Nesting Birds

Well, the spring flocks of robins are all gone, paired up, moved off to get down to business.


Everywhere I go I hear the tiny dry trill of nest-building blue-gray gnatcatchers. I know that's an unusual sentence, but I do. They say Prreeeeeep when they're gathering nesting material.


The inner bark of honeysuckle vines is great for gnatcatcher nests, and he tugs mightily to free it.
His mate has a plain face and an eyering, and she's grayer, but just as curious as he.


Out in the meadow, the tree swallows are well underway on their nest construction. They've started to line it with the white goose feathers we provide. Eggs won't be far behind.


They both try to sit on the same post near their nest box, with mixed results.


An angel lands.

Under the deck, the phoebes have been busy, making a nest on the little television relay box. They haven't nested here for two years, since a snake got the nestlings. This year, I built a better baffle, one with no toehold for snakes. Three large panes of tempered glass and a lot of duct tape were involved. She laid two eggs, then they disappeared, before I even built the new baffle. I am hoping so hard that they come back, but I haven't seen them for a couple of weeks. Why would a bird lay two eggs, then leave? There are questions I can't answer.

A billful of deer hair for the lining. She also added Hollofil from one of Chet's toys.

The finished nest.
Phoebes like a low ceiling.

The kids love to come with me when I check bluebird boxes. They especially love the road where Buck the Bull lives.

Hello, Ma'am. I made it through another winter.


So you did, Buck. So you did. Looking a little rough, but some new grass should take care of that.

Phoebe and Liam sit on Buck's gate, talking.
They love to peek in the boxes.
Sometimes there's a different surprise.
Phoebe holds a Carolina chickadee nest of moss, goldenrod stem fiber and deer hair.

The first egg. 

Chickadee mothers cover their eggs with fur and plant down when they have to leave the nest. It's very sweet. They make a little blanket that they pull over the eggs. I adore chickadees. I would love to tell you how many eggs the little hen has now, but she won't budge off the nest when I open the box, and I am not about to kick a chickadee out of her home just so I can know how many eggs there are. Still, it would be nice to know, because eggs are much easier to count than squirmers.

And what of Gouty, the female bluebird who overindulged in Zick Dough last winter and spring?
Well, she's fine, and her feet show no traces of swelling, but she does have stiff middle toes, which stick out in this picture. I've all but stopped feeding suet dough for the spring. Just a snack in the morning.

Gouty's got four daughters about a week away from fledging in the same box she used the last two years.

Here's Whiskers, named for her dark malar stripes, knee -deep in Zick dough. She's got five babies all but fledged in the box by our vegetable garden. 

And the chipping sparrows are trilling everywhere you turn.

A Petulant TItmouse

A telephoto lens can give you tunnel vision. You focus down on the bird you're after, and you may completely miss whatever's going on around it. This was a classic case of photographer's tunnel vision. I had the titmouse in my sights and was shooting away when suddenly the bird's bill opened and it began to emit a high, shrill Seeee Seeee Seeeee! What in the world??

I swiftly twisted the telephoto zoom, widening the field of view, to find that a Carolina wren had landed on the Zick dough bowl rim.



It was obvious that the titmouse didn't want to share the dough, felt threatened by the wren, or both. It stayed in its mondo-aggro pose and shrieked and shrieked.

In a comical moment, the wren turned to look at me, as if to say, "Are you getting this ? Because this bird definitely has a problem, and nobody would believe it if you don't get a shot."


Yes, dear, and that titmouse is being a total baby if you ask me. I'm getting it.

I agree. I think I'll show him how unimpressed I am by this over-the-top display. (Scratches cheek).

Photonote: An ISO of 1600 will freeze the blurred motion of a bird's foot!
Science Chimp note: The Carolina wren is an over-wing scratcher, and please note the white spangles on its lower back feathers. I have a theory about those, to be aired in a later post.

Eventually, the wren picked up a few nuggets of Zick dough and departed, leaving the titmouse the reigning dog in the manger.



