Additional Bird Feeders for Backyard Birding

Video Transcript

"Hello, welcome to Expert Village. My name is Wayne Petersen, director of the Massachusetts Audubon Society Important Bird Areas Program and we’re here this afternoon at the Daniel Webster Wildlife Sanctuary in Marshville, Massachusetts. Next we’re going to talk about backyard birding, a place where everybody has an opportunity to get involved and where many peoples interest in birding first begins. Certainly one of the most popular types of food to feed wild birds is black oil sunflower seed and again the loose sight tube type feeder like we showed for the Nigel thistle is a great way to dispense it. It can also be dispensed in feeders of this sort where the birds come underneath and actually perch and take the food out from beneath. But it’s the sort of thing that is as variable as human houses, there are manners of birdfeeders. In some cases there are open trays and platforms, in some cases there are birdfeeders where if a heavy bird like a blue jay lands on a perch to take seed from a dispenser, the door closes or if a squirrel jumps up onto it the door closes. So you can be a creative as you want in how you dispense food. In general black oil sunflower seed is a very, very popular item for bird feeding, it’s loved by chickadees, by cardinals, by goldfinches, by all manner of small birds, really winter and summer. So that you can either dispense it the way as I’ve shown or you can scatter it on the ground along with other mixed seeds of millet and peanut hearts and various other things that birds will like to enjoy scratching on the ground. Mourning doves for example particularly enjoy taking cracked corn as a ground dispensed food. So again, we’ve seen lots of different examples of ways that you can make food available for birds and attract them to your yard."