We keep bird feeders going year-round; seed feeders, suet feeders (peanut butter cakes instead of fat drippy suet in warm weather), hummingbird feeders and others. I make a custom seed mix, adding nuts and bits of dried fruit, which the buntings and finches appreciate, and try not to think about our yearly seed and suet costs. Eh, it’s worth it, less than a cable bill and beats watching television, especially when seeing the less common transients.

The custom adds to the mix, sometimes including additional sunflower seeds, makes for a messy buffet; the less desirable seeds fly everywhere with birds peck ISO the good stuff, but we have enough ground feeding birds to clean up the fallen seed.

The husk and shell debris is great for the soil, and for worms; the shepherds hook pole is anchored via spike holes drilled in a large log resting on a 2’ x 2’ paving stone, a paving stone surrounded on all sides by raised mole burrows. Feed the birds, feed the worms, feed the moles. Mole watching is like spectating submarine races.

The oddities, weirdos and transients are always enjoyable. We occasionally get migrating orioles passing through, worth briefly putting out an oriole feeder with grape jelly and orange slices. No orioles this year, but an uber-common yet new to me at eating orange slices citrus gobbler, a gray catbird.

He wasn’t around for long, which was a good thing; he could make short work of an orange slice, yanking out a pinkie sized chunks, throwing his head back like a shorebird with a fish, swallowing and going back for more. Happy to have fed him along his way, glad we’re done with orange slices.

Like orioles, scarlet tanagers are occasional migrants; we had a first year male Scarlet Tanager on the feeder a week ago. The first year males are, even to my color-blind eyes, far more orange, and the black wing bars are different. I needed a bird book to confirm.

Another very common bird, never seen on the feeders before this year, red-winged blackbirds. Not transients but suddenly everyday visitors. My farmer neighbor’s un-mown and un-cowed for several years pasture has gone to weeds and wildflowers (awesome for butterflies, some rascal may have thrown milkweed seeds over the fence) and the stream at the base of his pasture has gone to cattails, hence the red-winged.

An aside, if this whole post isn’t enough of an aside, those kind of neglected, gone to seed pastures have become increasingly rare where we live; land is worth too much to let it lie fallow and fall into a natural recovery state. Those neglected fields, once common, are a critical but unappreciated flora and fauna resource. Since his field went to seed it has become a butterfly bonanza and the riparian bottom has recovered.

On another plus side the number of manure flies has decreased by 90%. Previously I would walk out to my (white) truck and see 50 on each side of the cap and cab. We enjoyed the cows, frisky calves especially. The flies not so much.

Back to birdlife. Living in a mature woodland with snags, dead trees and cavities we have every mid-Atlantic woodpecker at the seed and suet feeders, often 3 -4 different species vying at once. A few days ago I looked at the feeder and saw another woodpecker common enough hereabout. Hard to miss the thunderous hammer pecks, size, and vibrant color. Their call was used in early Tarzan movies as background jungle noise.

https://www.google.com/search?q=pileate ... NVGPmo1xuA

I had never seen a Pileated on a feeder. He was taller than the tube feeder, and perched all of eight feet from where I was sitting; Best, longest close up view of a Pileated ever, wish he’d come back.

My amusing favorites were the three crows that figured out a way to get to the suet. Always three, there are dozens around, often ganged up scolding the nesting red shouldered hawks.

Too big to land on the hanging suet container, two would land beneath and one would attempt to grip the suet basket, flapping furiously and pecking to dislodge chunks of fatty goodness. His buddies on the ground gobbled the fallen pieces of suet, and they would spell each other at the flapping and pecking labor. It was comically cooperative to watch, if pricey in suet cakes.

OK, my always favorites are hummingbirds. We run multiple hummingbird feeders in season, on the front porch and back deck, and even with distant feeding stations the males are fighty little buggers, engaging in the most acrobatic of aerial combat. Immelman had nothing on two aggressive Ruby Throated going at it.

They are also demanding customers; when we bring the hummingbird feeders in to clean and re-fill they buzz around the naked feeder pole expectantly, knowingly, sometimes impatiently strafing me while I’m putting a feeder back up. I mutter at them “Yeah, yeah, I’m going as fast as I can dammit”.

Anyone else enjoying the bird show in their yard? Whatca got?

