Bird Feeders
August 24th, 2008 by ComputerBob
When I was younger, I always thought that feeding birds was something that only old people do.
Now that I’m older, my wife and I really enjoy watching the birds come and eat from our bird feeders, so… I guess maybe I was right.
For the past several years, even when we lived up north, we’ve had a couple of bird feeders. A couple of years ago, I hung them from the fascia outside our Florida room, so that we could see the birds right outside our windows.
Then, a few months ago, I thought I saw something moving on one of the feeders in the dark, so I got a flashlight, crept up to the window, and shone it onto the feeder. I found myself face-to-face with a red-eyed rat whose body was about nine inches long. I ran outside to scare him away, and he ran up the chain onto our fascia, then across our roof to the end of the house, where he jumped onto some high bushes. A few minutes later, a friend of his ran across the screens of several of our open Florida room windows.
When I went back in the house, I took the bird feeders with me. The next morning, I trimmed those bushes back away from the house.
Within a few days, I had built a T-bar to hold the feeders about 8 feet away from our house. I made it out of PVC pipe, with metal electrical conduit inside to give it strength. It’s too far away from the house for squirrels and rats to be able to jump onto it from our roof, and I put a concave plastic baffle on the upright pipe, about 4 feet off the ground, that keeps squirrels and rats from getting to the feeders.
I fill both feeders with black oil sunflower seeds that I buy at Walmart in 25-pound bags. We go through a bag every couple of weeks.
At first, all we saw were cardinals and blue jays. After a few weeks, the local monk parakeets also discovered our feeders. They’re extremely skittish birds; in fact, it took 3 days of repeatedly lurking behind our window shades to finally get the photos of them that you see below.
Nowdays, we enjoy seeing lots of different types of birds, including tufted titmice, red-winged blackbirds, cowbirds, mourning doves, boat-tailed grackles and red-bellied woodpeckers. Plus, three or four times each day, we see up to 19 monk parakeets at a time. They’re all sort of like colorful pets that come and go as they please.
Update: A couple of months after I wrote this, I added three more feeders, by adding a center pipe at a 90-degree angle to the cross bar, and by mounting two more feeders in between the center pole and the two outside feeders. Our five feeders now host up to 34 monk parakeets at a time, in addition to the other types of birds.
