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duwan
Metal newbie

Joined: Tue Feb 28, 2023 8:16 pm
Posts: 87
Location: Brazil
PostPosted: Sun Nov 05, 2023 7:01 pm 
 

Simply put your pets here and general fun facts about him and simple to advanced questions about petting.

HOWEVER you need to follow rules and tips.

Rule 1: Gore and NSFW content

Please, don't put gory images such as cat eating rat, rat eating cat, humans to animals, dogs to humans, and so on. We're not fucking r/eyeblech, as well as links to videos of animals having intercourse or gore involving animals. If you like images of these specific topics, go to a medic or keep saying on Twitter saying that you're edgy because you fucking watched a man being beheaded on your favorite site that has 300 pop-ups.

Rule 2: Questions

Questions are welcome (e.g. How can I give my dog a bath?), as well for "it's a lie or it's truth" questions about specific breeds of animals. But don't be a cunt, if someone says they have a pitbull, don't cry saying he's a psycho; It includes for ALL ANIMALS IN THIS PLANET, don't keep saying that the person is a dumb because he doesn't know what to pick to feed their animals. Don't know the breed of your dog? You can ask on this topic, but when to answer, certify as >>>KNOWING VERY WELL WHAT YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT<<<

Rule 3: Blacklisted Animals

Here's a list of some animals blacklisted:

    1. Alligators
    2. Agressive bears
    3. Maggots
    4. Fish (if it does not belong into a aquarium)
    5. Cows/Cattles (if they're not made for slaughter, obs: I'm not vegan)
    6. Pigs (with the same rules as the Cows/Cattles)
    7. Lions
    8. Leopards (if they're little and safe to pet, it's OK, but Leopards in its original habitat, fuck no)
    9. Snakes (if they're not hostile)
    10. Rats


Here's a list of SOME animals that are accepted here:

    1. Dogs
    2. Cats
    3. Hamsters
    4. Cows/Cattles (read the blacklisted section first, as well for Leopards and Pigs)
    5. Capivaras
    6. Birds (any breed)
    7. Fishs (on aquarium)
    8. Sheeps (please, don't show creepy "night sky with sheep" photos)
    9. Hedgehogs
    10. Wolves (if they're not aggresives)

Have some fun :nods:
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Last edited by duwan on Wed Nov 15, 2023 1:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Coastliner
Metalhead

Joined: Tue Mar 23, 2021 7:49 am
Posts: 655
Location: beyond the blue on some ancient, tattered Fates Warning cover
PostPosted: Mon Nov 06, 2023 2:38 pm 
 

I don't have pets, but I'm heavily – no, violently – into wild bird feeding. My impressive arsenal of feeders consists of:

1 suet ball feeder
1 bird table in the shape of a wooden house
1 milk carton with pigeon food in a tree
1 bird bath
1 robin feeder from the end of this week.

.
.
.

[crickets]

.
.
.

I know, I know, but I hope there'll be more sometime in the future.

The flock of visitors consists of:

– umpteen tits and blue tits
– a couple of sparrows
– three robins
– a couple of crows (during the winter months)
– wood pigeons
– approx. ten magpies
– three great spotted woodpeckers (father, mother, son)
– one green woodpecker (not at the feeding station but it likes the grass and the bark)
– a hedge sparrow
– two to four blackbirds
– approx. four greenfinches (not seen since late spring)
– a couple of wagtails (not at the feeding station [yet])
– a wren (at the feeding station during the previous winter months)
– a hawfinch (who once just stared at the food for five minutes and then flew away)
– a redstart in transit (early last spring)
– a chaffinch (don't know if it ate anything though).

New to the party since October:

– two jays
– two blackstarts
– two starlings (who are basically the only birds who assault the tits and shit in the food on a daily basis and can go to hell).

Oh, and when I was a kid we had a budgie and a cockatiel.

In my view, feeding is just a great and entertaining way to support the messengers of the avian world, which is in distress because of our rampant agriculture (=> massive decline in insects), five o'clock shadow lawns, stone gardens (that look like parking lots) and other idiocies of modern life.

Any other bird people out there? :)
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Defenestrated
Metal newbie

Joined: Sat Nov 19, 2022 1:50 pm
Posts: 295
Location: United States
PostPosted: Mon Nov 06, 2023 3:31 pm 
 

^Yes, birdwatching is awesome.

I forget how exactly, but when I was maybe 9 years old, I got into it pretty deeply (by children's standards, anyway) - I think there was just something inexplicably cool and soothing about walking through the yard with my mom and helping her fill the feeders. One year, for my birthday, I departed from the usual Power Rangers action figures and asked for a nice new feeder. :)

I mostly fell out of it in the ensuing decades, but I'm surprised occasionally to find that I can still get a genuine kick (like, taking pictures with my phone and sharing them excitedly with relatives) out of what I spot in the wild: Highlights over the last few years include bluebirds, Baltimore orioles, cedar waxwings, and just a single rose-breasted grosbeak out on a walking trail.

I wish I had a better memory for birdsong, though. There are some interesting ones I haven't quite managed to identify.

A philosopher I like has a book I'm meaning to read in which he argues, IIRC, that birdsong is not a mindless mating instinct but closer to an expression of aesthetic joy.

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Coastliner
Metalhead

Joined: Tue Mar 23, 2021 7:49 am
Posts: 655
Location: beyond the blue on some ancient, tattered Fates Warning cover
PostPosted: Sat Nov 11, 2023 6:11 pm 
 

The ordered robin feeder has arrived! Not sure (yet) how I can fix it to the tree so that the magpies can't kick it into outer space but it will be filled with meal worms, crickets, silk worms, freshwater shrimps and black soldier fly larvae, aka the stuff the average grindcore band writes songs about. :oh shit:

Defenestrated wrote:
I wish I had a better memory for birdsong, though. There are some interesting ones I haven't quite managed to identify.

A philosopher I like has a book I'm meaning to read in which he argues, IIRC, that birdsong is not a mindless mating instinct but closer to an expression of aesthetic joy.


As far as birdsong or sounds are concerned, I'm an absolute beginner. The only birds I can identify are tits, blue tits, robins, blackbirds, wrens, greenfinches, magpies, crows, tawny owls and, of course, pigeons as those are the ones I hear every day.

The book descriptions sound interesting. Maybe someday… I always thought that, at the end of the day, bird song meant two things "**** off" or "**** me", respectively, depending on the circumstances. But, yeah, regardless of a song's meaning or function, there's always the purely phonetic plane which can be analysed or interpreted.

