Planting for the Birds

Well it is snowing a bit outside, so we know it is still spring, but the May long weekend is just around the corner and, for many people, this weekend marks the "safe date" after which it is safe to plant your bedding plants and not be worried about frost.

So if you are one of these gardeners that are eagerly awaiting the May long weekend and doing some garden planning, then how about considering some plants that will attract birds.  I have made some suggestions among the plants that are commonly available in your local greenhouses:

Annuals
For hummingbirds: Hummingbirds have long thin bills that are ideal for probing into trumpet shaped flowers to find the nectar that they are seeking.  They seem to be attracted to flowers that are red in colour.  Look for plants that have high nectar production.  Annual plants to consider for attracting hummingbirds include fuchsias, nasturtiums, snapdragons, dianthus, foxglove, impatiens and petunias.

For seed eating birds:  It is the seed heads in flowers that are the attraction for seed eating birds. These seeds are not available to the birds until the seed head has dried out so don't dead head your flowers or if you do, save the seed heads and offer them once they have dried out in a tray feeder for the birds. In the fall, leave your flowers and their seedheads standing and you will have birds visiting these heads in cold weather condition.  Flowers to consider for attracting seed eating birds include cosmos, cornflower, marigolds, and zinnias, black eyed susans, daisies, impatiens and sunflower mixes

Perennials:
Now what about perennials?  If you are like me, you are getting lazy and prefer to not plant alot of bedding plants.  Here are some choices of commonly available perennial bedding plants for nectar generation (hummingbirds) or seed heads (seed-eating birds): consider bee balm, columbines, coral bells, bachelor buttons, delphiniums, lilies and lupines.

Finally what about shrubs, vines and trees:  consider plants that have berries like dogwood, mountain ash, chokecherry bushes or trees, russian olives, and crabapple trees. Also consider shrubs or climbing vines that have high nectar production for the hummingbirds like morning glory or honeysuckle vines.

It's amazing to find that attracting birds really isn't just about what feeders you have in the yard.  Bird's are looking for the right environment including plants (and don't forget water) when they decide whether to hang out in your backyard or your neighbor's.  So plant for success!

How to protect your lawn from bird seed.

OK, I should know better.  I should know that my lawn will be affected by my bird feeding habits but somehow every year in the spring it comes as a bit of surprise.

Right now I have this nice bump under my finch feeder. I have been feeding a mix of finely chopped sunflower seed and nyjer seed.  Now neither of these seeds will sprout as the nyjer seed has been sterilized and the chopped sunflower seed will not grow.  However, it appears that the shells from the nyjer seed (the birds hull the nyjer seed to eat it) have built up over the winter and now I have a this nice hill beneath my feeder which is now part of my bumpy lawn.

As a bird seed manufacturer, my testing ground is often my own backyard.  I test different types of nuts, different types of bird seed and try to confirm existing theories on bird seed preferences etc.  So I end up with problem areas in my lawn.  However, if you are a gardener first and a bird feeder second, and want to avoid these problems here are some tips:

1. Feed a no-mess mix like our Mother Nature's No Mess Gardener's Mix.  The seeds in this mix will not sprout under the feeder and do not have any seed hulls so you should not get built up waste under your feeder.  
2. Feed sunflower chips. We use the term "chips" for the sunflower seeds that have had the seed hulls removed (sunflower hearts or kernels is another term for these).  Our biggest seller is the medium sunflower chips (which are sunflower kernels that have been chopped into medium sized chunks).  These will not germinate under the feeder and will not cause any shell build up.  
3. Beware sunflower shells.  While birds love sunflower seed, the shells left over from the hulled seed is hard on the lawn and will prevent the lawn from growing below.  Also you may find some pretty sunflower germinating beneath the feeder.  You can prevent this by gathering up the shells as much as possible or by covering the ground with a piece of tarp to act as a hull catcher during the winter when feeding sunflower seed and gathering this up in the spring.  

I haven't quite given up on the gardening but I do recognize that my yard will not be Martha Stewart's.  That is OK with me though, because my garden is full of interesting feathered visitors that provide me with much enjoyment. 

How to avoid attracting "rodents" with Bird Seed

It is not a big problem here in Alberta because we do not have rats here but in other parts of Canada, in particular British Columbia, I hear about challenges with rats being attracted to bird seed.  Of course bird seed can attract really any wild animal including bears, squirrels, deer, raccoons etc. So how do you avoid attracting these wild animals and just feed the birds?

Racoon caught executing a night time raid on a bird feeder near our Chin Ridge Office.

Here are some tips from the Wild Bird Feeding Industry on rats in particular but they really apply to most unwanted critters:

1. Mount your feeders high off the ground in a way that makes it more difficult for critters to reach the feeders.  
2. Use a squirrel proof feeder to discourage larger animals from eating at it.  For example some feeders are weight activated so that if a heavy animal stands on the feeder the seed holes will close up.
3. Use a seed catcher to try to prevent seed from being spilled on the ground and clean up seed regularly under the feeder.
4. Use good quality bird seed so that the birds consume it all instead of dumping the undesirable seed on the ground.
5. Bring feeders in at night to avoid attracting wild life that is more active at night e.g rats and racoons.
6. Store excess seed in plastic or metal tubs that are rodent proof.
7. Try to keep your yard clean of other waste that may attract rodents, e.g. garbage bins, petfood, uncovered compost or food waste piles, dirty bbq's etc. 