Hm. That went pretty well. You weren't taking pictures, were you?

Starlings and Bluebirds

Bluebirds wait for the tenth welfare handout of the day.

I'm not done with Guyana, not by a long shot, but this has been such a ravishingly beautiful winter--the most beautiful I can remember, with a fresh new layer of snow nearly every day to cover the old, not to mention four days of solid ice, and all the brittle beauty that goes along with that. I've decided to post my ice pictures before the woodcocks arrive on February 19 and hurry us all toward spring.

The mundane, transformed by a gleaming coat.
A sassafras bud, waiting for spring, coated in a protective glass layer.


Of course, the transformation of their habitat and food sources into a wilderness of brittle ice was less than delightful for the birds. Ice storms are one of the single greatest population drains on the eastern bluebird. A bad winter can kill them by the millions.

And so the ice transformed our bluebirds into beggars--eight of them at once.

Here, a field sparrow crouches, heel-deep in suet dough, while bluebirds feed all around him.

I had to sit by the patio window whenever I put suet dough out, or a huge and ravenous flock of starlings would come in and clean it all up within seconds. Starlings are only a problem for us when the ground is covered with snow and/or frozen. They clear out as soon as it thaws, bless their dark little hearts. I gradually moved my rocking chair up until my toe touched the window, so bold were the starlings. Any bird that wanted the good stuff had to look me right in the eye.


We're not sure we want to do that. You don't seem to like us much.



You have to admit they're beautiful birds, if a bit on the gluttonous, pot-bellied, poopy side. Never fear, I put out tons of old fridge and freezer food for them; they were cleaning chicken carcasses and eating sausage and buns and dog chow and fancy ravioli like there was no tomorrow. I just was not into giving them the Zick dough, the costly, hard labor of mine own biceps.

One of my favorite ice storm revelations: When I'd rise, arms waving, and holler BOOGA BOOGA at the starlings, which would rise up and fly off in a panic, the bluebirds would just sit there in the willow, watching, never ruffling a feather. They knew what I was doing and why, and they knew that as soon as I got rid of the starlings, they could come in, say a polite hello, and eat in peace.
You got that right, Captain Cobalt. Zick loves you.

Peanuts, Salmonella, People and Birds

Bluebirds clean up the last of the morning's offering of Zick dough.

This post started with a note from Nina of Nature Remains, wondering if I'd thought about peanuts, salmonella, and birds. People can get salmonella from contaminated peanut products, and so can birds. Birdchick had posed the question on her blog, and even called up some peanut butter suet manufacturers to see if they could assert the safety of their products. Good question, Birdchick! Eek! Are my Zick Dough eating birds safe?
A dark-eyed junco shares with a field sparrow.

The peanut has moved squarely into my forebrain. At our Superbowl party on Sunday, two toddlers attended, both of whom have severe peanut allergies. What are the chances of that? I looked at those precious little people and it was as if everything in my kitchen was suddenly radioactive; glowing peanuts flying around, infiltrating every foodstuff that went in their rosebud mouths. Yikes. I felt a surge of apprehension, protectiveness, and a huge immediate empathy for their parents, forced to examine every label, think about everything that they offered their children, and pack Tupperwares of safe snacks wherever they went. Peanuts and peanut-based products are absolutely everywhere. If you don't think so, look at the FDA's peanut product recall list. It grows every day.

Now, thanks to the peanut product recall, we all have to think like the mother of a toddler with peanut allergies.

I have been checking online about the peanut-based products I've been consuming of late, namely Luna bars (Peanut Butter Cookie and Nutz Over Chocolate) and my new favorites, Clif Mojo Mountain Mix bars. I love these things for their convenience, especially when I'm traveling in foreign countries. Save yourself some time and money--skip the Luna bars and go directly to Clif Mojo bars. Mojo bars are delicious. By comparison, Luna bars taste like wet straw.

