Hummingbirds are one of the most unique bird species because their diet consists in large part of nectar. In addition to the oriole, hummingbirds are the only species that will feed off sugar water as part of its primary diet. Because sugar is a household product, owning a hummingbird feeder is an easy and cost efficient bird feeder to own. To make hummingbird food, all you need is sugar and water. You’ll want to maintain a ratio of about 1 parts sugar to 4 parts water; in other words, for each ¼ cup of sugar, add 1 cup of water. Place the mixture on your stovetop and bring it to a boil, then let it cool until the water once again becomes cold.
Once your mixture has cooled, simply funnel it into the hummingbird feeder and place it outside. Hummingbirds are naturally attracted to red, so they’ll come to your feeder and poke their beaks in to sip the liquid. You can also make a large batch of sugar water and freeze it in plastic cups for later use.
It’s rare that an average person with no carpentry skills is able to build a bird house at home, but with a dried out gourd, a drill, and a little elbow grease, you can build a great bird house in just a few minutes! First you’ll need a gourd, which can be bought at a local farmer’s market, or found at various supermarkets during the fall. The gourd needs to be sizable, about five inches in diameter. Once you’ve found your gourd, you’ll need a drill and an inch wide drill bit. Drill a hole into the center of the gourd where it is widest in circumference.
Do your best to drain any liquid inside, then hang the gourd out to dry. This is the tricky part, because it can take months for a gourd to dry completely, so it’s best to do this in the Fall and have new gourd bird houses in the Spring. Gourd bird houses can house a variety of different bird species, including martins, sparrows, and even chickadees if you drill a smaller hole!
 If you live in western North America and visit parks high in the mountains, especially where there are evergreen forests near timberline, you may know the gray bird with a rough, drawn-out, cranky-sounding “song,” the Clark’s Nutcracker. Nutcrackers are closely related to the jays that frequent our backyards. In late summer, Clark’s Nutcrackers harvest seeds of Pinyon Pines. They stuff the seeds into pouches below their tongues, and then may fly several miles and bury the seeds. A single nutcracker may bury as many as 33,000 Pinyon Pine seeds in groups, or caches, of four of five seeds each. When winter comes and food is scarce, the bird returns to its thousands of caches and eats its seeds. Earlier it was thought that probably nutcrackers remembered only the general area where their seeds were stored, or that perhaps they could smell the seeds. Now after many ingenious experiments, the truth is known. When it comes to remembering where their food is stored, nutcrackers have amazing memories. Their memories are not faultless, but nutcrackers are surely more gifted for this single cache-remembering task than average humans. If you hid seed in five or six thousand tiny holes in the ground scattered over a mountain slope, in several months’ time could you remember where most of them were?
In the paragraph above, the phrase “for this single cache-remembering task” is important to notice. When we speak of a bird’s amazing cache-finding memory, we’re definitely not saying that the bird is “smart.” It’s simply that finding its food caches in winter is extremely important to the Clark’s Nutcracker, so its brain has evolved to be wonderfully developed for the specific task of keeping track of exactly where it caches its thousands of seeds |
It’s against the law to stalk humans, for the definition of stalking is “to approach one’s quarry stealthily,” and people don’t like being thought of as “quarry.” However, stalking birds is fun, and doing it well is an art. The most important “bird-stalking tricks” are obvious: No bright clothing, no loud sounds, no quick moves, avoid open areas… However, a few others deserve special consideration.
Sitting quietly in a good place doesn’t sound like much of a strategy, but it’s a surprisingly good one. If you find a spot with things that birds like — food, water, shelter — just find yourself a comfortable, out-of-sight place to sit, keep quiet, and don’t move a muscle. Soon you’ll discover that, at least to birds, being still is almost like being invisible.
Bird scientists, or ornithologists, have found that while some birds seem able to conceive numbers up to about seven, most birds can count to approximately “one.” Therefore, if you have a bird feeder, you might consider placing next to it a large cardboard box or some other shelter big enough to hold you. Once birds have become accustomed to the box and are visiting the feeder again, have a friend accompany you there. You enter the box, but have your friend go away, and now you wait for the birds to come. The birds have seen “one” thing approach the feeders, and then “one” thing walk away. When birds begin returning to the feeder, if you keep quiet, you’ll have quite a view!
“Spishing” is the production of a special shhhh-shhhh- shhhh sound, or a similar squeak or hiss, in order to cause a bird to show itself. For example, maybe you know that a bird such as the White-crowned Sparrow at the right is in a thicket or behind a shrub, so you steal near, spish, and up pops the bird to look around and see what’s going on. Spishing doesn’t work with all birds but with some it’s almost magical.
Later you’ll learn more such tricks on your own. As you learn “bird psychology,” you’ll find yourself able to guess how to outsmart birds, and you’ll find that your skill in putting these insights into practice can be honed to the point where, really, stalking becomes an art.
Once you’ve learned your local birds and begun making lists, probably you’ll find yourself “bird listening” more than “bird watching.” Especially during spring and summer, it’s much, much easier to identify the various species by song than by trying to see every bird’s field marks.
For this reason, good field guides describe as well as they can each species’ song. Unfortunately, many of these descriptions are pretty hard to interpret. The best way to learn songs is to spot a bird with your eyes, watch it as it sings, and do this often enough for your brain to make the connection between the song and the bird. It’s also a good idea to add in your field guide your own notes describing the songs. Recordings of bird song can be bought. The announcer says “Rufous-sided Towhee,” and then you hear a few seconds of the towhee’s “drink-your-tea” song.