And the fields are all getting tile drained and the ditches, which used to be bordered by shrubbery or a full-on tree line, are filled-in making huge fields which are, from a wildlife perspective, barren monocultures. So no place for birds and small animals to live and no cover or transit corridors for larger species.
That, and the clear-cutting of former woodlands to make more arable farmland is robbing wildlife of a place to live.
We've seen that here. 45 years ago when I moved to my rural property the land across the road had been left fallow for a decade and was grown up in weeds and small shrubs - a productive wildlife habitat: rabbits, foxes, deer and the occasional moose were common (woke up one morning to find a moose in my hay shed). It supported kingbirds who lined up on the old barbed wire fence. One time I saw a male take off and climb straight up into the sky. Looking up I saw a hawk cruising by, way high on a thermal, barely visible. The kingbird went to challenge it - as a fly-catcher they're excellent flyers and are tough fearless defenders of their territory.
Woodcocks would probe the neglected ditches for grubs. It was a treat every spring to watch and listen to the males performing their mating ritual, flying straight up into the evening sky then tumbling back down singing insanely. Upland plovers would perch on the hydro wires surveying their domain. Bobolinks would be perched on the old fences, not bothered by the kingbirds. We had a couple of different flocks of Hungarian partridges, seldom seen in the summer but far more obvious come winter. Roughed grouse. Various warblers.
There was a Horned Owl nest in the big old maple tree down by the creek. They dined on the abundant mice and voles found in the fallow fields. Slow to mature they nested in late February when there's still snow on the ground.
That and more.
But the land had been afforested with black spruce and it turned into a mostly barren monoculture. All those listed above are gone now. And a few years ago the forest was clear-cut and is now a 100 acre corn and bean field - no birds, no nothing.
We also lost the barn and tree swallows and purple martins that kept the bugs down around our property. Partly because of the general decline of these species and partly because my yard in now well-treed, not the open areas the flying insectivores preferred.
Now we have phoebes who sit perched on the clothe-line then dart out to snag flying insects. They nest in the open garage. And of course robins, platform nesters who build their homes on the exposed beams outside the bard and hayshed.
Shy and reclusive catbirds and brown thrushes have nested in the dense spruce and hemlock in the back corner of our lot for many years.
We don't feed in the summer, except for the hummingbirds. In the winter our feeders attract mainly blue jays, chickadees, cardinals, juncos and tree sparrows (or is it chipping sparrows? I forget which are mainly summer visitors and which are here in the winter). Suet brings in downy and hairy woodpeckers and the occasional black-backed. Pileated peckers visit the bigger trees, but never the suet that I've noticed. They usually come in pairs, calling often to each other. For some unknow reason they sometimes attack my English oak which I am sure does not contain any embedded insects and grubs and is a hard wood to hammer against.
We have a whole other list of migrants passing through. Finches, various sparrows, brown creepers etc.
I've ticked off 105 species in my Peterson's yard list.

When the dam that created the local reservoir was erected in the ‘30’s the Civilian Conservation Corps planted thousands of trees in the surrounding fields. All Virginia Pine. In straight rows. As critter a barren monoculture as could be imagined.

This morning I noticed a medium sized white bird perched high in a distant tree across the overgrown field. A few minutes stalking with binoculars and bird book* identified it as a Plasticbagus horriblis.

That was yang to the yin of a “I’ll bet it’s just a damn white grocery bag on that stump” that turned out to be a Snowy Owl visitor, a rare one that strayed into Maryland, which birders had been flocking (no pun intended) from all over to catch a glimpse as he traveled through various counties.

I first saw my first Snowy from the comfort of my own home. While seated. Out the downstairs bathroom window through the mirror above the sink. When I realized what it was I scurried out for binoculars before pulling up my pants.

*Chandler Robbins’ Golden Field Guide to the Birds of North America. We have Sibley, Peterson and Audubon guides; my Robbins dates from 1966; I was ten, and it remains my familiar, go-to guide. That field guide has been cross-country 20 times, the spine is held together with duct tape and the index pages are starting to fall out.

I helped Robbins mist net a few times as a teenager. On a birding marsh walk at the Irish Grove Sanctuary I was absentmindedly twisting some dead marsh grass around my fingers and noticed that my tangled digit condom looked very much like a nest. I gave it to Robbins to identify; he and the other ornithologist leading the hike definitively declared it a Marsh wren’s nest. Robbins kept it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandler_Robbins

In later years I thought of visiting Robbins at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, just to have him autograph my dog eared and duct taped field guide and finally confess about the nest. It’s not like he and the other hike leader, my lifelong friend Dave Lee, were not tricksters in their own right.