Don't know much about bird song yet, only bits and pieces, e.g. I've read somewhere that the songs of certain birds have several distinct, relatively fixed or memorised verses so that, sometimes, e.g. the male blackbird sings the first verse before the female recites the second verse, in other words: they perform a particular song as a duet.

Also, individual birds seem to have individual voices or signature melodies: In an experiment, they confronted robin A with the voice of robin B, a perfect stranger. Robin A reacted aggressively because robins don't accept rivals within their personal territories. However, when they played a recording of robin C, robin A's long-known neighbour from the neighbour garden, robin A remained calm because the two had already come to a mutual agreement as far as their territorial claims were concerned.

PS: Surprised that there aren't more posts yet. Where are the animal-keeping metal fans? No animals? Not even a shark or a hyena?
PPS: I think rats should be allowed here!
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herra_af_lik
Metal newbie

Joined: Thu Mar 22, 2007 10:43 pm
Posts: 249
Location: Canada
PostPosted: Sat Nov 11, 2023 9:27 pm 
 

Just wondering why are snakes blacklisted?

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sjal
Metal newbie

Joined: Tue Apr 04, 2017 9:15 am
Posts: 305
PostPosted: Sun Nov 12, 2023 6:17 am 
 

Coastliner wrote:
In my view, feeding is just a great and entertaining way to support the messengers of the avian world, which is in distress because of our rampant agriculture (=> massive decline in insects), five o'clock shadow lawns, stone gardens (that look like parking lots) and other idiocies of modern life.

Yes, I also think this is very important these days. In the region where I live feeding birds is especially important in late autumn/winter/early spring.

Here is my simple homemade bird feeder (that is located in front of my "summer house") with a tit on it - tits mainly feed on sunflower seeds and crushed walnuts there (sorry for the low quality of the foto. It was photographed a few days ago, those small sweet grapes on the branches are not harvested at all and are also a "natural continuation" of the feeder - they are mainly eaten by sparrows in autumn and early winter) -
https://i.ibb.co/qsdFJQy/20231108-130045.jpg

Coastliner wrote:
Defenestrated wrote:
I wish I had a better memory for birdsong, though. There are some interesting ones I haven't quite managed to identify.

A philosopher I like has a book I'm meaning to read in which he argues, IIRC, that birdsong is not a mindless mating instinct but closer to an expression of aesthetic joy.


As far as birdsong or sounds are concerned, I'm an absolute beginner. The only birds I can identify are tits, blue tits, robins, blackbirds, wrens, greenfinches, magpies, crows, tawny owls and, of course, pigeons as those are the ones I hear every day.

The book descriptions sound interesting. Maybe someday… I always thought that, at the end of the day, bird song meant two things "**** off" or "**** me", respectively, depending on the circumstances. But, yeah, regardless of a song's meaning or function, there's always the purely phonetic plane which can be analysed or interpreted.

Don't know much about bird song yet, only bits and pieces, e.g. I've read somewhere that the songs of certain birds have several distinct, relatively fixed or memorised verses so that, sometimes, e.g. the male blackbird sings the first verse before the female recites the second verse, in other words: they perform a particular song as a duet.

Also, individual birds seem to have individual voices or signature melodies: In an experiment, they confronted robin A with the voice of robin B, a perfect stranger. Robin A reacted aggressively because robins don't accept rivals within their personal territories. However, when they played a recording of robin C, robin A's long-known neighbour from the neighbour garden, robin A remained calm because the two had already come to a mutual agreement as far as their territorial claims were concerned.

Thank you for this interesting information and discussion!

I have this page bookmarked with a helpful list of birds (and with links to examples of their voices) that may be found in the country where I live - http://zuotov.blogspot.com/p/blog-page_58.html?m=1

There was also this tip about sonograms (spectrograms) and the motivational "one bird per day" part on the page (translated from Ukrainian):
We recommend to analyze sonograms of recordings to better understand the structure of a "song". Visual perception of sound will facilitate memorization and understanding.
In total, there are 170 bird sounds. Yes, that's many. But you could agree that some people have an even bigger playlist of songs, and sometimes we recognize our favorite songs from the first notes/chords. Therefore, nothing is impossible. If you study 1 bird per day, then six months - and you are a music lover-ornithologist!


(if there's much more of different birds in the country where you live, maybe you could start with a shorter list - from those birds that live in the region where you live, and then gradually expand the list - to include those birds that move through your region during migrations, etc. ).

Coastliner, may I ask in what area (in/near a park, forest, meadow, field, river/sea bank, near mountains, etc.) are your bird feeders located?
The variety of birds that visit your feeders is very impressive, it's great. :)

There is not so much variety of birds in general in the region where I live, and this is probably (partly) a reason "feeding birds" and "watching birds" are usually different processes in my case (I’ll write about it in more detail later, if interested...).
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Coastliner
Metalhead

Joined: Tue Mar 23, 2021 7:49 am
Posts: 655
Location: beyond the blue on some ancient, tattered Fates Warning cover
PostPosted: Sun Nov 12, 2023 11:14 am 
 

sjal wrote:
Yes, I also think this is very important these days, in the region where I live feeding birds is especially important in late autumn/winter/early spring.

Here is my simple homemade bird feeder that is located near my "summer house" with a tit on it - tits mainly feed on sunflower seeds and crushed walnuts (sorry for the low quality of the foto. It was photographed a few days ago, those small sweet grapes on the branches are not picked at all and are also a "natural continuation" of the feeder - they are mainly eaten by sparrows in autumn and early winter) -
https://i.ibb.co/qsdFJQy/20231108-130045.jpg


Wow, the feeder's great! My little bird house is only half the size, much too small, but it works somehow…

The diet is very basic: sunflower hearts, oat flakes coated with insect fat and peanuts (for birds). In spring I tried out tiny seeds but there weren't many hardbills (e.g. finches) around and the only ones interested were the pigeons.

Speaking of winter… A probably little known fact: A bird can lose up to 15-20% of its own body weight during one cold winter night. If it cannot find a decent breakfast in the course of the first hours of the day, the worst can happen: the bird gives up and falls dead from the tree without anybody noticing. Birds can be pretty sturdy – with food. Without food they're as fragile as glass.

So… an appeal to all the people out there: a suet / fat ball in some sort of metal feeder is not expensive and can make a lot of animals happy. (Please don't serve fat balls in nets as they can kill).

sjal wrote:
Coastliner, may I ask in what area (in/near a park, forest, meadow, field, river/sea bank, near mountains, etc.) are your bird feeders located?
The variety of birds that visit your feeders is very impressive, it's great. :)


It's basically the edge of a smalltown. In the vicinity, there are only a tiny wood, a graveyard and a couple of row house gardens but not much else that qualifies as "nature".

