We were able to lower seed prices again this spring! With the exception of nuts, all the seed prices came down. Some, like safflower, we lowered by $10.00 for a 20 lbs. bag. If you were priced out of feeding the birds a few years ago when seed prices rose sharply, then now is your time to get back into it. As always, the Wild Bird Company has the highest quality and freshest seed around. Don't feed your birds junk food!
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Wild Bird Company
Quick Links
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Xcel Energy
Bird Cams
Osprey Cam
from Earth Cam
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| Osprey ©Wendy Marie Stuart |
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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 10:30 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
Weekly Bird Walk Slide Shows
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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
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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 28.5 years so memorable. I look forward to more good times. --Steve
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Attracting Northern Cardinals
Attracting Northern Cardinals
There are few birds in North America that elicit such an overwhelming positive response as the northern
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Northern Cardinal ©Steve Frye
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cardinal. They are iconic and whether you presently live where they do or not, customers always remember them fondly from growing up with them, visiting relatives where they saw them, or having them in their backyard presently. The northern cardinal, or cardinal for short, lives in the eastern US from the eastern half of the Great Plains to the East Coast. You can also find them in the desert southwest, with the highest concentrations in the south and southeast. Over the last 100 years, cardinals have expanded their range to the north and west, but they are still missing from the West Coast and Mountain West. Everyone always comments about how they would like to attract cardinals.
Bird Seed and Bird Feeders for
Attracting Cardinals
Cardinals are built for cracking seeds open using that big conical beak of theirs. Cardinals love sunflower
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Northern Cardinal
©Wendy Marie Stuart
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seeds especially, including black oil sunflower, striped sunflower, and even hulled sunflower. All other commercial seeds are far less attractive to cardinals except safflower which is a second choice compared to sunflower. Cardinals prefer platform or hopper feeders, but they will also visit a tube feeder fitted with a tray. They are not likely to come to a small perch or cramped space to feed. Cardinals prefer to feed near or even under cover. When you are bright red, you need a place to hide occasionally
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Bird Houses for Cardinals
Northern cardinals are not cavity nesting birds so they will not use a bird house. They make their own
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Northern Cardinal ©Steve Frye
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shaggy bowl-shaped nest in a thick bush, preferably one with thorns. It may be possible to get a cardinal pair to use a nesting platform if it is embedded amongst thick bushes
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Gardening for Cardinals
As noted above, when you are super red, you need super cover. Therefore, cardinals need thickets, hedgerows, and overgrown places in which to hide, nest, and forage. Many bushes/trees can provide both food and cover for cardinals like hackberries, viburnums, hollies, dogwoods, cherries, and sumacs. Other thorny elements like pyracantha, raspberries, blackberries, elderberries, and some roses are attractive to cardinals. A large portion of a cardinal's diet is
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Northern Cardinal and Redpoll ©Steve Frye
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comprised of weed seeds and many agricultural pests, so they are great to have around your property.
Attracting Cardinals with Water
Cardinals do not have any special water requirements other than the normal needs to drink and bathe, like all birds. They will certainly take advantage of a water source like a bird bath or a shallow area in a water garden. In the more arid portions of their range, available water is a very attractive element in your yard.
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It is always disheartening when I have to inform customers about the status of Northern Cardinals in Boulder County. For the record, there is and has been for the last four years, one male cardinal in Boulder County. As for cardinals in the state, we do
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Northern Cardinal ©Steve Frye
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have pockets of cardinals across the eastern plains along river courses like the Platte and Arkansas. I spoke with a Colorado Rancher who lived just west of the Kansas line 25 years ago and she told me cardinals had nested on her property for the last 19 years. Their march west has been at a snail's pace, but I think they will eventually reach the Front Range. When they do, I think the landscape now is such that they will thrive, because we have changed the grasslands into a more "eastern" landscape.
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Thanks for Supporting
Walk in the Wild
At our annual Walk in the Wild: International Migratory #BirdDayevent co-hosted with Environment for the Americas in May, event participants helped raise over $1,200 towards habitat restoration in Boulder County! Collectively, Environment for the Americas has donated more than $7,200 towards wildlife habitat improvements.
