Bye Bye Birdies

For most of my life, I've fed birds through the winter. For the last couple of years, I've been lax in that, but this fall I vowed to do it faithfully again. So about a month I repaired some feeders that squirrels had mangled, and bought 20# bags of sunflower seeds and mixed feed, as well as two suet feeders and a squirrel baffle. I dusted off the binoculars, set my Audubon guide on my desk in case I needed to identify unfamiliar visitors, and got ready to welcome the birds back to Cafe Shupac.

Initially, plenty of them came. Starting on the feeders' second day of operation, chickadees, nuthatches, titmice, downy and redbellied woodpeckers rotated through them almost constantly. English sparrows joined the party a few days later, and while I used to look down on these non-natives, I've come to appreciate them. These sparrows are accidental leaders and born followers --they descend on and leave feeders in mobs, and if one flock member starts out to the feeder or back to shelter, most the rest immediately do likewise. If one happens to stay behind on the feeder, then makes a dash for the bushes after the main flock has set out for the feeder again, the entire flock will turn midair and flee to the bushes. One might see in this a manic satire of herd behavior in other two-legged creatures.

Unfortunately, the curtain fell on it and on most of the activity at my feeders about two weeks ago, and I'm not sure why. I saw hawks assault my feeders a few times, albeit unsuccessfully. During one incursion, a hawk plunged deep into a bare forsythia bush, flapping and shaking the branches all the while, trying to pull out one of the many sparrows sheltered there, though it failed. One morning I did find blood on the snow below my sunflower seed feeder--there had been none that morning when I refilled it. Either something got eaten, or I've got a chickadee with colitis. I've seen kills when I fed birds in other locations, though, and feeding continued at its usual pace in the days and even hours afterward.

We had several very damp, mild days followed by deep freezes, conditions which are especially hard on small birds in the winter. That could have resulted in a sizeable die-off, but I've never seen a comparable drop in bird numbers after adverse weather before.

Maybe one of my neighbors has a bigger and better feeding setup.

Birds still come. A small band of chickadees or a solitary nuthatch or titmouse might stop by half a dozen times a day to grab a sunflower seed, but my feeders might go hours without a visit. Woodpeckers and nuthatches still patronize my suet cakes as avidly as before. Those are in a well-sheltered area, perhaps allaying fears of hawks. Snowbirds and cardinals still clean my ground piles in a day or two. But feeders perched on the pole are usually as untroubled as a Michigan trout in January.

When the thaw predicted for the weekend comes, I may have to move my pole feeders to a more protected place to see if it turns things around. I'm missing the little guys.