by Hal Borland
The beginner shouldn’t try to learn all the birds in the first season. Start with one related group, the sparrows for instance. Learn to recognize those common to your area. If the sparrows seem too difficult, start with the Winter woodpeckers, of which there are only a few. But take one group, learn to know its species, then go on to another group. Inevitably you will be lured to widen your knowledge with the more common members of other groups along the way. By late April you should have a fair foundation of knowledge of the cold-weather birds common in your area. From then on it will be a scramble, because the Summer birds will arrive in increasing numbers all through May. Among them will be warblers, which to me at least are the most challenging and most baffling of all. You won’t learn them all the first season, but you will get a start.
By Midsummer the birds common to any area will all be there, and through June and July they can be watched daily. That is when the energetic bird watcher fattens his list. And, of course, is baffled time and again by young birds, which often lack the distinguishing marks of the adults.
By August some of the migrants will have begun to move south again. And some birds will begin to change to Fall plumage. This creates still another problem in identification, another challenge. By September the migration will really be in progress. And all through the latter part of August and well into September, in my area at least, the warblers will be passing through again, on their way south. The watcher will get the year’s second chance to sort them out. But, again, many of the warblers change dress in the Fall, so the puzzles are compounded.
By October only the laggard migrants and the year-rounders will be around. In my area the late migrants include the flickers, the red-wing blackbirds, and often the robins. And the ducks and geese, which sometimes stay in my area into December. Meanwhile, there has been a quiet return of a good many familiar Winter birds, some of which always move north a little way to nest. Among them are juncos, tree sparrows, red-breasted nuthatches, redpolls, and kinglets. By November we are reduced to our normal Winter bird population, which includes a few migrants that are going to spend the whole year here. There is always a small flock of robins, sometimes there are a few bluebirds, and often a few red-wing blackbirds stay. The farther south one goes, the more of these non-migrating groups of migrant species will be found. Even a hundred miles south of where I live there are twice or three times as many of these birds every Winter.
The bird watcher will find, in most communities, a variety of group activities, ranging all the way from local field trips to national conservation movements. Both national and local groups have general as well as specialized programs. Day lists, week-end lists, and year lists are encouraged. Library and museum exhibits are sponsored and arranged. Educational programs are undertaken in schools and among youth organizations. Or the bird watcher can go it alone and make his own discoveries.
The week-ender, the vacationer, and the occasional visitor to the country often are satisfied to learn to recognize the principal birds of an area by sight or song. But the person who lives in the country even a part of the time usually wants to know all the birds, and sometimes he becomes something of an amateur ornithologist. At the least, he learns that birds are good company the year around, and if he is a gardener he soon learns that birds are among his most valuable allies. Without birds, gardening and farming would be all but impossible. It is safe to say that if all the birds were to be destroyed, human life would be in constant peril from the insects. Those of us who were not stung and bitten into madness would starve within a few years because the insects would destroy the food crops.
Ever since the first primitive farmer scratched the earth with a stick and planted a handful of seed, man has been fighting the war of the insects. Insect damage to farm crops in this country alone amounts to many millions of dollars a year despite all the use of insecticides. And since time began, the only real and continuing checks on the insects have been the birds and small animals.
This is not the place to fight the War of the Insecticides, but I must point out two facts. In the past ten years the insects, with their quick succession of generations, have developed immunity to the DDT-type of insecticides which were hailed as the killers of virtually every noxious insect we know. Stronger and stronger concentrations of the insecticides are used, and still the insects survive and do their damage. And, second, those poisons in the concentrations now used kill birds and animals, literally millions of them, and thus wipe out whole populations of natural enemies of insects in the very areas where they are most needed. Biologists warn that all bird life is being endangered by these DDT-type of poisons, which are potent enough to kill even so large an animal as a raccoon and possibly are a menace to human health.