The regular (daily) visitors aren't quite as varied as it appears. My bird list above is probably a bit misleading because I simply mentioned every exemplar I spotted in the course of 2023, including those that come here every couple of weeks or were seen only once (during the migration periods in spring and autumn). (The starlings were last seen two or three days ago, so I guess they've moved on south…)

sjal wrote:
There is not so much variety of birds in general in the area where I live, and this is probably (partly) a reason "feeding birds" and "watching birds" are usually different processes in my case (I’ll write about it in more detail later, if interested...).


Of course. :nods:
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duwan
Metal newbie

Joined: Tue Feb 28, 2023 8:16 pm
Posts: 87
Location: Brazil
PostPosted: Sun Nov 12, 2023 12:02 pm 
 

herra_af_lik wrote:
Just wondering why are snakes blacklisted?


Because I want and I can.

Just kidding, it's because it's a hostile animal, this thread is about animals that you can pet.
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Goatfangs
58.2% Metal

Joined: Tue Mar 18, 2008 5:02 pm
Posts: 2804
Location: United States
PostPosted: Tue Nov 14, 2023 10:36 pm 
 

Image

Who wouldn't want to pet that sweet little baby?
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duwan
Metal newbie

Joined: Tue Feb 28, 2023 8:16 pm
Posts: 87
Location: Brazil
PostPosted: Wed Nov 15, 2023 1:55 pm 
 

Goatfangs wrote:
Image

Who wouldn't want to pet that sweet little baby?


Cute ahh snake, updated rules.
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who da fuk sent me this shit - my friend after I crush his face with a hammer (cannibal corpse referenec)
ChatGPT wrote:
The first lineup of the band Carcass included Bill Steer on guitar and Lee Dorrian on vocals.

Check my mediocre ahh reviews

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sjal
Metal newbie

Joined: Tue Apr 04, 2017 9:15 am
Posts: 305
PostPosted: Wed Nov 15, 2023 6:58 pm 
 

Coastliner wrote:
sjal wrote:
Coastliner, may I ask in what area (in/near a park, forest, meadow, field, river/sea bank, near mountains, etc.) are your bird feeders located?
The variety of birds that visit your feeders is very impressive, it's great. :)


It's basically the edge of a smalltown. In the vicinity, there are only a tiny wood, a graveyard and a couple of row house gardens but not much else that qualifies as "nature".

The regular (daily) visitors aren't quite as varied as it appears. My bird list above is probably a bit misleading because I simply mentioned every exemplar I spotted in the course of 2023, including those that come here every couple of weeks or were seen only once (during the migration periods in spring and autumn). (The starlings were last seen two or three days ago, so I guess they've moved on south…)

sjal wrote:
There is not so much variety of birds in general in the area where I live, and this is probably (partly) a reason "feeding birds" and "watching birds" are usually different processes in my case (I’ll write about it in more detail later, if interested...).


Of course. :nods:


Thank you for your answer and sorry that I misunderstood you at first.
Then this is quite impressive in the sense that you have enough patience and interest, in addition to the more regular and typical visitors, to notice and remember the more "rare" birds that visit the feeders.

My "problem" is that in childhood I lived and visited school in the city, but spent all the summer (and sometimes winter and spring) school holidays in villages. Moreover, some of my close relatives lived in the northwestern part of Ukraine - in villages that are literally surrounded by very large forests, lakes, rivers, swamps. The variety of birds, even in the villages, was much more impressive and more numerous there than in that part of the forest-steppe (and heavily agricultural these days) Khmelnitsky region where I now live.
My relatives and I often went to the forests there and, thanks to them, at that time I learned voices of many birds.
When compared the diversity of birds, birdwatching in a city park, which I walk through almost every day in the city where I live now, as well as birdwatching near my "summer house" outside the city, are more of a "routine" for me - it’s just there can't be such a variety of birds anyway.

So "birdwatching" for me is more about time when I have a whole free day in which I take binoculars and some food and go somewhere closer to wild nature - there is a relatively large forest there which begins right outside of the city (about a 40 minute city bus ride from the place where I live) where I've learned the forest's trails. And there are bird feeders hung in the trees at the edge of the forest, so I can fill them up on the days I go there.

I saw a relatively larger variety of birds in spring/summer/autumn periods there in the forest - a larger variety of passerines, woodpeckers, etc.
Sometimes I wander along the fields that lie near the forest. If you're lucky and careful enough, you can see (but more often hear) such birds as quails and partridges. Sometimes (mainly in the spring when there is no grain plants in the fields yet or they are not too high) white storks walk there in search of food.
During migration periods it is also easier to notice more migratory birds that fly in the sky over that forest and fields.
In the second half of winter, you can also see a pair of Corvus corax “dancing” in the sky - it looks very mesmerizing.

Unfortunately, the rivers here are in a rather deplorable state (mainly due to sugar/food industry factories that dump production waste into rivers with impunity and pollute the water - to such an extent that from time to time there is a massive death of fish in the rivers), so when I want to admire waterfowl - such as swans and wild ducks, there are more chances to see them in certain villages (that can be reached by regular buses) with some other rivers and ponds.

If I have more than three free days of my day offs, I can go to the neighboring region which is located more to the west - Ivano-Frankivsk (closer to the south) - where I can wander along the mountain paths and see+explore the variety of birds there (my distant relatives live in that region and I visit them from time to time. Also, this is probably the region I will move to in case things get much worse in the city/region where I live now - due to the war...).

Coastliner wrote:
Wow, the feeder's great! My little bird house is only half the size, much too small, but it works somehow…


Smaller bird feeders are absolutely fine (and they are also a little better protected from rain/snow in windy weather), I often see birds visiting those in the nearest park in the city - there are many such bird feeders there, I fill some of them with food too.
The main reason I wanted this one to be larger was to be able to make it wider and deeper - with higher sides. Most of the visitors to the feeder are sparrows and tits and, unlike tits which eat carefully and never cause problems - they just quickly take something from the feeder and fly away to eat it on a grape branch or on the nearest tree/fence, sparrows can scatter food from the feeder while eating there, plus sometimes they start "fights" between each other with active flapping of their wings (and yelling) directly in the feeder - and then the food can "fly away" in all directions and fall to the ground. The higher sides prevent this so I can pour in some more food.
There is no need to make the feeder so high, I just did it in order to sometimes be able to additionally tie something that has no place directly inside the feeder - like bunches of millet, or small sunflower heads (right with a green branch) or some bunches of berries to the vertical wooden posts - they are more visible from a distance and may attract more birds. You can't see it in the photo because they are from the outside of the feeder - there are U-shaped staples of this type - https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/imag ... kgUnSh79&s which are hammered deep into the wood of the posts - approximately in the middle of the height of the posts, and I can drag the wire into the staple space and tie the food.
The roof of the feeder is made flat (and not a triangle, as usual) and covered with a waterproof piece of linoleum in order to place and fix a small container of water for drinking during the hottest and rainless periods of summer.

