The Apartment Birder

For those birdwatchers lucky enough to have a spacious yard with plenty of room for bird baths, bird feeders, and birdhouses, the view from most apartment windows might seem pretty bleak. Bird lovers in big cities might not see the same diversity as their colleagues further afield, but there are still many urban birds to be seen other than pigeons and fried chicken. Finches, swallows, waxwings, and orioles are among the many birds who commonly inhabit urban areas, and with a little luck, several species can be lured to your windowsill.
For bird lovers who live in apartments, “backyard birdwatching” poses some special challenges. Perhaps you’re lucky enough to have a patio or balcony, or maybe windows are all you’ve got. Whatever your situation might be, maintaining a birdfeeder is a great way to get to know your feathered neighbors. A patio or balcony can accommodate most feeders and smaller birdbaths. Small bird feeders and hummingbird feeders are also available which attach to a window using suction cups, offering up close viewing.
To successfully attract birds to your apartment, it’s important to be aware that different species prefer different foods and require specific types of feeders. Especially since you may not have room for multiple feeders, it’s a good idea to start by visiting local parks and other green spaces and learning which species frequent your area, particularly the sparrows, finches, cardinals, and hummingbirds that commonly visit feeders. This reconnaissance helps determine which feeders will be appropriate for your neighborhood, and helps to ensure that your new feeder has visitors. Having a better idea of which birds you’re trying to attract will also help you choose a seed blend. Try starting out with a basic blend that has a high percentage of black-oil sunflower seeds. Once birds have started visiting, you can tailor the seed to suit their tastes.
Often, the type of feeder you put up – or whether you can have one at all – depends on your landlord. Sometimes the management simply doesn’t allow them, or objects to the mess created by the debris and droppings. Start by looking for bird feeder guidelines in your lease or homeowner’s association paperwork. Often, though, no official rules on feeders have been enacted for your building, and you’ll have to proceed reasonably and with a bit of sensitivity towards your neighbors. Try choosing a shell-free bird seed blend to minimize the mess the feeder creates. Also, pick a feeder which can be mounted without damaging the property by using clamps or suction cups rather than nails and screws. If you have access to a balcony or patio, you can hang feeders from a lightweight pole sunk in a bucket of sand or cement.
Even if bird feeders aren’t allowed, all is not lost. Ask whether hummingbird feeders would be permitted – after all, those are virtually mess-free. Also try putting out nesting material in the spring, in a suet feeder or a mesh bag. With or without feeders, if you have a green thumb you can transform your balcony or patio into bird habitat by putting out shrubs that provide good cover, or hummingbird-attracting flowers such as fuchsia.

How to Create a Pinecone Bird Feeder

Look around your yard or neighborhood. What kinds of items can be used for bird feeders? Do you see a pinecone? Pinecones make lovely feeders because they are capable of holding peanut butter and suet. Your pinecone bird feeder will attract chickadees, nuthatches, titmice, and woodpeckers.

Here is what you’ll need:

1. Pinecones
2. Thin wire or twine
3. Cookie sheet or waxed paper
4. Peanut butter
5. Cornmeal
6. Tablespoon
7. Butter Knife
8. Sheperd’s crooks or nails (optional)

Steps to creating a Pinecone bird feeder:

1. Wrap your wire around each of the pinecones you have collected from your yard. You will need to slip the wire under the second or third tier of scales from the stem end (your pinecone will be hanging upside down). Once you have wrapped the wire around the scales, you will need to knot the wire to make sure it is secure. Allow approximately 6 to 12 inches of slack for hanging.
2. Place the pinecone on the cookie sheet or wax paper. This allows for easy clean up!
3. Mix equal amounts of peanut butter and cornmeal together. Do this until it looks well blended. Then use your tablespoon to spread the peanut butter/cornmeal mixture on each pinecone. Make sure to allow one or two small sections of the cone to remain free of the mixture. This free space will give your bird visitors a perching area. Use the knife to push the mixture deep between the scales of the pinecone.
4. Lastly, hang your pinecone bird feeder from a sheperd’s crook or low tree branch.

Bird’s will love this one! Not only will they love the bird food, but you have created a feeder that blends well into their natural habitat. This bird feeder project is also lots of fun to share with your children. They can hunt for the perfect pinecone, help create your peanut butter mixture, and enjoy watching the birds who are attracted to this feeder.

