Hello folks,
I've used this forum for insight time and time again so thank you to the community for your helpful and knowledgeable posts.
Our garden has a medium-sized pond and I presently have two ground feeders with mixed seed (frequented by blackbirds, pigeons and dunnocks), a hanging feeder with sunflower hearts (which is a dining table for a pair of blue tits and which had a resident greenfinch and couple of pairs of goldfinches last summer), a peanut feeder (which I don't think anything has ever been on!) and a new nyger seed feeder (which will hopefully get the finches this summer but which hasn't had much interest in the two weeks it has been up).
At the moment, these are spread out over the lawn, an area of hard standing and in two trees. I was wondering, however, whether we would be better off attaching the feeders to a pole and having them in one area. What are people's experiences of what has tended to work better for them? I always assumed that different birds would want to feed away from one another but some videos and photos I have seen of feeding stations tend to dispel that idea.
I'd be grateful for any ideas. It would be nice to see more activity than we have currently, which tends to be a blackbird or two in the morning followed by the pigeons, an odd dunnock, wren and robin, and the thrice daily appearance of two blue tits. So infrequent are the tits that I'm having to remove wet seed daily from the hopper.
Thanks,
A.
Hello Astraeus, I feed the birds all year round with premium bird seed, peanuts, Niger seed, sunflower hearts, fat balls and cakes. I have a 3 hanger pole for the Niger seed, seed, sunflower hearts, a few feet away a post with 2 peanut feeders and behind in the trees a fat ball feeder, another few feet away a seed and peanut feeder, in front a fat cake feeder and a few feet away a peanut feeder and another fat ball feeder. A total of 11 feeders in roughly a 12 feet line. All the food gets eaten and I have many different regular birds. Robin, great tit, blue tit, Cole tit, green, gold and chaffinch, sparrow, Dunnock, starling, blackbird, wren, Siskin, pheasant, others not so much. I also throw seed and at this time of year whole peanuts (not in the breeding season, in a feeder only) and suet pieces on the ground for the Robin and blackbirds, as well as apples and any fruit that may be going soft. Others find that their birds never eat peanuts or Niger seed, and only stick to seed and sunflower hearts. Hope this helps.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
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Recently, I hung a few bird houses on my tree in the garden, now there are a lot of beautiful birds living there. My favorite is the titmice. I also feed them seeds, boiled wheat, and corn seeds. My grandmother always taught me to love nature and animals and be their friend. She lived in a village and always had chickens and each chicken had its own name. But when she became older she started to forget about her chickens and when she talked about Sarah (one of her chicken's names) she was sure she talked about her friend. So, you can see, I was always surrounded by birds.