Spoiler: show
Unfortunately, I cannot come and regularly fill this particular feeder during winter. I live in the city and only come to my "summer house" from time to time. In the warm season this happens more often, but from the end of November to the beginning of spring I almost never visit there. These "summer cottages" are not so far from the city (about 30-40 minutes by bicycle), but this is located literally in the middle of nowhere and is surrounded by endless fields/meadows with some fairly wide wind-breaking plantings of leafy and coniferous trees and large bushes (There is also a small river about 30 minutes walk from my summer house and a village about an hour's walk along the fields).
There is only a dirt road from the city to the "summer cottages", which in some of the more rough places was simply covered with small crushed stone, which made it passable enough for a regular bus to go there during the season (approximately from mid-March to mid-November) 2-3 times a week, but the rest of the time the road becomes very unsuitable for both bicycles and buses/cars. There are almost no people in those "summer cottages" who spend the winter there, so that place is basically abandoned in winter.
There was a time when there was enough snow in winter and then I could use skis to get there, but winters in recent years not that snowy here, unfortunately.
There is also a railway there and a commuter train passes the "summer cottages" rail stop twice a day - in the evening from the city side and early in the morning towards the city, but the problem is that it stopped at the "summer cottages" only during the season (on the same principle as a regular bus), in the winter it didn’t stop there at all.
I recently heard from some "summer cottage's" residents that there is information that from this year the train will make stops there even during winter - hope that this will really be the case and I will be able to visit there at least 2-3 times a month during winter, and not on foot.

That is why on the plot of land around the summer house I try to grow and leave a lot of different plant foods that can hang on the branches for a long time during the cold period and can be used by certain birds as food at least in late autumn/early winter.
In addition to that type of small sweet dessert grapes, there are also three chokeberry bushes (Aronia melanocarpa; actively eaten by birds), one red rowan tree (Sorbus aucuparia; it seems that in recent years there have been no birds that eat these berries in large quantities, but I still decided to leave this tree on the land plot because the berries are bright and visible from afar), one hawthorn bush (Crataegus; it seems the situation is similar as in the red rowan tree case), and two sea buckthorn bushes (Hippophae; those are placed behind a fence outside the land plot as this plant tends to produce a lot of shoots around the bush; the seeds inside the berries are actively eaten by birds), - which are grown almost exclusively for birds.
There are also five (but very young - one/two y.o. and unharvested yet) serviceberry bushes (Amelanchier) on the land plot - I've read about the existence of this plant relatively recently, it has been described as a "Canadian grape" (in the sense that the plant is frost-hardy) and that birds love the berries. It was written that, although the berries ripen fully in the summer, they can hang on the branches for quite a long time. I also read that these berries can be dried so perhaps I may add them to feeders at least in dried form.
In addition, every year I sow sunflowers along the fences - some of them are eaten by birds directly on the plant during ripening, some I collect, separate the seeds, dry them and add them to feeders in late autumn/winter (but I also additionally buy a lot of "field" sunflower seeds in bulk - to add them in feeders when my own grown ones run out) and I have a small seedbed for sowing millet (but I also buy more millet in bulk to add the grain directly into the feeders).
There are also several walnut trees behind the fence near my land plot : I leave some of the nuts directly on/under the trees - for crows, and after that I pick/collect the most of them, dry them and crumble into a feeder - for tits and sparrows.
(There are also a LOT of walnut trees in/near the city: in parks/squares or simply planted in the green area along the roadways, - when if you have some free time in the fall, you can easily pick/gather several bags of these nuts there and use it as a food for birds all winter. Peanuts are not grown here at all, so I rarely buy these.)
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Last edited by sjal on Wed Nov 15, 2023 11:22 pm, edited 5 times in total.
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Goatfangs
58.2% Metal

Joined: Tue Mar 18, 2008 5:02 pm
Posts: 2804
Location: United States
PostPosted: Wed Nov 15, 2023 8:19 pm 
 

That is a friend of mine's snake named Vesper. He's a leucistic ball python, and definitely one of the cutest sneks I've ever met! That photo is what I show to people who are afraid of snakes, if they are okay with it, in an attempt to show that sneks are cute too.

Because if you see something as cute, it's not as scary.

Currently I have 25 mantises, 14 tarantulas, 3 jumping spiders, 1 huntsman spider, 2 grasshoppers, 2 blue death-feigning beetles, 11 species of cockroach, 8 species of isopod, 4 species of millipede, 2 types of snails, an enclosure with a lot of other animals that I still don't know all of what is in there, and a poltergeist that likes to shut the toilet seat in the middle of the night.

Here's my largest tarantula, also the oldest at up to 20 years old. Her name is Grandma and she used to be one of the educational tarantulas at the Philadelphia Insectarium. When that place closed down, I continued to work with the majority of the collection but there was not a lot of room so a few of the tarantulas were sold or given away. I got Grandma, as well as an Arizona Blonde named Muffet.

Image

She is definitely enjoying her retirement. She hurt a paw in the spring of 2022 and it didn't heal right with her molt that May. But with her most recent molt, the paw is healed and back to normal.
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duwan
Metal newbie

Joined: Tue Feb 28, 2023 8:16 pm
Posts: 87
Location: Brazil
PostPosted: Wed Nov 15, 2023 9:16 pm 
 

Goatfangs wrote:
Currently I have 25 mantises, 14 tarantulas, 3 jumping spiders, 1 huntsman spider, 2 grasshoppers, 2 blue death-feigning beetles, 11 species of cockroach, 8 species of isopod, 4 species of millipede, 2 types of snails, an enclosure with a lot of other animals that I still don't know all of what is in there, and a poltergeist that likes to shut the toilet seat in the middle of the night.


25 mantises? It reminds me of the time when I was seven years old and I was petting one mantise, and my grandmother was saying not to touch him.

However, I found one on the street last week when I was riding my bike.

