Posted On

The fun part of having birdfeeders in your yard or property is putting the food out and watching the birds come and enjoy it. Many people don’t think about the maintenance aspect – mostly the cleaning and hygiene procedures you’ll need to regularly undertake so your feathered friends are not put at risk of sickness or disease.

Thankfully, it’s simple and quick to keep birdfeeders clean and hygienic, especially when you keep a regular maintenance schedule. This prevents any risk of outbreak and saves you big cleanups later.

Unclean bird feeders pose a number of health risks to the birds that come to them: fungus and bacteria can grow on the food and the feeding equipment. This is one of the most common risks, as it does not take long for bacteria and fungus to form on old food, or unclean feeding equipment. Your local climate will have a great impact on just how vigilant you’ll need to be in this area; warm and humid areas are ripe for fungal growth so you need to stay on top of things to avoid this great risk to birds. Once birds are infected with bacteria or fungal spores it can end up being a death sentence for them.

Aspergillus is a serious fungus that causes aspergillosis in birds, and this is often a deadly condition. This fungus will grow on foods within a short amount of time when conditions are warm, wet or humid – but even those in dry or cooler areas need to avoid having any type of fungal growth occurring at birdfeeders.

Posted On

Everyone loves a Hummingbird. Florida is home to 3 species of Hummingbird. The diminutive feather-weight but spectacular Ruby-throated Hummingbird is the most common of Florida’s three Hummingbird species. It usually leaves Florida for the winter and heads south, although some individuals stay in FL all year.

The other two species you will see during winter: these are the Black-chinned Hummingbird and the Rufous Hummingbird.

Rufous Hummingbird feeding on a flower. Photo credit: USFWS Mountain-Prairie

From April you might be lucky enough to see Ruby-throated Hummingbirds nesting in Florida. Nests are tiny, and usually near or overhanging water.

Providing artificial feeders for hummingbirds is one of the most widespread and widely loved backyard bird feeding activities. Hummingbird-specific feeders are easy and cheap to purchase, or even make yourself.

It is however important that other natural food sources are available to your backyard hummers – like native plants. Artificial feeding does not provide the extensive nutrition that these birds need, and should be considered as a treat rather than a substantial part of the diet for the birds.

More and more people are finding it highly satisfying to create a garden with hummingbirds in mind. You can do this regardless of the size of your space – even if you are going to be limited to just a patio area. Hummingbirds will go for bright nectar rich flowers, including both native and non native species. What you decide to plant will depend where in Florida you live and which species are recommended or available in your area.

Red and orange colored flowers are very attractive to the Ruby-throated Hummingbird. A hummingbird’s long, often curved beak has evolved to reach into tube like flowers to reach the nectar within.

Posted On

Imagine being able to walk through any habitat and instantly know which bird species are there, even if you can’t see them?

Birding by ear is a skill that anyone can learn with enough practice and persistence.

If you’re a completely novice birder, you can simply start by paying close attention to the sounds of the birds in your very own yard.

There might be three or four species, each with their own unique calls and sounds. Some species make just a small number of sounds or variations in calls, while others have a vast repertoire of calls, songs, sounds, and even mimicking the sounds of other birds (which can really make things tricky, at first).

Even if you’ve only recently decided to take up birding as a more serious hobby, you’re very likely to already have some familiarity to the more common birds in your local area. Even people with no interest in birds (so they say) can recognize the most common “daily” birds that might be heard in the background of everyday life.

Obviously, these will vary depending on the country you live in, and the region you live.

Bird sounds are one of the great comforts of being home for many people, and when you move to or visit a far away place where there are no bird calls that are familiar to you, things can feel very alien indeed. When your understanding and recognition of bird calls grows over time, your bird world opens up more and you’ll start to seek out different habitats and locations to discover even more new and fascinating species and their calls.

To hone your birding ear, you need to be consistent. Just like a new piano player must practice regularly in order to enhance skills and not lose the instinctive playing skills that have been built up over time, so too must a birder attempt to spend as much time as possible with the birds so that their songs and sounds become second nature to you.

Eventually, you’ll have a memory bank of dozens of bird calls that you can recall instantly without a thought.

If you’re just starting out, this can seem an almost impossible thing to imagine happening – but happen it will! We all start somewhere and unlike learning a musical instrument, you won’t have to wait years and years before you can consider yourself a proficient bird call identifier.

There is a daunting conundrum that new birders are faced with when it comes to learning bird calls: how can I learn which bird is calling if I can’t see the bird that’s making the call?

Posted On

Kids love being outdoors, but too many spend much of their childhood cooped up inside in front of a screen or five. Not only is it unhealthy, but it also means the next generation and the one after that are not falling in love with the natural world and the wildlife around them; including birds.

