How to Feed Birds In The Winter

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

Sunflower seeds 25# bag
Suet from the supermarket

Step 1

Buy sunflower seeds in 25 pound bags. In northern climates, visiting winter bird love cracking open fatty sunflower seeds and eating them. If you're properly feeding chickadees and finches, they'll eat a lot of sunflower seeds over the course of the winter. Store sunflower seeds a garbage bag with a lid on it in order to protect them from mice and squirrels.
Step 2

Get suet at your local supermarket. Suet is the fat from a cow not used in making hamburg. Buy about two pounds of suet to start your winter.
Step 3

Hang your suet in a suet cage made of chicken wire, or a commercially available suet cage from a store like The Home Depot. Hang your suet cage out far enough from a tree branch that squirrels have a hard time jumping over to it.
Step 4

Now buy a birdfeeder. Your birdfeeder should have large, open trays. Although you can buy birdfeeders with only tiny little openings for the birds to peck through, they attract less birds then the "treehouse" style feeders.

Mount the birdfeeder on a pole in the yard, or a long branch, or anywhere you feel it will be safe from squirrels.
Step 5

Here's the super secret tip that few people know. In northern climates, you don't have to battle the squirrels away from the feeders every few seconds if you liberally spread sunflower seeds across the ground of your yard, or on a picnic table. Literally sow sunflower seeds from a small bucket as if they were grass seed. The squirrels run around, but because seeds are everywhere, the birds arrive en masse, and aren't scared off by the squirrels. Birds love to peck at seeds on a snow covered lawn, and this sowing method brings dozens of birds to your feeder.

(However, it is a little messy after all the birds leave their sunflower shells everywhere.)
Step 6

Practice the combination of suet, a "treehouse" style tray birdfeeder, and sunflower seeds spread out across your lawn or a picnic table, and you'll attract a wide variety of birds to your yard this winter.

Comments

prism said

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on 3/13/2009 We love to feed the birds. We found an adapter that converts soda bottles into a bird feeder (see my articles in interested) so have several feeders in our front and back yard. Never thought of scattering some seed but luckily, we don't have a problem with squirrels. Enough seed seems to get scattered under the feeders for the ground feeding birds. Thanks for the reminder about suet. I don't often think to buy and put it out.