Goatfangs wrote:
He's a leucistic ball python


Thank you; now you make me want to pet a LBP. They seem very cute and rid of venom, probably the best race of all the reptiles in the world.
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Coastliner
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PostPosted: Tue Nov 21, 2023 4:21 am 
 

sjal wrote:
There is no need to make the feeder so high, I just did it in order to sometimes be able to additionally tie something that has no place directly inside the feeder


Well, I guess it depends on which kinds of birds you want to attract. More space means more room for larger birds. The magpies here can't seem to ingest the food with their heads inside the small feeder. They have to take something out and swallow it on the ground (with their necks upright). So, not everything is smooth sailing but at least the pigeons can't pillage the food tray. They can use the milk carton in the tree (which gets pillaged by tits sometimes :-D.)

Ground… that reminds me… if you say your visitors are mainly tits and sparrows, is it possible that those who either prefer to or exclusively eat on the ground are, more or less, excluded from the food? If so you could try something like this. (The food rests on a wire grid which serves as a drainage.)

sjal wrote:
That is why on the plot of land around the summer house I try to grow and leave a lot of different plant foods that can hang on the branches for a long time during the cold period and can be used by certain birds as food at least in late autumn/early winter.


Yes, that's great. I think, ideally, every plot of land is a little biotope where synanthropic animals (wild animals that live near and benefit from humans) can live or visit. If the industry reduces nature, why not turn private garden plots in cities and villages into sanctuaries? Every berry bush and waterhole counts, and so many people could contribute to giving nature something back…

Goatfangs wrote:
Currently I have 25 mantises, 14 tarantulas, 3 jumping spiders, 1 huntsman spider, 2 grasshoppers, 2 blue death-feigning beetles, 11 species of cockroach, 8 species of isopod, 4 species of millipede, 2 types of snails, an enclosure with a lot of other animals that I still don't know all of what is in there, and a poltergeist that likes to shut the toilet seat in the middle of the night.


Wow, that probably means lots of terrariums and a lot of work, doesn't it? One presumably stupid question: Do the spiders have discernible individual personality traits or are they all just versions of the same? (I could google the answer but here's the chance to hear it from the horse's mouth.)
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sjal
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PostPosted: Thu Nov 23, 2023 11:36 am 
 

Coastliner wrote:
Ground… that reminds me… if you say your visitors are mainly tits and sparrows, is it possible that those who either prefer to or exclusively eat on the ground are, more or less, excluded from the food? If so you could try something like this. (The food rests on a wire grid which serves as a drainage.)

Thanks for the idea. :) I'll try to put a feeder like this on my plot of land next spring and summer, and I'll see if it's effective in my case.

Spoiler: show
The problem with this kind of low feeders in that place (surrounded by fields with grain and vegetables) is that there is a high probability that it may attract rodents - field mice and hamsters. Especially in the fall, this is really a problem here - field mice are looking for places where they can spend the winter and move closer to people's houses, you really need to be careful and always keep the entrance doors of the house closed - otherwise next thing you know that the field mice have entered the house (you can detect their presence by the specific unpleasant odor they produce, as well as by gnawed cardboard boxes, etc.). I do not want to kill them with a mousetrap (and especially I do not want to use poison - which can be dangerous for some other living organisms, including birds) so I just try to do everything that in the fall there was not bunch of grains/seeds on the ground (and even walnuts for crows/ravens I prefer to leave directly on the trees and to gather those ones that have fallen to the ground), and I also store food and seeds in the house in glass jars/containers and closed wall cabinets.

(I also wish that a couple of common kestrels visited these places, found a suitable nesting place somewhere nearby and raised their chicks here, and that these places were safe for them. I will never forget I once saw a YouTube video from a nest of these birds, quantity of rodents that these birds are able to catch and feed to their chicks is very impressive.
It’s too bad that many agrarians/farmers are not able to understand that birds of prey need to be protected. Some of those agrarians/farmers continue to use poison in the fight against mice in fields and many of them use pesticides in large guantities, which leads to tragic consequences. :( )

I think that the most frequent visitor of such bird species to my land plot this summer was a white wagtail. Usually they can be found walking along the side of a road there, but it looked like my land plot was part of the hunting territory of one of them. But honestly, I don’t know what I could give as a snack for this insect-nutritious bird. For all birds, I always put a few additional low containers of water on the ground during the spring and summer - so perhaps it could be helpful as a source of drinking for this bird as well, plus the water can attract insects and therefore some birds can catch them there, but that's all (white wagtails are here only during the warm period, and then they fly away).
As for common blackbird which is shown in that photo with the low feeder, I didn’t see any in that area at all.

Sparrows are actually most common there in both places - in the trees and on the ground. During breeding season (the breeding can be 2-3 times per season) they become mainly insect-oriented and I often see them not only on trees/bushes but also jumping on the ground under berry bushes (fallen overripe berries can attract insects) in search of food for their chicks. But those sparrows are very familiar with the feeder that is placed at the metal pole in the grapeyard, so I thought there is no need to make an additional feeder on the ground to attract them.

Coastliner wrote:
sjal wrote:
There is no need to make the feeder so high, I just did it in order to sometimes be able to additionally tie something that has no place directly inside the feeder


Well, I guess it depends on which kinds of birds you want to attract. More space means more room for larger birds. The magpies here can't seem to ingest the food with their heads inside the small feeder. They have to take something out and swallow it on the ground (with their necks upright). So, not everything is smooth sailing but at least the pigeons can't pillage the food tray. They can use the milk carton in the tree (which gets pillaged by tits sometimes :-D.) .

As for attracting birds selectively and separately, I think I don't really worry about it there, all birds are equally welcome. I don't make any "extra" smaller feeders separately for certain birds, and just try to make sure there is enough of variety of food in that general big feeder.
You mentioned starlings earlier, and I remembered that there was a year when a pair of starlings nested under the roof with wavy slate of a neighbor’s house in the spring (under the same roof, a few pairs of sparrows lay their eggs in nests and raise their chicks every year) which is located not far from the feeder. I didn’t see if the starlings ate something at the feeder and how they behaved with smaller birds (It is not advisable to closely watch birds during nesting, usually when you are just walking nearby and are busy with some work - they do not pay attention to you at all, but as soon as you start directly watching them - they become very suspicious and nervous), but starlings were in minority there anyway, and I don't mind if they used food in the feeder for a snack or if they ate some berries in my garden.

In the city, the situation is different - all the parks and squares are dominated by crows there, so smaller feeders can provide more chances for food for smaller birds (although, given the resourcefulness of crows, there is a risk(?) that they have found a way to take some food from small feeders too).
Pigeons are almost absent in local parks (and the population of pigeons here in general is much smaller than in metropolis), the only places where you can find them in relatively big quantities in the city are market squares and near large shopping centers where people feed them simply by throwing them some food on asphalt pavements.

