Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Cool birds at your birdfeeder.

We've fed and watched birds for many years. The most interesting visitor I've ever seen near a feeder was at my father's house a few years ago. He lived on the edge of town and would often get interesting birds due to his proximity to fields & woods; turkeys, quail, etc. One winter, a Kestrel showed up for a few days.

(Not my pic; copied from Wikipedia)


As you can probably guess, it wasn't for the seed. But it was for the food. {S}He had learned that there were lots of fat & happy little finches and sparrows cheerfully feeding. I'll spare the fellow bird-lovers the details, but let me just say that it was pretty amazing to watch that Kestrel hunt right in my father's back yard.

Here are some action shots I took of blue jays feeding on my parents deck last Christmas. Blue jays are quite entertaining to say the least; they are very dominant and dive bomb each other. They were literally 3-4 feet from me.

Blue Jays are mean!

Medic,
last summer I had 20 Goldfinches at my feeders at one time, it was awesome.

Wow, those are great shots. What camera are you using?

Thanks, Ken. It's a Canon G3 with the zoom lens on. Although it's an older camera (was highly regarded at the time), it takes great pictures. Going to upgrade to a DSLR in a year or two.

They place a trap around the feeder with a trap door and a string attached as a trigger. The hummers are not very cautious and they will fly in to get to the feeder. All you have to do is pull the string and, Voila!

http://www.carolinabirdclub.org/hummingbirds/winterhummingbirds.html Check out this site if you are interested.

One other point - The hummers will fly south whether you leave your feeders up all year or not. There is no need to take them down to insure that the birds will leave. It is the feeders that are left up past October that attract the vagrants that have lost their way for whatever reason.

I have a Canon 20D that I have had for some time. Excellent camera - zero lag time when you press the shutter button. I think that the series is up to 50D now?

Cooper's and Sharp Shinned hawks also latch on to an area where homeowners are feeding birds. You see a lot of complaints from the "bird lovers" that the hawks are preying on "their" birds. I, for one, enjoy watching a bird of prey take down a meal every now and then.

My parents have an "island" of bushes in their back yard that has about 10 feeders and 3-4 suet stations, as well as 3-4 sugar feeders for the hummers. They get pretty much all the birds mentioned here plus several types of hummers, grackles, stellar jays, several types of chickadees(mountain, brown/black cap) and many others I can't remember. I'm sure every bird in Whiterock knows their house because they get adult birds like Pileated Woodpeckers and Nuthatches bringing their babies to the suet feeders to eat.

Every once in a while, they do get a Coopers or Sharp Shinned swoop down and pick off an unsuspecting bird though, or even a ground squirrel near the feeder.

"So what are your Axiom buddies talking about on the boards today?"

"Hummers, and taking pictures of hummers."

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