Winter is a Great Time to Watch Birds!

For beginning birders it is often easiest to learn to ID your basic, year-round resident birds during this season, when there is no visual competition with other breeding or migrating birds...and certainly no obstruction from foliage.

To attract a variety of birds to your feeders, you need a variety of foods...sunflower, millet, corn and suet are the basics...but you can also add nuts, old bread and dried fruits. The finches, such as cardinals and house finches will eat the sunflower seeds, along with chickadees, titmice and squirrels. Sparrows, doves and juncos will peck at the millet, and woodpeckers will primarily feast on suet or peanut butter. You can also attract mockingbirds (below), catbirds, robins and bluebirds with dried apples, raisins or cranberries. If you have bluebirds on your property, meal worms will give them extra help through winter.

In general, insect-eating birds will feed on the high fat content foods, but other seed-eating birds will partake in winter due to the increased need for energy-producing resources. The best way to attract birds all year round is to plant native seed, nut and fruit producing grasses, shrubs and trees.

It is also important to have a variety of feeders located on or near trees or shrubs. Some birds will frequent feeders, while others prefer to feed on the ground. And some birds, such as this Cooper's Hawk sitting in our sweet gum tree , feed on other birds...so if you notice not one bird at your feeder (or several sitting completely frozen) just minutes after you saw flocks of them...look up in the trees.
No sentimentality here...it is just the food web in action.