We grow a large vegetable garden and, since we dislike poison in or on our food, we have never used any insecticide except non-poisonous rotenone. We also encourage the birds, which are busy in our garden all Spring and Summer. True, they take a little sprouting corn and a few beans, but they also eat countless grubs, cutworms, cornworms, squash beetles, potato beetles, cabbage and tomato worms, and many other pests including Japanese beetles. They also eat mosquitoes and add to our physical comfort. I am quite willing even to share the strawberries with the birds in payment for what they do. Year after year we have less insect damage than any gardener we know who uses DDT or any of its chemical cousins. To me, the significance of this is obvious.
Birds will come to any place where they can find food and nesting sites. Natural food is the best lure of all, but it can be supplemented with grain and suet in the Winter months. I am sure that dooryard feeders are welcomed by millions of birds, but I know that far more millions of them never visit a feeder. The vast majority of our birds are self-sustaining, as they always have been. The tons of grain and suet put out for the birds every year certainly are not wasted, but the more important result, it seems to me, is the constantly growing interest in birds and their protection.
The person who would have birds nearby all the year around will see to it that there is plenty of natural food. All berry bushes provide bird food, and scores of trees and bushes, both tame ornamentals and wildlings, are worth attention. Birds like the berries of dogwoods, both tree and bush, tame and wild. Junipers and mountain ash provide food many birds like. So do the hollies, including our northern winterberry. Wild grapes and Virginia creeper are high on the birds’ dietary list. Most of the viburnums, both wild and tame, provide bird berries. Pyracantha (firethorn) is a special lure, and so are barberry and winged euonymus. Common pasture cedars and roadside sumac are favored Winter lunch counters for the birds.
Most of these trees and bushes also provide nesting places. Catbirds nest in our big lilac clumps. Song sparrows nest in the yews and barberries. Robins nest in the apple trees. Orioles hang their nests in the tall elms and maples. Goldfinches nest in the low juniper in the corner of the flower garden.
In the vegetable garden we grow giant sunflowers for the birds. I harvest most of the heads to shell out and put in the feeders in the Winter, but I always let a few heads ripen on the stalks. The chickadees, out of sight most of the Summer earning their own living in the woodland, know to the day when those heads are ripe. They come in flocks and have a wonderful time. Often a few cardinals get the word, too, and come to share in the treat. And I let the asparagus stand till first frost so its little red berries can ripen. Dozens of birds come all through September to eat those berries. And plant asparagus in their droppings all along the roadsides, where it grows vigorously every Summer and provides still more berries every September. I let the seed pods, the hips, form on the cabbage rose bushes in the sideyard simply because the birds like them, come Fall and Winter. I tolerate several huge plants of pokeweed along the garden fence because the birds feast on their berries, inkberries as some call them.
Weeds and wildflowers provide vast quantities of food for birds, especially those of the finch family. You will recognize any member of the finch family by its s
hort, thick bill, typical in the grosbeaks and sparrows. Such bills are ideally adapted to cracking the hard hulls of many wild seeds. All the finch family are primarily seed-eaters, though they also eat a good many insects. The insect-eaters have longer, slimmer beaks, such as the beak of the kingbird, the oriole, and the meadowlark. Most of the insect-eaters also eat some seeds, especially in their Winter diet. In fact, most birds—except hawks, owls, herons, and a number of shore birds, which are flesh-eaters—have a mixed diet that includes both animal and vegetable matter. But the shape of the beak is usually an index to which type of food predominates. The beak shape is also important in identifying the bird’s species. The strong, hooked beak belongs to a hawk, an eagle, or an owl, for instance. The extremely long, slim beak belongs to a heron, a crane, a snipe, a woodcock, or some other marsh or shore bird. The chisel beak belongs to one of the woodpeckers. The sharp, slender beak belongs to one of the insect-eating songbirds, and the short, cone-shaped beak belongs to a seed-eater, one of the finch tribe.
