Photo: White-breasted Nuthatch, Pamela Brown/Audubon Photography Awards
When it’s a snowy, icy and cold winter, there’s little gardening you can or want to do in the yard. But there are a few steps you can take to supplement the work you have already done by providing natural food sources and shelter. You can offer and maintain bird feeders and can provide an unfrozen source of water for drinking and bathing. Both will help local birds and provide a reliable source of entertainment as you watch from the warmth of your home.
Northern Flicker and Red-belled Woodpecker, Wilson C Po/Audubon Photography Awards
Bird Feeders
There are some basic rules for bird feeders.
Make sure that the food you offer is nutritious, providing needed fat and carbohydrates. Favorites include black-oil sunflower, hulled sunflower, Nyjer (thistle), whole peanuts, and suet. You may also want to offer some dried mealworms on a small plate on a patio table.
Clean the feeders well and often. Clean feeders weekly, especially during wet weather. Take them apart and scrub off debris and either scrub them with soap and water or run them through the dishwasher. To disinfect them, soak them for 10 minutes in a bleach/water solution or a weak vinegar solution, but make sure to rinse them well afterwards and dry them thoroughly before reusing them.
Keep the area under feeders clean. Using hulled seed helps prevent potentially moldy buildup under feeders, but a good raking now and then is still necessary.
Prevent predation from outdoor cats and raptors. If you notice neighborhood cats stalking the birds you have attracted, chase them away. If that doesn’t work, you should take the feeders down for a while, or even permanently. And, although predation by raptors is natural, you should remove feeders for a while if raptors such as Cooper’s or Sharp-shinned Hawks make daily visits.
Prevent window collisions. If birds swarming your feeders are colliding with your windows, remove the feeders until you can take steps to prevent those collisions. Information on making buildings safe from window collisions is available on NVBA’s Bird Safe NOVA site.
Red-bellied Woodpecker, Marie Schmidt/Audubon Photography Awards
Bird Baths
If you have a water feature such as a natural or constructed stream or pond, chances are it’s frozen, drained or, in the case of a feature with a pump, turned off for the time being. Because nearby natural streams and ponds also may be frozen in very cold winter months, you can help the birds by providing a bird bath with a water heater that keeps it ice-free. This will be an option only if you have a grounded outdoor outlet where you can plug in the heater. There are a variety of models you can find either online or at a local bird feeding or hardware store. Of course, maintaining a clean bird bath is very important, particularly if it attracts mobs of birds, which it may do when other sources of water freeze.
As with bird feeders, it’s important to keep the bird bath clean. Change the water daily, and disinfect it weekly. For the weekly cleaning, rinse and scrub it with nine parts water, one part vinegar. Although you should avoid synthetic soaps and cleansers because they can strip the essential oils off of feathers, running the bird bath through the dishwasher on the disinfect cycle and adding an additional rinse with running water afterwards is an easy way to do the weekly cleaning.
Keep warm and enjoy the view from your windows.
Catch up on past Wildlife Sanctuary Almanac articles here.