Wild Bird Company
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Wild Bird Company Saturday Bird Walk
(Every Saturday morning for our Colorado Birders)
Bird Watchers (that's us)
From 7:30 am (promptly)
to 10:00 am (approximately)
Every Saturday year-round. No reservations required. Every last Saturday of the month we travel further afield than normal and return a little later. Bird Walk locations are determined on the morning of the walk. All ages and birding abilities are welcome! Meet at Wild Bird Company 1641 - 28th St., Boulder, CO 80301
Call for more info: 303-442-1322 Wild Bird Company Weekly Bird Walk Newsletters & Bird Counts Wild Bird Company
Weekly Bird Walk Slide Shows
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Attracting Chickadees
by Steve Frye
One of North America's most beloved birds, the chickadee, is friendly, social, and entertaining. Many customers want to know how to attract chickadees into their yards. The most common species of chickadees across the nation are black-capped, mountain, and Carolina, but gray-headed, boreal, Mexican, and chestnut-backed chickadees are also found in parts of North America. We will refer to them collectively as chickadees. So how can you attract chickadees to your backyard?
Bird Seed and Feeders to
Attract Chickadees
The best bird foods for attracting chickadees are sunflower seeds and shelled nuts. Chickadees are also attracted to suet, peanut butter mixes, safflower, and pumpkin seeds. Preference studies show chickadees favor sunflowers in the shell, but hulled sunflower will be readily consumed if no choice is offered. Seeds that chickadees do not like include millet, milo, oats, and corn. Peanut and insect suets are great for attracting chickadees in all seasons, but especially in winter when extra energy is required for warmth.
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Black-Capped Chickadee
©Steve Frye
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Presenting mealworms, either dried or alive, is another way to attract chickadees. Live mealworms are often fed in a small dish with vertical sides so the mealworms can't crawl out.
Raw suet can be used to attract chickadees in cold regions where it won't go rancid. Rendered suet cakes will work in all weather conditions, but you may have to feed them in the shade during summer so they don't melt. Below is a recipe for a homemade suet dough or pudding.
Suet Scrumpy -- from the kitchen of Steve Frye
- 3 c Peanut Butter (Smooth or Crunchy)
- 4 c shortening
- 4 c Regal Seed Blend (or other Patio Mix rich in Hulled Sunflowers)
- 2 c Flour
- 2 c Cornmeal
- Extra flour/cornmeal
Mix all the ingredients in a large bowl or bucket. You can microwave the peanut butter and shortening to make it easier to mix. Add extras like raisins, nuts, mealworms, or oyster shell if you like. Add extra flour/cornmeal to give the Scrumpy the consistency of cookie dough. Suet Scrumpy works great smeared onto tree bark, suet logs, or in a traditional suet basket.
Another classic way to feed chickadees is with a peanut butter pine cone. Attach a string or pipe cleaner to a pine cone. Then cover the pine cone in peanut butter or a mixture of shortening and peanut butter followed by a roll in some bird seed. I would suggest a shelled (patio) mix rich in sunflowers. After that, just hang it up in a bush or small tree and watch the chickadees. Peanut butter will not choke the birds like many believe.
Chickadees will come to any type of feeder as long as sunflower seeds are present. However, due to chickadee social hierarchy and to their small size, chickadees often are excluded from larger hopper and platform-style feeders with larger and/or more dominant birds. Therefore, we often recommend tube feeders (without trays) with multiple ports. This allows chickadees to grab a sunflower seed and fly off to eat or cache it without getting hassled by larger birds or even by more dominant chickadees. There are even feeders specifically designed to exclude all birds except clinging birds like chickadees.
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Black-Capped Chickadee
©Kevin Rutherford
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All of the chickadee species cache food, especially the ones in colder climates. Studies have shown that chickadees may cache hundreds of items in a single day. Chickadees will return to these caches, visiting the ones with higher quality food first and they will also remember which caches have been emptied. In fact, chickadees have been found to grow extra brain cells in the fall to help them remember all of their caches.
Studies on chickadees have also shown that they do not become dependent on bird feeders, but overwinter survival is increased when a feeder is available. In certain extreme conditions with overnight temperatures of -20°F or lower, black-capped chickadees can burn up to 30% of their body weight overnight to keep warm.
Bird Houses for Attracting Chickadees
Chickadees are cavity nesting birds, meaning they excavate holes in trees or take over other existing holes to nest in. They will also readily move into a bird house (nest box) with the proper dimensions and features. Chickadee bird houses should have a 1 1/8" or 1 ¼" entrance hole which is 6-8" above the floor. The floor size should be roughly 4x4" to 5x5". All nest boxes should have adequate drainage, ventilation, and a way to clean out the old nests.
Clean your bird house out every fall. This will increase the nesting success for the following spring's new batch of chickadees. You can add an inch of sawdust or wood shavings to the bottom of the bird house to increase your chances of occupancy.