If my choice at breakfast on the road is some kind of sickening sweet roll, a doughnut, bagel or nothing, I'm delighted to pull a reasonably nutritious snack bar out of my pack and take a pass on the carb-laden junk food before me. So I stuff about twenty little bars in my suitcase while I'm packing for each journey, along with raw almonds and macadamias. I'm thereby assured of a nutritious start to my day, or a boost when I'm flagging. Needless to say, I buy the snack bars in bulk, 15-bar boxes. I was going to take a substantial hit if I just threw them out, and the Clif company had made a voluntary recall of its peanut-containing products just to be safe. So I spent part of an afternoon on the phone with the Clif people.

They were terrific, and they believed me when I said I was a travel writer (and unrepentant pack rat) and had, uh, 89 uneaten possibly contaminated Clif Luna bars in my pantry. Cool. The Clif company is now sending me coupons to replace those with new, delicious and safe Clif Mojo bars. Mmmm. Good deal all around.

But back to the birds. In the recent ice storm, I kept my birds going with peanuts. Not only do I feed cocktail peanuts in a cylindrical feeder,A Carolina wren vies with a female yellow-bellied sapsucker for peanuts.

but I make huge batches of Zick dough, which of course is peanut-butter based. Eight bluebirds magically appeared in last week's ice storm and began begging for Zick dough as if their lives depended on it. Which, in the four solid days of ice we experienced, they doubtless did.
Glug, glug, glug. A male eastern bluebird stuffs himself with high-energy homemade dough.

A field sparrow, most delicate and beautiful of sparrows, fills up on Zick dough.

It is clear that, at least on Indigo Hill, the peanut should have its own food group. So far, major brands of jarred retail peanut butter have been declared safe from salmonella contamination, and have not been recalled by the FDA. Big institutional tubs of peanut butter, however, are suspect. And commercial peanut-based suet doughs must necessarily be viewed with suspicion, since they may have peanut paste, peanut bits, bulk peanut butter, and other ingredients sourced from the Peanut Corporation of America, which has a history of unsafe conditions. A blue jay helps himself to dough

Here's the peanut/salmonella rub: If you're feeding peanut based suet concoctions, it's best to play it safe and make them yourself, from human-grade jarred peanut butter, because birds can get salmonella just like people can. So here's the recipe for Zick Dough, once again.

Peanut Butter Suet Dough from Julie Zickefoose

1 cup peanut butter
1 cup lard

Combine and melt these two in the microwave, in the oven, or over very low heat on the stovetop. Remove from heat and stir in:

2 cups plain yellow cornmeal
2 cups quick oats
1 cup flour

Allow to cool and harden, then chop into chunks and store at room temperature in jars. Serve crumbled in a shallow dish. Attracts bluebirds, chickadees, titmice, nuthatches, woodpeckers, jays, wrens, thrashers, orioles, cardinals, and towhees. This is an excellent supplement for nesting birds, especially in cold, rainy weather, as they will feed it to their young. However, it is not recommended for warm-weather feeding, as it is too rich and may cause gout. Feed only in the depth of winter or as an emergency supplement in spring.
A northern cardinal likes what she tastes.

Here's Garth the red-bellied woodpecker, Ruby's mate, homing in on some Zick dough. Yes, he's still around and going strong.
My thanks to Nina for sparking this post, and to Birdchick for raising the question about peanut safety and birds in the first place. Until your peanuts get contaminated, you don't realize how ubiquitous and valuable they are. Be safe, everyone--and make sure your beautiful birds are safe, too.

The Ferocious Warbler

Black-throated green warblers are common fall migrants here. Sometimes they'll even treat us to a snippet of their buzzy, drawly zee-zee-zee-zu-zee song. But mostly they fight, with each other and with any other bird that crosses their path.
Two males square off, their golden-olive backs an exotic glow against leaf-green.

They whirl and chase through the branches.
Face to face, they spar.
Their fight takes them looping over to the shining sumac and out of my reach. That would have been such a gorgeous picture, given the right exposure and framing. Ah well. Warblers move fast, and I do my best. Sometimes the blurry ones are more evocative of their nature than the sharp ones.