---
I've noticed that the OP wrote that you can ask questions here.
If someone has a plot of land with a garden or just noticed somewhere that birds were eating some berries/other plants, could you please write here - which ones? This is especially relevant for the cold autumn and winter periods in Europe, North America, Russia, possibly Northern Japan. If these plants have hight frost resistance and are relatively non-invasive for the region where I live, I will try to find seeds/seedlings/saplings here and to plant them for birds in my region.
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PostPosted: Tue Nov 28, 2023 7:49 am 
 

sjal wrote:
The problem with this kind of low feeders in that place (surrounded by fields with grain and vegetables) is that there is a high probability that it may attract rodents - field mice and hamsters.


Hamsters? Wild hamsters?? :eek:

Ah, I forgot about the mice and rats (rodents are my favourite animals but their faeces can be harmful to birds) and that you probably aren't around 24/7 to supervise a ground feeder… (I'd put it inside for the night etc.) and if there are no blackbirds, the feeder may indeed be superfluous.

sjal wrote:
If someone has a plot of land with a garden or just noticed somewhere that birds were eating some berries/other plants, could you please write here - which ones?


Personally, I'm no botanist (on a good day I can spot the difference between a cucumber and a strawberry...) but, here, the plants the birds seem to feed on are e.g. spindle (euonymus europaeus), holly (ilex aquifolium), dog rose, hawthorn and rowan. But caution! Some of them are said to be highly toxic for humans and even insects (spindle and holly) and probably for all kinds of animals so that birds might only survive the berries in certain months (i.e. periods of low toxicity). I have no notion of gardening but I think tolerability is the most important thing. As for dog rose, hawthorn and rowan: tolerable but not all birds like them.

PS: Anecdote: Damn! Yesterday they emptied the feeders three times! Today, after a mild snowfall: next to no activity. I hope they're all alive and well…
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MeavyHetal
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PostPosted: Tue Nov 28, 2023 2:57 pm 
 

Fellow dog owners:

I’ve been taking our pet Chihuahua/Min Pin mix (thats what i presume she is, we adopted her from our local SPCA) to dog daycare on days where me and my wife are both working, but with the recent outbreak of the mysterious canine respiratory illness I am now rather reluctant to take her. As much as I want to support the local daycare, I don’t want to risk her getting it and developing pneumonia. We have a trip planned in January and are planning to board her during that time, but I’m now unsure of that as well.

Any other dog owners here that are concerned about this illness? The veterinary community isn’t sure what it is at this time and can only give palliative care as there is currently no vaccine or direct treatment available.
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sjal
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 01, 2023 1:01 pm 
 

Coastliner wrote:
sjal wrote:
If someone has a plot of land with a garden or just noticed somewhere that birds were eating some berries/other plants, could you please write here - which ones?


Personally, I'm no botanist (on a good day I can spot the difference between a cucumber and a strawberry...) but, here, the plants the birds seem to feed on are e.g. spindle (euonymus europaeus), holly (ilex aquifolium), dog rose, hawthorn and rowan. But caution! Some of them are said to be highly toxic for humans and even insects (spindle and holly) and probably for all kinds of animals so that birds might only survive the berries in certain months (i.e. periods of low toxicity). I have no notion of gardening but I think tolerability is the most important thing. As for dog rose, hawthorn and rowan: tolerable but not all birds like them.

Thanks for the information and for the caution!

Spoiler: show
Already have a red rowan tree and a hawthorn shrub. The birds that are able to eat these berries in large quantities and in the coldest frosts here are waxwings, - when I came to my plot of land after winters when (presumably) these birds flew through those places, there were no berries on the tree/shrub at all (only a small part on the ground under the tree/shrub), but in the last few years these berries have remained almost untouched all winter here - so I'm trying to find some additional trees/shrubs/bushes that can be used by some other birds as food in winter.

Dog rose is quite common here - there are several bushes near fences in that area, but I didn’t see any birds eating it.
A similar situation is with Viburnum opulus shrubs - this is a very common ornamental shrub in Ukraine, but the berries stand untouched by birds all winter too.

The bushes/shrubs/trees that have berries that are edible for birds but are poisonous to humans or that have flowers that are poisonous to insects are definitely not suitable for planting in a fruit and berry garden, especially if this garden was planned taking into account that children might visit it.
I recalled another shrub like this - elderberry (Sambucus nigra L. (the berries of which are poisonous when unripe, but when they are ripe birds can eat them, and these ripe berries can also be used by people for drying or making jam) and Sambucus racemosa (the berries are edible only for birds)). This plant is also quite common here, especially in villages, but I decided not to plant it on my land plot.

If someone wants to take all the risks into account, then perhaps berries such as red rowan (which can hang on branches all winter) should not be planted at all, because under certain circumstances they can also lead to toxicity in birds - https://www.reconnectwithnature.org/new ... ted-fruit/
(if global warming will get much worse every year, then perhaps I will pick these berries in autumn, will dry them and will add them to feeders during winter only in dried form).

---
I also needed to mention that there is a possibility to plant trees/shrubs outside the land of ​​summer cottages - in windbreaks. There are almost no people there who visit those windbreaks places, and it seems no one controls plantings there - especially those along the railway tracks (in theory, sometimes some work should be carried out there - clearing away dead wood, trimming branches that grow too close to the railway/electric power lines, planting new trees/shrubs, but in fact those places are very unkempt these days), so for several years now I have been planting trees and shrubs myself on free parts of the land (away from any railways/roads/electric power lines) there. Basically I plant trees there that are good for birds but that are too tall to plant them directly outside the fence of my plot of land (birch (Betula pendula), spruce, pine, tall cherry trees (Prunus avium), - they are relatively common here anyway, so in fact I just increase their number here; also beech (Fagus sylvatica) - much less common here, but its nuts can be used as food by tits (raw nuts are a bit toxic to humans but they are edible when roasted)), plus every autumn I also bury a few nuts of walnut (Juglans regia L.) in the ground in different places there - and some of them germinate next year.
So if someone knows tall trees whose berries/fruits/seeds/nuts can be used as food by birds, they are also suitable.
I also know that maple and ash seeds can be eaten by Eurasian bullfinch. But here you need to be careful when choosing it because there is a species - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acer_negundo that is invasive in Europe.
There's also this tree - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juniperus_virginiana which seems perfect for birds as both food and shelter in winter, but I read that it also has a few "side effects" so I don't want to take the risk to plant it.

(I hope the OP doesn’t kick us out of this thread for our numerous ornithological and botanical offtopic, I do not have any pets either).