The various finches—and the finch tribe is one of the largest in birddom—eat vast quantities of ragweed seed, and should therefor have the thanks of all who suffer from hay fever and similar allergies. The seeds of the troublesome pigweed are a stock item on the sparrow diet, which makes them special allies of all gardeners. Goldfinches specially like the tiny seeds of the thistles and will be found wherever thistle heads are ripe. Goldenrod seed is another favorite for the smaller finches, such as field and tree sparrows. Every Winter I find a dark dust of hulls under the brown goldenrod stems, proving that my sparrow friends have been feasting there. Even the asters and Queen Anne’s lace are acceptable fare for December birds, though the seeds are extremely small.
When Winter comes, and snow and ice, we put out the feeders here in the yard. Any kind of feeder will do. We have used all kinds but now prefer the top-loading cannister type. I have improvised such a feeder from a tall fruit-juice can and two aluminum pie plates, one for a cover, the other for a bottom tray. I hang the feeders on long wires suspended from tree limbs, a method that makes raiding by the squirrels more difficult. The feeders blow and sway in the wind, and they tilt when the blue jays crowd onto them, but the grain spilled onto the ground is salvaged by juncos and other ground feeders. In these feeders we use any mixture at hand or readily obtainable, sometimes the ready-mixed wild bird feed, sometimes cracked grain sold as chick feed, but always with sunflower seeds mixed in. Some people put out bread crumbs, peanut hearts, crumbled nutmeats, rolled oats. I have put out popped corn and seen it eagerly eaten. One year we had a quantity of stale mixed nuts, everything from pecans to Brazil nuts, and I put them through a food chopper, shells and all, and put them in the feeder. The birds liked them, and the shells probably helped supplement the sand they need for digestion. I put out sand in a covered box, but it has few patrons. I notice that our birds get the necessary sand during the Winter from the roads after the sander trucks have been out. Flocks of birds go to the sanded road every day.
Some people put out peanut butter, but now it has been shown that peanut butter can choke a bird to death. I understand that it is no longer recommended, not without something else mixed in, anyway. And some people grind dog biscuits and put them out. Other exotic foods include cottage cheese, doughnuts, even pancakes. Some birds apparently will eat anything.
Suet, or some kind of fat, is welcome especially in bitter cold weather. Chickadees, nuthatches, woodpeckers, and blue jays are our most persistent fat-eaters. We have used suet cages made of half-inch wire mesh. They are satisfactory and keep the gluttonous jays from making off with great chunks of suet at a time. Some advisers frown on using such wire cages, saying the metal can maim a bird in very cold weather if the bird touches it with an eye or other moist, unprotected part. Perhaps so, but I have never seen it happen. One year I bought a coconut, sawed it in half, and hung it out for the birds. They cleaned out the meat in a few days and I filled the empty shells with tallow fried out of beef suet and let it harden, then hung them out again. The birds loved it that way. Anyone who doesn’t want to use a metal container for fat might try coconut shells. Incidentally, one year when there was a shortage of suet locally we filled the shells with Spry and Crisco, and it was eaten as eagerly as was the suet. Since then we have used any kind of fat or shortening, even bacon fat, and they eat it. You can buy or make suet packs with seed and nuts mixed in, but we never found the birds specially eager to get that combination. They never find it in nature; maybe that’s the reason.
Some birds like salt. I first learned this when I saw a flock of pine siskins every day at a salt block that had been put out for the cows in a nearby pasture and left there over Winter. The siskins pecked at that salt, obviously wanted it. Other finches also like salt. Some bird folk accommodate them by pouring concentrated salt water on a log or stump in the dooryard and letting it crystallize there. I suspect that most rural birds get the salt they need in the sander-truck sand, always salted to hasten the melting of ice on the roads. The road salt is calcium chloride, but it probably substitutes well enough for sodium chloride, common table salt.