A feisty male challenges a titmouse who outweighs him twice. Whatchoo lookin' at?
Nothing, sir, nothing. Just minding my own bidness.

And what about you, Camera Girl? Come on. Take your best shot.
Sorry, Mr. BT Green. A blurry one will have to do. You're too fast and mean for me.

As I write, the migration is winding down; the first yellow-rumped warblers have shown up, and they're among the most cold-hardy of warblers. Indigo buntings are sweeping in. Ruby-crowned kinglets are fluttering at the branch tips; field sparrows are flocking. But today we did have Nashville, Tennessee, Cape May, bay-breasted and black-throated green warblers in addition to the butterbutts. I'm considering making a teeny little batch of Zick dough for the FOURTEEN bluebirds who sit on the tower every sunny morning, calling my name. It's hard to deny them... After the late summer and early fall hiatus that all bluebirds seem to take, the gouty female bluebird is back with her mate, and she looks good, with no swelling or redness in her feet, but she still sits low on the perch, and one of her toes is stiff. Truly, I'm just glad to see her at all, glad she and her mate have survived the summer and come back with babies in tow.

Gosh, I'll miss the warblers, though. It has been one heck of a beautiful fall, graced with their company every morning.

Uh-Oh. Zick Dough.

Sorry for the interruption. JFK airport looks on the surface like it has wireless Internet, but the terminal we occupied all day yesterday was overloaded or bereft, probably both. So I couldn't post. I went directly from my (fabulous!) writer's weekend at Murphin Ridge Inn in central Ohio to Pittsburgh on Sunday and stayed overnight with the family in an airport hotel hoping to fly out for Maine Monday morning. The Airline Gods declared that it was Not to Be. Instead of flying out of Pittsburgh at 7 AM, our flight was delayed, causing us to miss our connection in New York, and we wound up challishing in a windowless terminal crammed with miserable people at JFK for 7 hours. Every flight we could take to Portland, Maine, was canceled for the day, but they told us we might just get out at 10:30 P.M. if we were very lucky. Or, then again, we might not, and we'd have to spend the night in that terminal. Ohh, wouldn't that be luverly. As we had been languishing there since 10 A.M., we rejected that notion. Think crying babies, blaring alarms and announcements, flourescent lights, nowhere to lie down. One sandwich stand with bread like wallboard. Baaaaaaaaa. We put our heads together with a similarly stranded couple, decided to catch a flight to Boston, rent a car and DRIVE to Maine. Anything, anything, anything but more sitting at JFK. We finally fell into bed at 12:30 A.M. on Hog Island, Maine, where I'm writing now.


The kids were great, real troopers. All day long at that airport, Liam acted like he ate jumping beans for breakfast, when actually it was Frosted Flakes. Thinking about it, that's pretty much the same thing, isn't it? Speaking of inappropriate foods...

I've been winding up to write this post for quite awhile, because I wanted to be sure I knew what I was talking about before committing anything to electrons. I've figured out something about the concoction popularly known as "Zick Dough," and what I've figured out isn't good.

As many of you know, I've always been a little squeamy about people calling this stuff, a mixture of cornmeal, quick oats, flour, melted peanut butter and lard, "Zick Dough." I didn't invent it; the recipe's been around for years, first as "Miracle Meal," and then, with some alterations (less sugar, fewer ingredients) as "Peanut Butter Suet Dough." I first wrote about it in Bird Watcher's Digest in the fall of 2004, when I'd been feeding it for two years. So I guess I've had a considerable hand in popularizing it. Every time I post about it, people want the recipe, and it pops up on blogs all the time, usually as Zick Dough.

In 2002, a BWD subscriber in Port Orchard, Washington had sent in photos of herself feeding it to a wild male pileated woodpecker--from her hand. Not only that, but over the ensuing seasons the big woodpecker brought his fledglings to her deck railing, where he'd stuff them with what she called "bird pudding." She sent me the recipe, we talked on the phone, and I came away convinced that this was some kind of stuff and I'd better start making it for my birds.