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Source: Projects for the Birder’s Garden.

Backyard Birding For The Beginner: Not Just For the Birds

Do you love to nature? Are you concerned about the environment? If you answered yes to both, then birding is most likely for you. It’s entertaining, inexpensive and helps the birds surrounding your community. Once you begin backyard birding you will begin to see species you may consider “common” exhibit interesting and fascinating behaviors when feeding, bathing, courting and finding a nest. In time, you’ll get to recognize different birds in the same species and get to see how individual the birds are. It’s like having television in your back yard or balcony.

The Beginner Twitcher

The snazzy name for a birdwatcher is a twitcher. However, this is usually given to birdwatchers that drive long distances and take vacations to watch birds. But watching birds in your home turf is just as important to conservation efforts, but for your enjoyment. Many important discoveries about bird behavior have been made by amateur birdwatchers who liked to watch birds for the sheer joy of it.

Despite the name, twitchers stay very still and are often quite relaxed. Birders often become the same way. Watching birds is like a kind of mediation. You become still and focus our attention on just one thing – watching the birds. Birding or twitching is a great way to naturally relieve daily stress.

What You Need To Get Started

With backyard birding for the beginner, you don’t need a lot of equipment. Over time, you may want to get some things like more powerful bird watching binoculars or a birdhouse for a specific species that visits your home, but for now, just looking out of your window and sitting still in a comfortable spot will do.
If you don’t have a lot of bid activity, look at ways you can make your yard or balcony more bird-friendly. Transform your place into a guest hotel for the local bird population. Offer them food, water and shelter. You can best give them these from bird feeders, bird baths or birdhouses.

There are a large variety of bird feeders, bird baths and birdhouses available to fit any budget and any bird species you are trying to attract.
Optional Gear

Later on, as you get more comfortable with the hobby, you can get other equipment to help you with watching birds and attracting them to your yard or balcony. These include:

• Good bird watching binoculars or a telescope on a tripod
• Good illustrated books about the local bird life
• A blank notebook to jot down some of your observations or to note what species regularly visit your place
• Joining a birding club that meets in person or online

This stuff isn’t necessary to get started right away – all you need, really, is bread crumbs to scatter on your yard and a good chair. But this stuff can make your bird watching easier and more enjoyable.

Attracting Titmice to your Backyard

A titmouse is a small gray bird approximately 4 1/2 to 5 1/2 inches with pale bellies and pinkish coloring at the sides. The word titmouse comes from the Icelandic word “tit” meaning “small” and the Anglo-saxon word “mase” meaning a kind of bird.

A titmouse look in trees for beetles, ants and other types of insects. They are also highly attracted to seed such as acorns, beechnuts, pecans, and tulip tree. These small birds are cavity nesters so they will build nests in nestboxes or birdhouses

In order to attract titmice to your backyard you should follow a certain protocol.

1. Plant a berry-bearing shrub in your backyard.  The will feast on bayberries, sumac, blueberries, and wild cherries.
2. Fill your favorite bird feeder with sunflower seeds, peanuts, or suet.
3. Let a few lamb’s-quarters or ragweed plants go to seed – these provide food in the winter for the titmouse.
4. They love peanut butter! Smear peanut butter on the tops of your bird feeders and titmouse will abound.

Titmice are easy to attract to our backyards and enjoyable to watch.  Happy Birding!

First Aid for Birds

There was a heartwarming story released within the past couple of days about a woman who saved a hummingbird who was trapped in the water she used as an ant moat for her feeder.

There are so many of us who wouldn’t know the first thing about helping an injured bird. I thought it would be prudent to help readers learn about basic first aid for birds. Please keep in mind that your intention should ALWAYS be to stabilize the bird and then find a licensed rehabilitator to provide further care. You can find a bird rehabilitator by contacting your local Humane Society or by calling the Department of Natural Resources.

One of the most common problems for birds in our backyards is colliding with window panes. If a bird accidentally flies into your window you should attempt to find the bird immediately. This bird will likely need a safe place to rest in order to restore its equilibrium. You can create this safe place with a nest of lightly crumpled tissues in a small deep box with a lid (a shoe box is ideal). Make sure the lid to the box has air holes. Do not punch too many holes in the lid as the bird will need it to be relatively dark. Gently place the bird onto the nest of tissues and place it in a safe area away from potential threats (cats, dogs, children, etc). After about an hour, take the box outside (away from the windows) and lift the lid slowly to peek inside. If the bird begins to flutter about it may be ready to leave the safe-haven you have provided. Open the box fully and allow the bird to fly away.