Especially during spring migration when trees swarm with various species of warbler, vireo, and other migrants, it’s a pure joy to walk through the landscape hearing all the various songs, and knowing exactly who is where. Then the added joy is when you have attracted some of these birds to your backyard with their favorite food in the bird feeders.
Owning a bird feeder allows you to attract birds that nest in several different locations around your yard. Because birds will often travel far to find food, it’s important to keep a steady supply of food in your feeder, as birds will become dependent on your feeding them during the colder months when food is sparse. If you are removing a bird feeder from your yard, or intending not to fill it, make sure to do it at the end of the summer. This will give the birds that might depend on food from your bird feeder a chance to look elsewhere for different bird feeders or alternate sources of food.
During the winter, ensure that you fill, or at least check your bird feeders twice a week. Birds will need more food in the winter months than during the other times of the year.
I’ve found that most people store their bird baths in the winter months, but this can be the time of year when birds are most in need of water for drinking and bathing. Water is sparse in winter months when there’s a lot of snow on the ground, or if it is snowing outside. I ensure that I fill my birdfeeders every couple days in the winter, but I also wanted to provide my winged friends with fresh water. Then I saw a friend of mine had a heated bird bath on her porch and I thought; what a great idea! Heated bird baths are kept warm through an un-invasive heating supply located on the bottom of the bath, and are controlled through their own internal thermostat.
I bought a heated birdbath as an early Christmas present to myself, and enjoy the fact that I’m helping out my neighborhood birds, and also that I have an active bird gathering place on my back porch.
Birds fall into certain groupings, such as the sparrows, the warblers, the ducks, the hawks, the flycatchers, the woodpeckers, etc. Sometimes these groupings coincide with the family category, as with the turkey family, the swift family, and the vireo family. Other times, large families themselves are broken into recognizable and established groupings. For example, the crow family includes not only crows but also groupings of species known collectively as the jays and magpies. The chickadee family includes different species of chickadees as well as numerous species of titmice and bushtits. The important thing to know is that most birds belong to some kind of group and, usually, when we’re identifying birds, the big question isn’t whether it’s a falcon or a hawk, but rather which falcon or which hawk.
You might guess that sometimes answering this is easy, but other times it’s hard. If you’re anyplace in eastern North America other than Florida and you see a hummingbird, you instantly know you’ve spotted a Ruby-throated Hummingbird because in eastern North America north of Florida, Ruby-throats are the only hummingbirds. However, if you live in southern California and see a hummer, you’ll need to figure out whether you’re seeing a Calliope, an Anna’s, a Black-chinned, a Costa’s, a Rufous, or an Allen’s, because they’re all present. Similarly, Florida is home to about 17 species of sparrow; Texas has about two dozen duck species, and; in Michigan, you can see about 36 species of warbler.
If you want to be a good birder, you should develop general notions of what the various groups of birds in your area look like. You should learn to tell at a glance whether what you have is a falcon or a hawk, a duck or a goose, a warbler or a vireo. Once you know your area’s common groups of birds, then notice more subtle details, which among birders are referred to as fieldmarks.
Birding will bring you many benefits, right in your own backyard! The simple act of putting up a bird feeder could lead to a lifetime of enjoyment. Birds bring us:
Beauty and Song
Attracting birds into your backyard will also bring color, music, and motion. As you learn to look more closely, you’ll sharpen your powers of observation, see that all those little brown birds are actually full of beautiful colors and markings. Waking up to the sound of birdsong is an added bonus!
Entertainment
Warning: Birding is addictive! Putting up a backyard bird feeder could be the beginning of a life-long hobby (or obsession, in some cases). Not only is watching birds at your feeder enjoyable and relaxing, you will end up being entertained for hours on end as you notice things like “pecking order” and personality in your little house-guests.
You’ll get to know your “regulars” and you’ll get excited when special visitors come from time to time. Birding sharpens your powers of observation - you may not have noticed the migrants that pass through your yard with the changing of seasons before, but soon you’ll start to anticipate the first appearance of spring migrants, and notice when their calls change to mating calls.
Ecological Benefit
Attracting birds to your garden will help keep insect pests down, as birds will not only eat your seeds and suet from your bird feeders, but will also clean up garden pests and flies. Hummingbirds will pollinate your flowers and eat mosquitoes. Healthy bird populations also carry ecological benefit far beyond your own backyard, because they migrate long distances. Those birds in your backyard have connections - connections to far away places! Find out what you can do to keep them healthy and coming back year after year, both in your backyard and far beyond it.
It may seem funny that your ideas about birds can determine what you see, but it’s true. Wrong ideas can actually inflict you with a kind of bird-seeing blindness.
For instance, right now you may know that a rooster looks different from a hen, and that baby birds look different from adult birds. Probably you’ve also noticed that a saint bernard and, say, a poodle are very unlike one another, yet they can breed with one another and produce mixed-blood offspring. All these thoughts may be mingling in your mind, creating the general impression that groups of animals such as birds are more or less just one thing, the appearance of each individual depending on what its parents looked like, or some other unknown cause.
Therefore, if you see two birds together that are plainly very unlike, you may consciously or unconsciously think something like, “Well, bird appearances are so unpredictable and confusing that there’s no reason to pay attention to every little detail.”
The result will be that you ignore features such as wing bars, eye stripes, and the rest. You look at the bird, but do not really see it. In order to remedy that, you need three main tools: field guides, binoculars, and notes. You can enjoy birds flitting around the bird feeders without these but, if you want to become even halfway serious about bird watching, you must have these things.