I've posted, more or less ecstatically, about suet dough for two years now. I fed more of the stuff this winter and spring than ever before. I'd multiply the recipe (yes, it's in the link above) times six each time I made it, dragging a huge lobster pot up from the basement and using my stoutest stainless spoon to stir it. It takes all my strength to stir a batch like that, and I get down on the floor and hold the pot between my knees as I grunt and groan the mixture into smoothness. But oh, the birds it attracted, especially my beloved bluebirds. I felt I was helping them through the winter.

Most of the U.S. had an abnormally cold, wet spring (or long winter, however you want to look at it). I kept feeding the dough at winter levels well into May, because it just refused to warm up, and I knew there couldn't be many insects stirring when it rained all day, and the nights went into the 30's and 40's.

And two bluebirds in my yard turned up lame. She looks fine--until you notice the missing scute on the outer toe--that pink zone.

First, the male from the front yard nestbox started holding up one foot, balancing awkwardly on the other and catching himself with an outthrust wing when he'd fall. Almost at the same time, the female bluebird from the backyard nestbox started sitting very low, puffed up as if she were in pain, and favoring both feet alternately. Now, this isn't necessarily something that would alarm me had it occurred in just one bird; I'd figure it had pulled a muscle or gotten its toe bent the wrong way. As I thought about it, though, I've seen lame legs in other songbirds at my suet dish over the years. I always figured they were coming to the suet dough dish because they were compromised. It didn't occur to me that they might have been compromised because they were coming to the suet dough dish.

Hmm. What's that going on with the heel of her right foot?

One of the nice things about having a 300 mm. lens, Mary, is that you can make a close-up examination of a bird you can't handle. I decided to photograph the afflicted birds' feet and legs, to see if I could blow up the pictures and determine what was going on. On getting my photos on the screen, I was sickened to see the backyard female bluebird's feet swollen, red and misshapen. No wonder she was acting as if she were in pain. She was in a great deal of pain, and she had to feed a brood of five young right through it all. And what was she feeding them? Why, Zick dough, of course.

Because the front yard male held up his foot, hiding it in his belly feathers, I couldn't get a picture of him, but I noticed that he switched off--sometimes he'd hold up the left leg; sometimes the right. That makes injury unlikely, and points even more directly to a metabolic problem. The mental leap I immediately took was that this condition had to be dietary in origin. When a pet bird turns up with a problem--any problem--the first place you go for answers is its diet. As I thought about it, these garden bluebirds, for all practical purposes, ARE pets, since they are eating prodigious quantities of an artifical diet. They're living on lard, oats, cornmeal, flour and peanut butter. Does that sound like a proper diet for a wild bluebird?

Wouldn't you think someone who has kept an orchard oriole and a Savannah sparrow going for 17 years as captives, feeding them everything from live wasp larvae to lasagne, might have figured this out before now? I can be a little slow.

As my friend Shila points out, the foods that are seasonally available to wild birds (and people) are the foods that are appropriate for them at that time of the year. Feeding unlimited lard and peanut butter all winter and well into the spring can't be a good idea. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that I had created this problem in otherwise healthy birds. So I got on the trail of it. I'll tell you what I learned tomorrow.

Ruby

When you live in a place long enough, and you're lucky enough to be able to work at home and stare out the windows at the birds for part of each day, you can get to know them as individuals. It helps when a bird has distinctive markings--maybe missing feathers on the hindcrown, like one male indigo bunting who nested here for many years. Perhaps there's a drooping wing, like that of the bluebird we called Mr. Troyer. He nested in our yard for eight years, and I still miss him. There's a long story behind him, but that's one for the next book.
Speaking of distinctive markings, this is Snowflake (who I began calling Queen Frostine), a leucistic female dark-eyed junco who has been with us for three winters, growing whiter each year. She's a Zick Dough freak, and I'd love to think that we've just sent her to Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire or Ontario with an ample pad of fat for the flight, and a good start for the breeding season ahead. The last juncoes left on April 17 as they do every year. You can imagine how excited we'll be should Queen Frostine show up again next winter. She's our friend.

