Wild Birds Unlimited

Wild Birds Unlimited is the name of a chain of wild bird seed/feeder/birdhouse stores.  Hopefully it will also soon describe backyard world.

I was reminded of the wild birds when I noticed that a flock of  cedar waxwings was having a feast on the ligustrom berries.  They seem to make a stop in our yard each year about this time.  We also often see larger birds such as cardinals, blue jays, mockingbirds, and mourning doves in the yard.  I only occasionally see smaller birds moving in the shrubbery, but don't often see them well enough to identify them.  With the protection due to the fence and the abundance of shrubbery, I thought adding a feeder might make our backyard the perfect bird sanctuary.

This probably would not have been practical in the past, but we have not seen any neighbor cats in the yard for months.  Our ferocious yellow feline spends little or no time outside.  This leaves the yard cat free 99.3% of the time. [Alex's time in the backyard:  (5 min/exploration)(2 explorations/day)]/[(24hrs/day)(60min/hr) x 100 or 0.69% of any given day the cat is "on duty" patrolling the backyard.]  Even when he is in the backyard, Alex is mostly oblivious to other activities and no longer climbs or jumps.  If the larger birds such as the blue jays yell at him, he quickly retreats back inside.  He is probably an embarassment to the rest of the cat kingdom, but perhaps such behavior is the privilege of being a geriatric cat.

With all of this in mind, we set off last Saturday morning to find a bird feeder. We were especially anxious for it to be a bird feeder, not a squirrel feeder.  After much discussion with the very patient owners of our local Wild Birds Unlimited store, we loaded the car with an anti-squirrel feeder, a pole system to mount it on, and a 20 pound bag of safflower seeds.

Squirrel proof bird feeder

Safflower seeds are somewhat uncommon as a birdseed.  Cardinals, chickadees and a few other species especially like safflower seeds, while they are an acquired taste for some other birds.  The most important thing about safflower seeds is the list of various critters that do not like them.  Squirrels do not like them and some of the nuisance birds such as grackles and starlings won't eat them.  Safflower seeds sounded like a good choice for our needs.

I think the people at the store were concerned that we would not quickly attract any birds, because they told us multiple times to sprinkle seed on the ground below the feeder and not become discouraged if it took awhile for the birds to find the feeder.

We set everything up (the pole is drilled into the ground), filled the feeder, and retreated inside.  There was no great rush of feathers to the feeder, but within a couple of hours two cardinals were eating the seeds we had scattered on the ground.  By the next day, the cardinals were eating from the feeder.

female cardinal on feeder

There was relatively little activity until noon Friday, when the temperature reached the mid-60's on its way to a high in the mid-70's.  This was after multiple days of much lower temperatures.  All of the neighborhood birds seemed to think it was spring.  The two cardinals were still using the feeder, but they were accompanied by multiple Carolina chickadees flitting on and off the feeder, two Carolina wrens who were energetically throwing seeds out of the feeder (did they even eat any?), a blue jay eating seeds from the ground, and several unidentified small gray and brown birds on the ground.  A red-bellied woodpecker even showed up on the ligustrom and made a couple of visits to the feeder.

We were quite pleased that so many different kinds of birds had found the feeder in less than a week.  I am not sure if we will need to wait until the next warm spell for such a flurry of activity, but at least the birds now know the food is here.