One thing spring brings to the Mid-Atlantic is wind. Some times things can get a bit crazy. When the wind is blowing in the twenty or so mile per hour range, feeders sway a lot. When wind gusts over thirty miles per hour, bird feeder baffles start kiting around and the feeders move with them. Birds can deal with a certain amount of feeder movement (they are used to moving tree branches after all), but there is a point when a feeders are blowing around violently enough that a bird (or even a person) could get hurt.
I have a strategy I use to keep feeders from blowing whenever winds pick up that works quite well in my yard. I described it in this post: Bird Feeder Baffles in the Wind. But I am now also using a very small feeder for mealworms. For this particular feeder, I needed to use a different strategy.
For weeks I’ve been on a crusade to get rid of House Sparrows that settled in over the winter. We’ve never had many House Sparrows. I only put out millet in the winter months for the White-Throated Sparrows and the Dark-Eyed Juncos. Each winter, I might get a couple, but they have always left once I stopped offering millet in the spring.
But this year, the House Sparrow population built up gradually over the winter. Now I typically see nearly twenty at a time and they’ve become a problem. If I let them stay, they will nest here and the numbers will climb like crazy. They need to go. This is the story of what has turned into one of my biggest bird feeding challenges. In the end though, I did get the House Sparrows to leave.
We’ve lived in our house for 34 years now. In all that time, I’ve only seen Eastern Bluebirds once or twice. Even then, they’ve never stayed long . . . until now. For the past few weeks, two male and one female bluebird pop up at the feeders periodically. Most days I see them for at least a few minutes. I’m trying to encourage them to stay.
This post will be a bit different than my usual posts. Instead of sharing everything I’ve learned afterwards, I’m going to offer a real time journal along the way. Hopefully I’ll be able to report that I’ve succeeded in enticing a pair to stay and nest in the yard. I hope you’ll take the journey with me.