At one time or another I have heard dozens of taboos about feeding birds, and over the years I have seen nearly all of them disproven. I have been told that a feeder painted with a bright or shiny color will frighten the birds away, that brown or naturally weathered feeders are essential. One year I painted one feeder bright red and left another as it was, weathered brown. I hung them in the same tree and stocked them with the same food, and couldn’t see any preference between them by the birds. The feeders I make out of juice cans are enameled in red, white, orange, and blue, and the birds pay no attention to the colors. The aluminum covers and trays seem to make no difference, bright as they are.
I have been told that a glass roof on a feeder will frighten off the customers. I made a tray feeder for a window sill and covered it with glass so we could see in, and every bird in the neighborhood used it.
I have been told that birds don’t like salted fat. Our birds eat bacon fat as eagerly as they eat raw beef suet.
I have been told that robins like raisins and apples. The robins in my area won’t touch them.
I have been told that squirrels will drive the birds away from a feeder. I have seen one truculent nuthatch drive a big red squirrel out of a feeder, and I have seen two squirrels and a dozen tree sparrows eating at the same feeder at the same time. That, incidentally, was at a window feeder. The squirrels haven’t yet solved the problem of reaching the feeders I hang on wires in the trees. But they do eat grain spilled on the ground from those feeders. On the ground, they compete with the blue jays, but the juncos seem to have a truce with the squirrels—they feed together with few disputes.
One Winter a pair of ruffed grouse came down from the mountain and found the big window feeder. For several weeks they came and ate there, looking as big as Leghorn hens and practically filling the feeder. I’ve never heard of grouse in anybody else’s feeder, and after that Winter they never came to ours again. But they often come down in late February to feed on the buds in the apple trees near the house.
I have heard it argued that food put out in feeders keeps normally migrant birds from going south and lures others here that shouldn’t be here in the Winter. That I doubt. Those who credit—or blame—the feeders sometimes point to the sizable flocks of evening grosbeaks, normally Western birds, they say, which recently have made a habit of wintering in the East. They forget that the evening grosbeaks are habitual wanderers and that good-sized flocks of them Wintered in Massachusetts as early as 1889. They were regular Winter visitors there by 1910, long before Winter feeding became widespread. Others point to robins and bluebirds; but they, too, have Wintered in the North in occasional flocks for many years. Still others use the cardinal as an example. Actually, the cardinals were extending their range northward at least twenty-five years ago. Moreover, cardinals are seldom regular customers at the dooryard feeder. Some of them seem to lik
e the easy life, but my guess is that hundreds of them fend for themselves for every individual that lives on charity.
It is almost impossible to set definite limits on the range of most birds. Nearly all of them are remarkably adaptable and they are likely to go anywhere they can find food. Even in the matter of food they are adaptable. Robins, for example, though they like a diet in which worms and insects constitute almost half, can and do live on a seed and berry diet for months. The flocks that Winter over in my area make many meals on the sumac berries and the cedar berries. About one fourth of the red-wing blackbird’s Summer diet consists of insects, but in the Winter the red-wing turns vegetarian. I suspect that pretty much the same is true of all the birds who occasionally fail to migrate with the rest of their species. I have wondered if these habitual non-migrants are not slowly evolving strains that are particularly hardy and more than normally adaptable to northern Winters. I doubt that it is a matter of accident that certain flocks of robins spend the Winter here. Some of them must have spent previous Winters here. I know that as far back as I can remember it was possible to find flocks of robins in the swamp thickets every Winter. When the first relatively mild days of late Winter arrive, some of them appear in dooryards and someone announces happily that “the robins are back!” Actually, those robins were here all the time, and the migrants usually won’t appear until late March.
Birds as a species are older than mammals and evidently evolved from the early reptiles. Their feathers are believed to be modified reptile scales, though if that is true the word “modified” is a most inadequate term. The scale is quite simple, and the feather is one of the most complex achievements of nature. I shall never cease to marvel at a feather, so ingeniously fashioned to its purpose, so nearly weightless, so incredibly strong, so efficiently insulating.