If after an hour the bird is still struggling, place the lid back on the box and allow the bird another hour or two to recover (sometimes it helps to give them a full night’s rest). If after you have allowed the bird additional time to recover its equilibrium, and it is not able to fly, it probably has an injury that will surpass your level of expertise. In this case, you should definitely locate a rehabber in your area.

Saving a Baby Bird

The first and most important thing to do when you have found a baby bird is to determine whether or not it really needs your help. If the bird looks newborn, i.e. it is featherless, simply pick up the little baby and place it back into its natural nest. By the way, it is an old wive’s tale that a mother bird will abandon its baby if it smells a human scent!

What if you can’t reach the nest or find the nest? Then you should attempt to reunite the baby with its parents by creating a nest of your own. We have found the green strawberry pint boxes fill with cotton to work quite well. Once you have filled the box with cotton, obtain some wire and attach the box to the tree branch. Then place the baby bird into the makeshift nest and observe. If the parent does not go to the baby bird within the hour – you my friend, will be the new proud parent of a baby bird. At least until you get the bird to a rehabilitator! In the meantime, keep the baby warm and fed. How you ask? Feed the bird at least every half hour (or every 15 minutes if the baby’s eyes have not opened yet) from before sunup to sundown.

For the first meal, stir 2 tablespoons of Karo syrup into 4 tablespoons of warm water until it is dissolved. You can feed the baby with an eyedropper. For your next meal and all other meals following, prepare an all-purpose nestling food.

All Purpose Nestling Food:

1. Peel a hard-boiled egg, remove the yolk and mash it.

2. Mix the mashed egg yolk with unmedicated chick scratch, baby cereal or crushed cornflakes. For older nestlings, also add canned dog food to the mixture.

3. Add warm water, a few drops at a time until mixture is soft but not runny.

4. Break off the sharp end of a wooden skewer (the type used for making shish kabob). Pick up a small dab of the mixture on the skewer and feed it to the baby.

5. Continue feeding the bird small dabs of food until it doesn’t want it anymore.

6. Repeat feedings every 30 minutes. Feed the nestling all it will eat each time you feed it.

Keeping baby warm

Place the baby bird into a small box lined with kleenex. Fill two 20 oz soda bottles with warm water and wrap them in wash clothes. Put the washcloth wrapped bottles in the box on each side of the baby and refill them with warm water each time the water cools.

First Aid for baby birds is difficult and constant work, which is one of the very reasons you will want to hand the bird over to a rehabilitation specialist as soon as possible.

*Information for First Aid from a book called Attracting Bird to Your Backyard. Great book!

How to Create a Simple Woodpecker Feeder

This is my kind of birding project… it’s not rocket science, it’s simple, and quick!

Whenever building a feeder at home it is usually beneficial to mimic the natural habitat of the bird you are attempting to attract to the birdfeeder. It therefore becomes important to learn how a woodpecker typically feeds in the wild. Woodpeckers are considered “clinging” birds – they have clawed toes that point in opposite directions which gives them the ability to cling and walk vertically up a tree trunk. Woodpeckers perch vertically to forage for food in trees which is exactly why we are going to hang our feeder vertically on a nearby tree.

Steps to Building a Woodpecker Feeder:

1. Obtain a rectangular cedar shingle. Cedar is best because it is thin and sturdy.
2. Purchase chunky peanut butter.
3. Since peanut butter is high in oil – you many want to wrap the back of the cedar shingle with aluminum foil to prevent the peanut oil from seeping all the way through the shingle.
4. Simply nail the shingle to a vertical support. This support can be an arbor post or a feeder mounting post. The shingle should be nailed as high as you can reach without using a ladder.
5. Spread your chunky peanut butter near the top of the shingle so the woodpeckers have room to grip without smearing the peanut butter on their feet or tails.
6. That’s it!

Keep in mind, woodpeckers will not be the only interested parties. Other clinging birds such as nuthatches, titmice, and chickadees will probably partake as well.

Happy Feeding!!