Ruby is a beautiful female red-bellied woodpecker. This is her third year with us (that I know of). Year to year, she's displayed a consistent mark: two tiny red bindis in her otherwise gray forecrown. She's also got really red nares just above the bill, which is a sign of her maturity, as is the faint wash of red along her malar (jaw) area).
Those two simple feathers, and the fact that I happened to notice them, elevate her status from that of Just Another Redbelly to a Named Bird, a friend. It's a human conceit, of course, that she's special because I've named her, but it helps me to feel a bond with her from year to year, and it makes me more interested in watching her behavior. There's value in that, if only for me as the observer. She's certainly interested in my behavior; she waits each morning in the willow or on the chimney for me to pop out with the Zick Dough. Recipe here. She's probably noticed that I have more gray streaks in my forecrown this year than last, and a bunch more than three years ago. Ruby, we'll talk.

Sometimes she's dainty about helping herself to dough
and sometimes she grabs the biggest glob she can find to bear off and cache.
I never tire of watching Ruby, of noticing what, besides those two little red feathers, makes her an individual.
Wouldn't you think she'd spread her wings for the leap down to the railing? I think she wants to avoid knocking the dough to the ground with the backwash from her wings, that's what I think.

I like Ruby; I like knowing that she knows me and looks forward to seeing me, too. She's not a pet, but neither is she just another bird to me. She's my neighbor, my friend.

Beauty on Ice

Sometimes, when it's so cold you don't even want to stick your nose outside, the colors are so beautiful that you MUST put on coat, hat and gloves and do your duty as an intrepid liver of life. Chet and I walked out to the mailbox to see Phoebe and Liam off to school. The hayfield was a cluster of diamonds.Each stalk of dried Queen Anne's lace was that much lacier.Chet Baker made his way through all that beauty, holding up first one paw and then the other. See how his mouth is all drawn up? That's his cold face.
The milkweed pods had a special magic.Back home at the feeders, things were hopping.

Our gorgeous female hairy woodpecker paused in her search for more suet.

The male red-bellied woodpecker glowed like a hot coal in the single digits.A cardinal offered up his own coals, his tinged with ash.
It's good to get out on cold mornings.


This morning at daybreak, I heard three peents from a woodcock in the field. Just three peents, no display flight. "I'm here. But it's too cold to think of love." I was glad to hear him, and I wondered what he'd been through. While we were gone, our feeders all went empty; all the Zick dough I'd labored to make up in advance had never been put out. It had been in the single digits and we'd had four inches of snow, topped with ice. I grieved for my bird friends, what they'd been through in the worst of the winter without me to help them. Today, I put out three feedings of Zick dough, and three bluebirds, a bunch of cardinals, a red-bellied woodpecker, and the leucistic junco Snowflake (who I've renamed Queen Frostine) came to partake. They're so glad I'm home, and I'm so glad to see them! I know they don't need me as much as I think they do.

I'm running around, re-provisioning, taking out garbage, doing laundry, cooking, watering, digging out. Treated myself to a Shila massage, trying to re-align muscles and bones bent by carrying a backpack full of lead-weight optics all over Guatemala and North America. I was amazed how much more in-tune I felt after some adjustment.

I hope frosty scenes like these will be a distant memory now, in the latest, coldest early spring I can remember. The daffodils are budding anyway. Here's a little titmouse. He looks as wistful for balmy breezes as I feel right now.It's about time for some Guatemala color, don't you think?

Snob Feeding

A suet dough fan at the back deck (female eastern bluebird). I post these just to show you that I am capable of taking a decent bird picture.
Blue jays are prone to gobbling great quantities of dough, but I don't mind it. They're just bearing it away to cache it for later. Sometimes I give them the bum's rush when I think they've taken enough. But I adore them and they know it. Well, that's enough of good bird photos. On to the crappy ones.

