connected to the natural world.”

    Wait a minute—harmful? Research by Grieg and Cornell Lab Citizen Science Director David Bonter assesses the balance between positive impacts of bird feeders—supporting populations of regular feeder guests such as northern cardinals—and negatives, such as “disease transmission, deaths from window strikes (when birds fly away from a feeder and into a house), and increased predation pressures," as when hawks eat bird feeder birds.

It's squirrel-proof, but is this feeder bad for backyard birds?

    I’m one of more than 50 million North Americans who feed backyard birds. I have a tube feeder for mixed seed, a hopper feeder for sunflower seeds, a thistle feeder, and the suet feeder for woodpeckers and nuthatches that like to eat hanging upside down. Last fall I bought ten 20-pound bags of birdseed at Mass Audubon Broadmoor Sanctuary’s Bird Seed Day Fundraiser. 

Blue jays are fun to have around

     I’d never thought there could be anything negative about bird feeders until I read George Adams’ book Gardening for the Birds: How to Create a Bird-Friendly Backyard.

     In addition to the potential harm noted by the Cornell researchers, Adams points out that birds evolved to forage for seeds and insects on their own. If they come to depend on food from our feeders, they could go hungry when we leave town. Also, we may be changing population dynamics, causing booms in feeder-reliant species, including nonnatives such as European sparrows.

Flocks of European sparrows can grab all the available food--Hopkinton News photo

     Is feeding birds just a feel-good activity, another ham-handed human intervention that gets in the way of natural processes instead of helping?  The Cornell article presumes that our goal in feeding birds is to save endangered species. 

     That’s one goal, but I have others. In winter, I’m proud to feed ten native species on Mass Audubon’s list of common backyard birds of the Northeast. I think they deserve to flourish, even if they’re not rare, and I know they’re contributing to the health of my garden ecosystem. 

Downy woodpecker hunting for insects

       To encourage birds to do their part in the garden by eating insects, I’ve stopped putting out seed in summer. I just need to get in the habit of washing those feeders more often.

Feeders need cleaning so they won't transmit diseases between birds