“Your yard can feel like a different place when you share it with birds.”
~Dan Rouse, How to Attract Birds to your Garden
“The observation of birds leads inevitably to environmental awareness.”
~Roger Tory Peterson, Peterson Field Guides: Eastern Birds
You know that feeling of “settling” that stick season brings? That way you linger a bit longer over your morning mug of coffee before starting the day’s work? Your sudden craving for hooded sweaters, and slippers, and soup, and stillness. How early twilight has your eyes searching for the flicker of a fire in your wood stove, or a flame in a balsam-fir scented candle as you stare and wonder how something so hot and bright can both soothe and energize simultaneously? How five o’clock sometimes finds you in your pajamas on the couch, or even in bed, in front of a beloved book or movie?
If you’re like me, you can relate to this quintessential Vermont experience.
But stick season hasn’t always felt this way for me. There were the years of stuffing babies into bundlers, toddlers into boots and snow bibs…when I would have wagered a hefty sum on the fact that I felt the sting of my children’s chapped lips and cheeks, and their frozen fingers and toes more acutely than they themselves did. These setbacks were enough to keep us indoors during most of the precious, fleeting sunlight—if only because it took hours—no joke—to bundle my chapped little cherubs.
Feeding our backyard birds was one of the few activities that ushered me through this time of literal and metaphorical darkness. I’m grateful to our feeder birds—the northern cardinals, black-capped chickadees, tufted titmice, white-breasted nuthatches, white-throated sparrows, American-tree sparrows, house-finches, purple-finches, goldfinches, and even the occasional redpoll and pine-siskin—that suffused my memories of those cold, dark days with the warmth and light of wonder.
Years ago, when the spark of bird curiosity had only just visited us, but our knowledge was still lacking, we hung feeders in full view of the kitchen windows. We positioned our farm table across from the windows and moved a rug, loveseat, side table, and small bookshelf directly in front of them. We filled the bookshelf with field guides, and then we waited.
It didn’t take long—maybe days, a week—for our bird neighbors to find the treats we had left, especially since cold temperatures had set in, and sources of wild food were harder to come by. Since then, my mind lights up with the memories of our family counting birds while eating lunch, sipping tea and hot cocoa on the loveseat while flipping through field guides, venturing outside to sled, play, pour maple syrup over bowls of snow—all amidst the company of flocks upon flocks of foraging birds.
And the wonder, oh the wonder, in my wide-eyed children when they learned that chickadees reliably perched on their fingers and ate birdseed from their palms when they stood still near our feeders.
And that time my daughter, just six, said, “Mama, what’s that reddish bird on our clothesline?”
“Purple finch,” I answered, peeking at the window while rinsing dishes.
“Mama, I know what a purple finch looks like and that’s not one!
I dropped my dish towel, and the three of us tiptoed to the bookshelf, opened a field guide, and discovered—to our great delight—that the bird in questions was a rare visitor from the far north—a (not-so-common) common redpoll!
Or that time my son, at ten, learned to use a table-of-contents and index—not to mention the concept of taxonomy—by looking up each of our bird visitors by family and species in our Sibley’s Field Guide to Birds of Eastern North America.
As parents of small children, we’ve had to keep bird feeding as simple and minimalist as we do everything else. Since we live in bear-country, we only feed birds from November 30-March 31, in accordance with the guidance of Vermont’s Department of Fish and Wildlife.
We buy three types of food:
1. Black-oil sunflower seed: the most nutritious food for songbirds, attracts the biggest variety of species.
2. Suet blocks: attract mainly woodpeckers, but also attracts nuthatches—including the seldom spotted red-breasted nuthatch—and chickadees.
3. Thistle or Nyjer seed: attracts goldfinches, redpolls, and pine siskins, the last two being infrequent visitors and therefore particularly awe-inspiring.
We hang four types of feeders:
1. One tube feeder for black-oil sunflower seed: to attract small-to-medium sized songbirds. These are easy to find in squirrel-proof varieties that disassemble for convenient cleaning.
2. One cage feeder with rain guard for suet blocks: these tend to be very inexpensive and easy to find in squirrel-proof varieties.
3. One platform feeder with a rain guard for black-oil sunflower seed: these are essential for attracting larger passerines (perching birds) like blue-jays, northern cardinals, and the rare and highly coveted pine grosbeaks, evening grosbeaks, and both the red and the white-winged crossbill. These are difficult, but not impossible, to find squirrel-proofed with wire cages, or you can rig up and attach a chicken wire cage without too much difficulty.
4. One mesh feeder with rain guard for thistle or Nyjer seed: these are finch-specific feeders and the seed tend to be expensive, but the squirrels don’t bother with it so the finches will get it all.
We’ve learned that most birds have discerning palates, which tends to make high quality seed worth the extra dollars. I tend to buy my food and feeders from our local Agway rather than the hardware store or supermarket.
There’s so much more to say about feeding birds—like how to keep feeders clean and prevent bird collisions—all of which I will write about in future posts. For now, I hope that you buy some bird food, hang some feeders, and make some warm winter memories. My kids are older and far more independent these days, but at dawn, lunch, and twilight, you’ll still find us in our kitchen doing the same.
Happy birding!