Bird Feeders

 I spent a good part of my early days in Florida eschewing the use of bird feeders. As Bob Dylan once wrote: "I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."  I've mellowed, and with the installation of my bird feeders here in my new landscape, I've come to appreciate their value. Bird feeders do not replace the value of a well-planned landscape designed for them, but they augment it.  I sit daily in my backyard developing woodland and I watch birds.

It is likely true that none of the birds that now come to my feeders would starve if I stopped my feeding program, but they would certainly find life harder without them. As they visit daily, I know that what they are gaining is energy that will assist them later this spring or when they migrate north to their breeding grounds. I live in an urban desert. There is very little for them in my immediate neighborhood and my landscape is still in its infancy. My firebush has generated fruit that the mockingbirds and catbirds find value in, but very few other of my plants are mature enough now to make fruit. Some of my asters have made seeds, but they seem to hold little interest to my seed-eating birds. What the birds have reliably now is the food available each day in the suet, bark butter, and seed in my feeders. 

My daily visitors are relatively common species for my region of the state - downy and red-bellied woodpeckers, titmice and Carolina chickadees, common and boat-tailed grackles, catbirds, cardinals, and Carolina wrens, mourning and ring-neck doves, fish crows, and a couple of palm warblers. The bluegray gnatcatchers are often in the vegetation looking for insects, but they don't stop at my feeders. They are self-reliant.  What I get most out of my feeders is a sense of connection to the natural world around me. Before I put them out, I had no good idea what I was creating a landscape for. Now I do. These are the species that live here and the landscape is one that will someday have to support their nesting needs as well as their food ones. 

Feeders are important as a supplement to a living landscape. They cannot be a sole support mechanism. The landscape always will be the overriding need and the foundation for what can live here, but my feeders are now part of that landscape. Feed what your birds are looking for. Not all bird seed is equally as valuable. Millets - the white and red rounded seed found in high percentages in low-cost bird seed, are not of interest to much except doves and pigeons. What my birds favor most are the high-energy foods found in the suet and bark butter that I have to resupply daily. 

I also have a squirrel guard in order not to feed the squirrels that now flock to my yard. As I watched yesterday, there were 5 beneath the feeders looking for the seed that the birds above them dropped to the ground. I've taken some pity on them (heaven knows why) and I started to put cracked corn on the ground as well. They repay me by digging up the flats of wildflower seed nearby, but they'd do that anyway. Even squirrels need to eat... 

One cannot design a living landscape and chose what will decide to reside in it. We can, however, tailor it some to provide better habitat for the species we most desire to live with us and the ones most likely to be present. As my landscape develops, I will continue to monitor those kind of things. It is a work in progress and it gives me joy each day that I have time to spend in it. After all, that is an important part of creating a living landscape.