Hunter was this year's donation superstar. As part of his homeschool curriculum he learned about migratory bird species and raised $130 before joining us at Walk in the Wild. Thanks for flying the extra mile for bird conservation, Hunter!
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They Don't Like Junk Food!
~~ So don't try to feed it to them ~~
Not all bird seed is the same. Superficially, it may look very similar, but the birds know what they want and if you don't give it to them, they'll go elsewhere. Birds use bird seed like a supplement to their already complete and varied diets. They are not dependent on your seed, so if you are not offering up something they like there are plenty of other choices. Why go back to a restaurant with poor food and service? Birds detest seed that is moldy, stale, dusty, desiccated, old, or just unpalatable like filler seeds used to make many mixes inexpensive. The most common filler seeds are milo (sorghum) and wheat. Avoiding filler seeds will drastically reduce waste, spoilage, rodent issues, and spouting under your feeders. Here at the Wild Bird Company, we always offer to you the cleanest, freshest, and highest quality seed on the market.
The following is an email I received recently which illustrates perfectly my point about junk food.
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I know you already know this but wanted to share anyway. My husband and I had purchased a bird feeder at your store earlier this year and having been stocking up with your hulled sunflower seeds. The birdies love it! We've gotten so many birds to come by that they drain the feeder pretty quickly. Alas, at one point we ran out of seed. The birdies stopped coming by and we still hadn't had a chance to make it up to Boulder for a re-supply. After a few days we thought we'd just pick up some hulled seeds at (the grocery store). How different could they be? Well....we filled up the feeder and figured it might take a few days for the birdies to come back. They did....one or two....very sporadically. They'd look at the seed, give it a nibble and fly away. Needless to say they seemed quite unimpressed and the level in the feeder didn't drop at all. We thought maybe it was because it was summer and they had other food.
Then we decided to dump the (grocery store) bird seed and refill it with your yummy hulled sunflower seeds (which we finally were able to come up and get). Lo and behold...
BIRDS EVERYWHERE!
They totally love your hulled sunflower seeds. Our backyard
feeder is rapidly draining, just like it used to and we have all of our feathered friends coming to see us again. It's such a joy to watch them, listen to them, see new species and try to figure out what they are.
Thanks for being purveyors of such quality feed and caring so much for the wild bird population out here in the Rockies!
Flapping our wings in gratitude your way
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Karin H and Tom C
Evergreen, CO
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Q: What is up with all the goldfinches? Don't get me wrong, I love 'em, but why do we have so many this summer?
A:
It has been fantastic, hasn't it? We have been hearing from lots of customers about how great the goldfinch activity is this year, both with lesser and American Goldfinches.
We have been working hard over the last few years to make sure customers don't let nyjer seed sit out in their feeders forever. If you have had nyjer seed in your feeder with no birds eating it for more than six months, then I think it is time to ditch that stuff and put in fresh. Nyjer seed, unfortunately, is prone to desiccation, mold, and going stale. If that's what you have out when the birds show up, they are not likely to return. It may not even be bad because of sitting in your feeder. I would say that the majority of nyjer seed sold across the country is in poor to bad condition by the time it is purchased.
We have an excellent seed supplier and their nyjer is particularly high quality. It smells great and looks shiny and clean. Sometimes, I just want to take a handful and pop it in my mouth it is so appealing. Part of our customers' goldfinch success is due to this high quality nyjer.
As with all things natural, many factors influence the local populations to go up or down. It would only be speculation to say why we are having a good goldfinch year. Whatever the factors this year, I'm glad it has led to lots of goldfinches around.
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$10.00 Off Any Caged
Squirrel/Grackle-Proof Bird Feeder!
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[Note: When purchasing online, discount will be applied during checkout.]
Shop Online
, Call (303) 442-1322 and mention this Coupon or visit our Store to redeem.
Code:
WBCO0614
Not to be combined with other offers.
Expires 7/31/17.
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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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