Coastliner wrote:
PS: Anecdote: Damn! Yesterday they emptied the feeders three times! Today, after a mild snowfall: next to no activity. I hope they're all alive and well…

:)

We had quite a lot of snow and it got colder here, so there were more visitors at bird feeders both in the city and near the "summer house".
I had already prepared the feeder near the "summer house" for the winter season in the hope that in this season it would be possible to visit there at least once a week - I made the roof a little wider and also closed one side - the one from the side of the fields - to better protect it from the wind and snow (also I cut off a couple of branches of grapes of a sour variety with bigger berries that birds don’t eat, and I’m not really a fan of this variety of grape either).
Visitors on the two days I was there were mostly great tits and only few sparrows, didn't see any relatively big birds there at all. - https://i.ibb.co/DpN6Xw9/20231130-124802.jpg
I've also made a primitive big plastic bottle feeder for smaller birds only and placed it near the path to the big wood feeder. I haven’t seen anyone visited the "bottle feeder" yet, but I hope one of the tits/sparrows will notice the food inside the bottle and will be brave enough to fly in (there are two holes in the bottle but they are not very wide, but maybe there is a chance that it will be perceived as a relatively suitable/safe alternative when food in the big feeder will run out) - https://i.ibb.co/hY0vWh8/20231130-125533.jpg
I have a similar feeder that hangs right outside the window of my flat in the city (it’s not really correct to place bird feeders in this way, but this was done during the beginning of the covid pandemic when there was a risk of lockdowns - so please don’t judge too harshly). From what I saw these days, it seems that visitors there (usually most active in the early morning) are exclusively great tits, and it is clear that it's not comfortable for them to fly/go into a bird feeder where there is only one small entrance and no "emergency" exit, but it still works with these particular birds and their tactics of using bird feeders in general - "quickly take a sunflower seed/piece of walnut in beak and fly away" (The proso millet remains untouched so it seems sparrows did not visit there.). This morning I took a few photos with some visitors:
https://i.ibb.co/0jsCY0W/20231201-083445.jpg
https://i.ibb.co/PQbnFRC/20231201-083449.jpg
https://i.ibb.co/52gKFL9/20231201-083519.jpg
Edit: writing in this thread is useful, it makes me look at things much more critically.
I've made an "emergency" exit in the upper part of the bottle (from the side of the window) on this feeder and left a roof-canopy above the exit to better protect it from rain and snow. - https://i.ibb.co/z7vRr0p/20231204-090839-1-1.jpg
If you have any ideas to replace this bird feeder with something better (but still - for small birds only and protected from rain and snow), I will try to make it or to find it in stores (only don't suggest those feeders that attach with suction cups to window glass, to me they look very unsafe and can come unstuck and fall down).
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PostPosted: Wed Dec 06, 2023 10:32 pm 
 

I have always had pets, they are much better to have around than most people ever known. I have:

2 Dogs ( 1 Rat Terrier & 1 Chihuahua )
1 Cat ( a Calico )
2 Rodents ( 2 Syrian Hamsters ) and...

13 Parrots:
1 Congo African Grey
1 Umbrella Cockatoo
2 Solomon Island Eclectus'
1 Yellow Crown Amazon
1 Double Yellow-Headed Amazon
2 Blue & Gold MaCaws
1 Catalina MaCaw
1 Sun Conure
1 Brown-Crested Conure
2 Budgies
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Coastliner
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 08, 2023 6:35 pm 
 

sjal wrote:
If someone wants to take all the risks into account, then perhaps berries such as red rowan (which can hang on branches all winter) should not be planted at all, because under certain circumstances they can also lead to toxicity in birds - https://www.reconnectwithnature.org/new ... ted-fruit/


Oh, I didn't know berries can intoxicate birds. Thanks for the info. Looks like berries, birds and windows might make for an unfortunate combination…

sjal wrote:
(I hope the OP doesn’t kick us out of this thread for our numerous ornithological and botanical offtopic, I do not have any pets either).


Yeah, but I'm not too concerned about this because the only difference between caring for pets and caring for wild animals is the question of ownership, which often remains unanswered anyway: "a man may cast a dainty to his cat (his cat he calls her, but she owns him not)" (Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings, The Two Towers, Shelob's Lair). ( :nods: )

sjal wrote:
I've also made a primitive big plastic bottle feeder for smaller birds only and placed it near the path to the big wood feeder. […]
I have a similar feeder that hangs right outside the window of my flat in the city […]
I've made an "emergency" exit in the upper part of the bottle (from the side of the window) on this feeder and left a roof-canopy above the exit to better protect it from rain and snow. - https://i.ibb.co/z7vRr0p/20231204-090839-1-1.jpg
If you have any ideas to replace this bird feeder with something better (but still - for small birds only and protected from rain and snow), I will try to make it or to find it in stores


I think the bottle is fine, especially with the second exit. As far as protection is concerned, I can't think of a better object. Last winter I placed a similar bottle in a tree (similar but much smaller, 0,5 l, and with drainage holes at the bottom… I don't know, does your bottle have a drainage?) before I eventually took it down because I read that, over time, UV rays can release toxins from PET bottles that can disturb the hormonal balance in humans. So… if humans can suffer fertility disorder after too much exposure to those toxins – what about animals or their offspring's offspring? Maybe I'm overcautious but now I can sleep better. I replaced it with a simple milk carton (which gets renewed weekly) like this one. (But without the "perch". The carton rests on a branch, so an additional perch isn't needed.)

As for the question how you could replace your bottle feeder… I don't know, can't think of anything better or better protected against the weather, but if you, too, are concerned about PET toxins there are simple and effective feeders of this kind:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/JoDaK-Squirrel ... B09RQ767SN (plastic food bowl, always problematic, and there's no drainage)
https://www.worm.co.uk/products/picoti-bird-feeder (metal food bowl, better than plastic, still no drainage)

I must say I quite like these metal grid feeders but now I can't find a version you can fix to a wall or a tree like this variant. Pretty sure it exists somewhere, though. Sure, the food gets wet, but that's nature. As long as it can dry off quickly (grid = drainage, ventilation) and you have many daily visitors, mould formation isn't very probable. Cons: big birds can empty them in no time.