One teenage weekend of banding and birding at Irish Grove Dave gathered his class - Field Biology, Ornithology, Native Flora & Fauna, whatever elective he could come up with to avoid teaching Biology 101 to teenagers - along with a bushel of oysters and a bunch small nets, and gave a very convincing chalk-talk, diagramed the pattern in which to lay out our oysters and demonstrating how to crouch motionless in the Spartina grass at night and swoop the net to capture any Oystercatcher that happened upon the bait.

There were no winners in that contest. The students eventually returned covered in mosquito bites, but no oystercatchers were captured.

There were no oystercatchers. The contest was to determine which of Dave’s students was the stupidest, or most determined. He should at least have given me a prize.

I got him back many times over as an adult. And vice versa.

https://ornithologyexchange.org/forums/ ... 1943-2014/

Will Mackins’ remembrance in that obit captures the essence of Dave Lee.

Twelve 50 pound bags of black oil sunflower seeds get consumed by our birds yearly along with filling our one homemade suet cage.If you told me as a young man I’d spend good money on bird feeding I’d never believed it.
Mike. Would you mind posting your peanut suet recipe?

It is a secret family recipe, but I will list the ingredients:

https://www.walmart.com/ip/C-S-Peanut-D ... om=/search

That is still $1.50 per peanut cake and in summer the birds, especially the woodpeckers, chow down on the peanut suet faster than the fatty type, sometimes in a single day, so I alternate peanut suet with hanging a second seed feeder.

I make 55 to 60 lbs of seed mix at a time. For a while I was keeping track of how long each batch lasted but realized I really didn’t want to know the annual seed expense. Let’s just say I could buy a new used canoe every year at that cost.

About buying bird seed, I have mentioned this before but it remains my Holy Grail. Years ago a UPS truck brought me a package. I noticed a 30L blue barrel in the truck and asked if I could have a look at it.

It was bird seed. I wrote down the name of the seed company. And promptly lost it. I have searched ever since, Googling every possible variation of “30L bird seed”, “8 gallon bird seed”, “Bulk bird seed” and "blue barrel”.

Bupkis. I could have supplied every one of my paddling friends with blue barrels.

Thanks

I realized I needed to replace that Robbins guide, it was getting increasingly hard to keep the pages intact while looking something up.

P6070008 by Mike McCrea, on Flickr

There is a newer, revised edition. I don’t want a new version, I want the same 1966 edition I have used 57 years. I’m old, change sucks.

Used, ’66 hardback, couple bucks, identical except spine and pages are still intact. Someone didn’t use their Robbins very much. Or haul it around cross country, and set their coffee cup on it.

P6070009 by Mike McCrea, on Flickr

That got me thinking about another favorite old guide. The Fieldbook of Natural History (E. Laurence Palmer, Director of Nature Education at Cornell).

Palmer pre-dated me by a few years; that guide was published in 1949. The preface alone is good reading, advocating that “The study of natural history should lead to sound citizenship, a rational conservation policy, and a happy life”. Can’t disagree on any of those counts.

P6070010 by Mike McCrea, on Flickr

650 three-column pages of everything from rocks and minerals to algae, moss and ferns, to trees, reptiles, amphibians, birds and mammals.

Plants too of course. Palmer’s plants included Cannabis sativa, listed as Hemp between Hackberry and Hops. Quote Palmer, “Marijuana, from dried leaves, is smoked as tobacco, and is a dangerous habit-forming drug which stimulates unreasonable and often almost insane activities.”

P6070011 by Mike McCrea, on Flickr

E. Laurence Palmer may have done some of his research at the drive-in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_vo0UEteKU

That fieldbook is a general natural history reference worth having around. Sometimes I’ll page through it just quick reference; there is a lot of information in that book, and the occasional 60-years later changes to our environmental understanding are noteworthy in their own half-century later changes

https://www.amazon.com/Fieldbook-Natura ... 203&sr=1-2

I wouldn’t let mine go for $15.

There is an updated 1975 edition.

https://www.amazon.com/Fieldbook-Natura ... 313&sr=1-1

I’ll keep my ’49 edition, although I’d like to see the ‘70’s edition hemp reference. Maybe Palmer furthered his 2nd edition research at Woodstock.