Chickadees will use roosting boxes or bird houses to roost in during the winter. These shelters can significantly reduce the amount of food they need to burn in order to keep warm.
Attracting Chickadees with Water
Chickadees, like all other birds, need to drink and to bathe so their feathers remain functional. While chickadees are not considered the most frequent bathers in the backyard, they will still appreciate a bird bath, fountain, or wildlife pond.
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Black-Capped Chickadee
©Steve Frye
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Chickadees are particularly attracted to dripping water from faucets, buckets, icicles, or from a bird bath dripper.
Gardening for Chickadees
Chickadees are omnivores, and as such enjoy a varied diet of insects, fruits, and seeds. A garden with a variety of plants and structure will be very attractive to chickadees. Weedy patches and unkempt gardens for seeds, small trees and bushes for cover and fruits, and large trees for seeds and insects are some of the elements your garden should have to attract chickadees.
A recent study showed chickadees during nesting season were only present in neighborhoods with native trees and plants. This has to do with the association of native insects with native plants. These native insects are so important to raising chickadees that parents will not nest in areas where these insects (plants) are not available.
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Chickadee Products
To view products
from Wild Bird Company
Online Store that will Attract Chickadees
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New Seed Varieties
We have recently added some new seed varieties to give you more choices and attract more birds.
Hulled millet is making a return to our selection. It is a cleaner alternative to white proso millet and it has a broader appeal. Use it in a platform or hopper feeder. We have added a new patio mix called Complete Patio, a no-mess mix which can be used
in any style feeder. And last, but not least, we are adding a blend called Songbird. It is a great all-purpose mix with lots of sunflowers. Come in and
try some our new seeds-you (and the birds)
will
love them.
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Ask Steve
Q: We have had so many hummingbirds lately. When will they leave us??
A:
I'm sorry to report that the hummingbirds are already leaving. That's why you have so many. The males leave first and that started in the beginning of July. Right now, all of the females and the young from this year are migrating south. Combine all those migrants with a few residents and you have a party! They are also trying to put on their 1 gram of fat so they can migrate several hundred miles south! That is another reason you see so many at your feeder. Keep your feeders out as long as you have hummingbirds. It will help them leave. By mid-September we are down to almost no hummers left. I love the fall, but it is always a little sad to see the hummers leave.
Q: Can the birds tell us anything about the coming winter?
A:
Ducks have traditionally been seen as weather predictors. If migrating ducks arrived early, then watch out because you were going to have a bad winter. Also, if the breastbone of a duck was dark, that would predict a severe winter and a light colored one meant a mild winter. I really think it just means you cooked them differently.
As a science-minded person, I would tell you that the birds cannot tell you anything about predicting the weather. However, being animals living life outdoors, they are certainly more attuned to changes in weather which might escape us climate-controlled, fully clothed animals. I think the birds could teach us something about reading the clues in nature which can inform about weather changes, but that is not the same as predicting the weather. Perhaps, we tend to treat them a bit like pet rocks. If you see birds with ruffled feathers, then it's windy out. If they are wet, then it's raining and if they are white on top, then it's snowing.
I would like to make the distinction between weather and climate. Weather is current conditions, what the present observations describe. Predicting the weather is an educated guess about what weather will do in the near future using past experience to guide. Climate is the overall trend of the weather on a much broader time scale than weather.
While I don't think the birds can predict the weather, I do think they can be very instrumental in helping us predict climate change. Even locally, over the last 10 years we have seen range expansions of black-chinned hummingbirds, bushtits, and eastern phoebes to mention a few. These range expansions are a result of many influences including climate and landscape (which can also be influenced by climate). We'll have to let the climatologists figure out what the most important influences are, but undoubtedly, the birds can help. Also, migration patterns and timing have been changing and this trend may be related to changing climate.
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The New Sign
Some of you may have seen our new sign and logo or noticed our new name. After many years as a franchise store, we have gone independent and changed our name to Wild Bird Company. We look forward to a continued relationship with our customers, increasing our brick-and-mortar and electronic inventories, greater educational resources, and so many other plans. Thank you all for making the last 27.5 years so memorable. I look forward to more good times. -Steve Frye
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I know many of you really love receiving the Facebook postings, weekly bird list and slide show emails and/or the monthly newsletter emails. Please consider sharing or forwarding these emails and postings to your friends interested in nature. I would really appreciate getting these educational postings to a wider audience. Thanks for the help. -Steve Frye
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Save $2.00!
Sunflower Chips - 8 lbs
Clean feeding hulled sunflower is great for condo and apartment dwellers. No shells to clean up or fall down on your neighbors!
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[Note: When purchasing online, discount
will be applied during checkout]
Not to be combined with other offers.
Expires 10/15/16.
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Don't forget to pro-actively attract your favorite birds. Stop by the Wild Bird Company today or
Sincerely,
Stephen Frye
1.844.442.1322 (toll free)
Wild Bird Company Headquarters
1641- 28th Street, Boulder, CO 80301
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