Following these tips can help avoid attracting those unwanted rodents to your back yard.

Now what kind of bird is that?

I often struggle to identify the birds in my backyard.  I know the usual suspects of course - my normal backyard visitors but when someone new comes along ....  So today when these large robin sized bird that clearly were not robins and not cedar waxwings and not kingbirds arrived in my berry tree for lunch at lunch time I started another round of frustrating attempts at identifying these odd characters.  This time I turned to technology for help:

A website that I find quite helpful is www.whatbird.com but specifically I like the step by step identifier on the site, which allows you to narrow down the possible bird type by using your location, it's size, colour, beak shape etc.  This allows use to use as many clues as you have at your disposal to identify the bird and hopefully saves you from the embarrassment of mistakenly identifying the bird as an unusual, rare, unlikely bird that never frequents your area as the bird in your backyard -trust me I have done this.  So anyways today I used this tool and determined I had Pine Grosbeaks (immature male or female grosbeaks to match the colour of birds) in my tree.

Now I really don't know if these were truly Pine Grosbeaks and based on the range map it would be kind of unusual to have them in my area.  However it was the best thing I could come up with after an hour of research.  As I never got organized enough to capture these birds on film, I can not get a second opinion on my identification but isn't that half the fun of bird watching - just trying to figure out who is coming to dinner?

New Year's Resolution - Fill the feeder more often with different seeds.

You have heard about the shoemaker's kids that don't have any shoes, well how about the Bird Seed Manufacturer's birds that don't have any bird seed?  It just seems that my days and evenings are so full that I don't get out in the yard much to top up those feeders.  So my 2012 resolution is to actually fill the bird feeders more.

After coming home from visiting relatives over Christmas, I found the feeders in my backyard empty as usual and went out to put new food in the feeders.  Of course as a bird seed manufacturer, we end up with the odds & ends from the bird seed operations, seed samples from this vendor and of this product or another that I end up dragging home.  So for the fun of it, I filled my feeders with different products and spent the afternoon doing backyard feeder observation.

Of course with our Mother Nature's bird feeding system, we recommend this.  Ideally you want to separate the birds in the yard to avoid conflict between them and to encourage the maximum diversity of birds in your backyard.  I sometimes forget to do this myself though and watching the birds eat that afternoon just reinforced how important this is. 

I had put tree nuts in my peanut feeder.  Tree nuts included almonds, walnuts, brazil nuts, pistachio, hazelnuts, pecans etc.  In fact most nuts with the exception of peanuts are a "tree nut" and we use tree nuts in some of our more exotic mixes.  However, I do not typically feed pure nuts and if I do, I would usually use peanuts.  Well I was so impressed with the birds reaction to the tree nuts.  The nuthatches and downy woodpeckers in my yard were head over heals for the tree nuts.  Meanwhile the finches definitely preferred the sunflower or nyjer seed while the juncos and doves were hanging out underneath and around the millet feeders.

Lesson reinforced:  Different food for different birds.  Diversity is the spice of life so mix it up this year at your bird feeders - oh and try to keep them full too!

Feeding your pet bird

I have mainly been talking about feeding wild birds in my blog to this point but today's blog will focus on our pet bird food products and the philosophy behind them. 

Yes we do manufacture bird food for companion birds, in fact this is how we got started in the bird seed business many years ago.  Our customers, many of whom are bird breeders, have very exacting standards on bird seed and we have created our seed mixes to meet those requirements.

One of the most important requirements of any bird seed mix is it's cleanliness.   Dust is very harmful to bird health and we triple clean our bird seed ingredients to ensure there is no dust in our mixes.  Then secondly, good quality ingredients are important.  We spend a great deal of time sourcing excellent quality ingredients for our mixes to ensure freshness, flavour and nutritional value.  Finally, our mixes are formulated to provide interest, variety and nutrition.  While our mixes are seed, fruit, vegetable and nut based, we do add a vitamin enriched pellet to some of our seed mixes where necessary to ensure that the seed mix can be used as a daily diet for your bird. 

We do not add preservatives to our mixes or food coloring.  This is because we know that some of these ingredients can actually be toxic to birds.  We believe in offering good, honest, all natural ingredients and believe that if we can educate our customers on how to store and rotate their stock effectively, then we should not need to add preservatives to our mixes. 

While some bird experts promote only feeding pet birds a pellet diet to ensure birds get properly formulated nutrition, it is our customers' experience that some bird's will thrive much better on a diet that has interesting and varied ingredients that provide this nutritional value. 

If you are located in Canada and are interested in trying a sample of our our Mother Nature's companion bird seed for your pet, send us an email at seed@chinridge.com and we will send you a sample to try.

So excited to have my red breasted nuthatches back..

I love nuthatches.  I love how they can walk down trees and hang upside down.  I find them very entertaining to watch. Very rarely I will get a White-Breasted Nuthatch in my yard but they don't seem to stay around.  However, when I do get some Red -Breasted Nuthatches in my yard they seem to stick around longer.

I think that the nuthatches sense that winter is coming as they are very busy and are back and forth to the feeder. In fact we had a bit of snow here today.   The feeder they are most interested in has primarily black oil sunflower seeds and some split skinless peanuts in it.  They also seem to be enjoying the suet.

In fact I can't believe how quickly all my suet feeders are being depleted by a variety of different birds.  I just put out 4 cakes last week and they are almost gone.

Keep your feeders full folks, your birds are bulking up and getting ready for winter.