It's that time of winter, when the cold clamps down and supplies of natural bird food are dwindling. As I write, the temperature is plunging through the twenties, despite brilliant sun and blue sky. Tonight's going to be in the single digits, brrrr!

When the ground freezes, European starlings come in hordes to my feeders. I am an unrepentant snob when it comes to feeding good suet dough to starlings. Hence my newly coined term, "Snob feeding." If the starlings would just take a little food and leave, like all the rest of the birds do, that would be fine. But starling style (dare I call it Eurostyle?) is to descend in a pack of a dozen or more, crowd, squabbling, into the dish, and vacuum up every bit of food. Before they depart, they unload the foul contents of their caecums into the food dish for me to clean up. (No, clearly I dare not.) What doesn't go into the dish goes all over our front stoop. They sit all day in the sumac on our north border and watch for me to put out more food, and they try to beat the bluebirds, Carolina wrens, cardinals, titmice and woodpeckers to it. Usually, they succeed. If starlings weren't exotic birds, and so aggressive and abundant, I'd probably put up with their gluttony. But the filth they leave everywhere puts me over the edge.

Making suet dough is enough work, especially when I'm mixing up the recipe times ten, that this starling problem had to be addressed. So, taking the advice I hand out so freely to others, I got out my so-called "bluebird feeders" and once again tried to make them work to everyone's advantage but the starlings'.

This Plexi-sided feeder has proven to be an unequivocal flop. It's a great looking feeder, a nice concept, and I'm sure that somewhere on Planet Earth, there are happy bluebirds and chickadees going in and out of a feeder just like this one. However...I've been trying to entice birds to use it for five years now, and I have never had a single bird, blue or otherwise, enter it via the entrance holes in each side. Cardinals perch on the side railings and peer forlornly at the dough locked within. Chances that a cardinal would enter a hole are nil, anyway. Carolina wrens peek and lean in, occasionally snagging a morsel. I think it's because it looks like some kind of trap. It's been hanging up for two weeks now, stuffed with suet dough, and the most action it's gotten is a pair of tufted titmice, perching and peeking in one hole. But as bold and innovative as titmice are, neither one has dared enter. One year I put it out and found the same results after a couple of weeks. So I opened up the hinged top, and birds would hop down inside it to get suet dough. But that defeats the purpose, which is to exclude birds that can't enter a 1 1/2" hole. So I reluctantly give this feeder an F, and will consign it to eternity.

This little feeder is somewhat more successful. The principle is that it excludes all birds that can't or won't enter through the 1 1/2" square wire mesh holes. It's a little more user friendly, since the bird doesn't have to squeeze through a hole and enter a completely enclosed area. After a couple of days of sitting unused, a pair of Carolina wrens and a couple of titmice learned to use it. The starlings also figured out that if they stuck their heads inside and stretched their necks all the way out they could vacuum up all the suet dough. Putting the dough in a small plastic dish in the center solved this. But a problem remained: Cardinals, woodpeckers, juncoes and the bluebirds I was trying to entice refused to go inside. In past years I've had bluebirds enter this feeder successfully. It's a matter of giving them time to get used to it. So this feeder was marginally successful, but nothing to write home about, because it's just too small all around to completely defeat the starlings. I often wonder if feeder manufacturers bother to give prototypes to people like me who can test them before going into production. Apparently not, in many cases. The small size of most feeders available today has to do not with utility or efficacy, but solely with whether or not they'll fit on store shelves. Starlings have a reach of more than three inches by just stretching their necks, and this little feeder encloses an area about 9 x 9". So there's a three-inch "safe zone" at the very center of the inside. Hmmph.
There had to be some other solution, given that the "bluebird feeders" I have are both failures, from a number of standpoints.