Introducing kids of any age to birds, birding and the environment can only benefit everyone involved: including the birds. Some of these kids will become advocates for the conservation of birds in the future. Without them to speak for birds and to understand birds and their habitats, the future of birds will be dire.

And birding is just plain fun. Children love a challenge, and introducing challenges is a great way to get kids into bird watching. How many birds can they spot? How many species can they name? Which birds do they find throughout the year in different seasons? Teachers who plan bird related lessons or activities in school can give kids a great head start in becoming bird lovers as they develop their interest in class and outside the classroom, then take that home with them.

Kids birding
A group of children birdwatching
Bird watching for kids
Children and adults doing birding
Boy bird watching
Boy looking at birds through binoculars

What do kids need to get started with birdwatching?

As we know, birding is a free activity and you can do it with zero financial outlay and not even any consumables if you don’t want to. Books, binoculars, smart phones with apps, and cameras with telephoto lenses are all wonderful birding accessories – but they aren’t mandatory. Families who are on a budget can make birding a new activity that costs nothing but time (and perhaps some travel costs if you wish to go outside your local walking distance).

This can make it a challenge to entice children away from their technological and entertainment comforts like their console games, PC, tablet, television and whatever else they tend to amuse themselves with during the time you’d prefer them to be outdoors. Kids these days may feel alien walking around without holding some sort of device.

A small financial investment can help make things more exciting for kids, depending on their age. A good bird guide book is one of the best places to start. But if you or they really prefer technology instead, go for a good birding identification app where the kids can not only look at the birds, but hear their calls as well.

Posted On

Birding – or birdwatching – is immensely popular in the United States. And the popularity of birding or interest in birds only increased during COVID as people were more confined to home and the local neighborhood. Watching birds is one of the few completely free and solitary activities people could do, and one that is continually variable and never boring. If there is any silver lining to the pandemic, perhaps it just could be that more people have developed a passion for birds in the US – leading to greater awareness of conservation and wildlife generally.

birdwatching in Alaska
Birdwatching in Alaska

But let’s talk more generally about birding in the United States and just how popular it is today.

Membership in Audobon Society groups around the country can provide a good indicator of the level of interest in birds in any particular area or state. While not every single person who joins Audubon as a paid member is necessarily a bird watcher or into birding – they may simply want to support conservation or enjoy specific member benefits – we can still gauge the level of interest in birds as a whole by looking at Audubon membership. For example, Mass Audubon states a membership and supporter community of 130,000.

There are more than 450 local Audobon chapters throughout the United States, 23 state programs and 41 Audubon centers.

Not all people who feed birds consider themselves as bird watchers (although most are certainly at least watching the birds who come to the feeder!). Likewise, many birdwatchers are not necessarily interested in backyard bird feeding. These two interests certainly loosely tie in with each other, and it is well known that backyard bird feeding is a huge industry in the United States – so while this doesn’t translate to the same level of interest in regular birdwatching, it does tell us that millions of people in the United States have some level of interest in wild birds; even if it is only those who visit their yard or property.

Posted On

Most of us aren’t fortunate enough to get up close views of birds of prey in the backyard (and if you have a bird feeder, you’re probably glad of that fact).

The popularity of live streaming bird of prey, or raptor, web cams has been increasing rapidly in recent years thanks to technology becoming more affordable. Continue reading “Best Birds of Prey Live Streaming Cams – Worldwide”

Posted On

Whether or not you enjoying feeding birds in your own yard, there’s no denying the joy and yes – addiction – that can come with watching live cameras not only fixed on wildlife in wild place but also within other people’s backyards and gardens. Not all of us have the time, energy, space, or indeed the desire to set up our own backyard bird feeders, so why not tune in to some of many “feeder cams” that more and more people are sharing with the world? Continue reading “12 Best Bird Feeder Cams to Watch in North America”

Posted On

So many of us have relished the joy of nature during this ongoing coronavirus situation.

If you’re lucky enough to live somewhere where birds come to you, or you can visit bird watching sites close by, you might be feeling a newfound or increased appreciation for birds and nature in general. For many of us, it’s what is getting us through the stress and upheaval of normal life during this time. Continue reading “COVID-19 Bird Watching – Birding During Coronavirus”

Posted On

Bluebirds using a nesting box

Placing an artificial nest box or birdhouse in your garden to attract a specific species to – in our case Bluebirds – means being aware of what the birds look for in a nesting site and replicating as close as possible the type of conditions and structure that they nest in out in the wild. Continue reading “Which Birdhouse for Bluebirds? Guide To Bluebird Nest Boxes in Your Backyard”