I decided to use the starling's natural (and well-founded) fear of humans to my advantage. I'd feed suet dough only when I was in the kitchen to watch it. This is easy enough to do, since I'm in the kitchen for a couple of hours in the morning and a couple in the evening, fixing lunches and breakfasts, cooking dinner. I put my birdbath pedestal on top of my bonsai bench, which stands just beneath the kitchen window. I put the suet dough dish on top of that, neatly bringing it up to window level. This is a great arrangement, since the whole affair is under the eave, which keeps the food dry. The dish is snugged right up against the kitchen window, which means that I am about two feet away from it. And I make a terrific scarecrow.Tufted titmice are usually the first to try anything around here. They're inquisitive, smart, and bold. But even the juncoes and song sparrows are becoming accustomed to the new arrangement.My first Carolina chickadee at the new location. Yes, it's me. The Dough Lady. You know me. Don't look so spooked.At first, the birds all avoided the dish, but I was patient. I knew that my true friends would come to accept it if I would only wait. At first, they only came in ones and twos, and only when I was out of the kitchen. About ten days into it, I'm delighted to report that most of the birds are now using the "snob feeder" when I'm in the kitchen, especially if the kitchen lights are off. Titmice and cardinals will come when I'm standing right at the window, and the bluebirds are rapidly acclimating to me as well. Hey, it's not like they don't know who I am. These are the same birds that stare me down, begging shamelessly, when I'm writing in the tower. They know darn well who I am, and they know that I'm the person who puts the dough out for them. And they're cool with it. We're friends.
I really like it when the bluebirds feel comfortable enough to turn their backs on me. That is something I can assure you the starlings NEVER do. A subtle refinement of this new system is to pile the suet dough on the side of the dish nearest the window, so the birds have to come right up against the glass to feed. The starlings don't like that, and I have seen only one house sparrow venture on this feeder. That's saying something.

The starlings are not cool with feeding two feet away from me. I make horrible faces and lunge at them should they be so bold. This photo was taken while I was standing well back from the window in the darkened kitchen, and just a millisecond before I yelled BLAAA! and waved my arms. The starlings didn't come back for the rest of the morning. I have to laugh, because when I drive up from being in town, the "snob feeder" is full of starlings. They know when I'm away and take that opportunity to clean up all the food. But they're decidedly uncomfortable with eating in front of me. They get strong negative reinforcement when they dare. And I actually have suet dough left in the dish at dusk.

For now, two weeks into it, this is working well. I get ridiculously close looks at all my favorite birds. They get good food, unmolested by starlings. I don't have to wash the dish twice a day. My suet dough output has gone from over a pound a day to about 1/3 pound. That's as it should be. What's the sense of putting expensive, labor-intensive bird food out and not hanging around to see who eats it? When you think about it, it makes sense to feed a premium food like this in a highly structured way, at the same time of day. That way, the birds you want to attract learn when it's available, and the birds you don't want have to lump it, because you're there guarding it. The system is based on snobbery, on the natural spookiness of starlings, and on the bond of trust I've built with the birds I feed. Snob feeding.
Action like this right by your kitchen window is its own reward. I know these pictures are awful, but it was the darkest rainy day ever, and I haven't had a chance to get up and clean the outside glass. I just had to show you what all goes on now outside my window as I'm cooking and washing dishes. As you can see, sunny days are worse yet for photography! This is a bluebird with a cardinal. Check out the hind toe length on this white-breasted nuthatch. Nice hook to hang by.How nice to see Mr. Redbelly conquer his shyness! Help yourself! We're all friends here at Birdie Cheers.
If you're around at predictable times a day, and you're having trouble with starlings eating all your good Zick dough,** you might want to try something like this. A large, high-quality cage excluder feeder is a good place to start. But it's really rewarding to train the birds you like most to trust you and eat in your presence. And they'll like you, and trust you right back.

**There. I wrote it. I still have to suppress a startled "Waaak!" when I see people I've never met calling it Zick Dough on their blogs. I keep forgetting that we're all out there, introducing ourselves, every day.