PS: If anyone's interested: My other feeders look like this:
- bird table (A Christmas present – but the price on Amazon is ridiculous, the giver probably paid only half the price, so it's one of the cheapest bird tables around.)
- robin feeder (For small birds only – but now a strategy-trained pigeon has found a way to empty it in minutes [ :tongue: ] and I'm working on a plan to prevent this.)
- fat ball feeder (The steel cables only lasted 12 months – then they were rusted through. I replaced them with a piece of string and hope the weather gods like string… After 16 months, the rest is still is in top shape and looks like it could last forever.)
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sjal
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PostPosted: Mon Dec 11, 2023 8:06 pm 
 

Coastliner, thank you very much again for sharing the information!
No, I did not know about toxic effects of PET bottles (This kind of bird feeder is mentioned as suitable even in articles written by some ornithologists about feeding birds here :( ). I almost didn't use bottle bird feeders before, I will not use this as a bird feeder at all anymore.
Also thanks for the ideas with those plastic and metal bird feeders. I think if there is no drainage then I would find a way to clean+wash the feeders at least 2 times a week, but for me main "cons" of these feeders is that they look like those where there is a risk that a lot of food will fall down as a result of active moving of some visitors, there should be relatively high sides in the feeders.

I think I will replace the bottle bird feeder that I hung for smaller birds near the "summer house" with a small wooden one. I’ll make a classic feeder in the shape of a wooden house, but much smaller, maybe with a few vertical/horizontal entrance partition posts - like on your awesome bird feeder table - and with one side covered with a piece of plywood (with the ability to easily open it) - to make it easier to clean the feeder and to add food + protection from snow and rain on the windiest side.
I will also think about wooden alternatives to feeders like the first two ones you suggested - the idea that there is only one entrance but a wide one (and at the same time relatively low in height).
Perhaps I’ll try to modify it to fit my conditions and will try to implement something like this:
https://vikna.tv/wp-content/uploads/202 ... 68x512.jpg
(with higher sides and without those strange metal staples)

As for the feeder near the flat's window, I don’t even know anymore whether I’ll replace it with some alternative variant after disposal of the bottle feeder or whether it’s better to put another wooden one (but smaller), in addition to the medium-sized wooden one that is already there, in the green square across the road on the right side of the window instead.
It so happened that the great tit monopoly did not last long, and now there is this visitor there on daily basis -
https://i.ibb.co/QvyW347/20231210-091343.jpg
Eurasian nuthatches are very welcome to bird feeders for me, but it is much more natural to see these birds on bird feeders in squares/parks/forests among the trees, I couldn’t imagine that this bird would fly to that particular feeder near the window. The flock of tits that flies there for a snack on daily basis is also a little shocked - https://i.ibb.co/0BwqVgk/20231210-090745-1.jpg (although this nuthatch does not offend them, the bird just flies “out of turn” and sometimes stays inside a little too long - these birds can be quite picky and if there are any nuts (walnut, hazelnut) or peanuts among the sunflower seeds/some grain, then they will rummage through the food by using their beak and, first of all, will choose nuts/peanuts + these birds also like to look for pieces of food of the size that can be taken of more than one piece at once in their long beak for the purpose of transferring food to the birds' food storage areas, - and then the tits have to wait).

Maybe it's better to give up this idea of ​​feeding small birds outside of my flat's window altogether? Or it's better to keep feeding there until the warm spring (since I started it in this year's cold season)? As for those birds that have been visited that feeder outside the window, I think they will be able to find their way to the feeder in the nearest square.
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Coastliner
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PostPosted: Sat Dec 16, 2023 7:46 am 
 

sjal wrote:
I will also think about wooden alternatives to feeders like the first two ones you suggested - the idea that there is only one entrance but a wide one (and at the same time relatively low in height).
Perhaps I’ll try to modify it to fit my conditions and will try to implement something like this:
https://vikna.tv/wp-content/uploads/202 ... 68x512.jpg
(with higher sides and without those strange metal staples)


Looks great and good luck! I wish I could build the necessary stuff myself but I've neither the talent nor the tools…

sjal wrote:
https://i.ibb.co/QvyW347/20231210-091343.jpg


Yay, a nuthatch! Never seen one in real life myself.

sjal wrote:
Maybe it's better to give up this idea of feeding small birds outside of my flat's window altogether? Or it's better to keep feeding there until the warm spring (since I started it in this year's cold season)? As for those birds that have been visited that feeder outside the window, I think they will be able to find their way to the feeder in the nearest square.


Well, it's your choice, but, personally, I would try to find a way to continue feeding them throughout the cold season because lots of ornithological websites say: 'The birds rely on you, especially in winter'. It's possible that some birds fly up to five kilometres just to get to a feeder they once discovered. But maybe there's no problem if they already know the feeder across the road. Maybe you can see whether your visitors come from or fly to the other one.

That other one… is it a private or a public feeder? And could you use that one instead or place your own (additional) feeder in the same square? If that's possible and "allowed", it would possibly be a good alternative because, if I don't misunderstand anything, the feeder across the road is closer to the ground than your apartment, and birds probably prefer the ground level to altitudes. I don't know if it was an exaggeration or not but I read somewhere that e.g. balcony feeding doesn't make much sense in winter (it's very helpful in the warm half of the year, though) because the birds use up precious energy to get to the upper storeys of a higher building. As I said, don't know whether it was an exaggeration but… just a thought.
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sjal
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 22, 2023 8:30 am 
 

Coastliner wrote:
Yay, a nuthatch! Never seen one in real life myself.

I read that in cities/towns nuthatches' preferred habitats are those parks/squares where there are many old deciduous trees. If this bird is found in a country where you live (I read that they do not live in Ireland for some reason, for example), then I hope you will have a chance to see a nuthatch someday.
Nuthatches are those small birds that can be easily overlooked in parks/squares until you learn their voices or until you put a bird feeder there.

Among the regular visitors that I saw at the feeder near the window, there is also a pair of marsh tits (a peculiarity of marsh tits is that their call sounds quite loud, plus they, like nuthatches, also store food. This information was also useful for me in case of these birds - https://www.birdguides.com/articles/ide ... llow-tits/ + https://youtube.com/watch?v=HUrMrXbJIQk ... e=emb_logo), but they fly separately and are not part of the flock of great tits (it's a sunflower heart in the bird's beak):
https://i.ibb.co/5TzJ6hd/20231221-092950.jpg
(+ an additional photo for identification from a different angle where the small white mark at the base of the upper mandible is noticeable - https://i.ibb.co/SJ82Xqf/20231218-130534-1.jpg)

Coastliner wrote:
...birds probably prefer the ground level to altitudes. I don't know if it was an exaggeration or not but I read somewhere that e.g. balcony feeding doesn't make much sense in winter (it's very helpful in the warm half of the year, though) because the birds use up precious energy to get to the upper storeys of a higher building. As I said, don't know whether it was an exaggeration but… just a thought.

Yes, this is one of the reasons. You can see in the photo above that there is a tree (an old plum tree) under the window, but it is still a bit lower the level of the third floor where the feeder is located so the birds have to fly for food not only to the side but also up and therefore they have to waste more energy. I just hope that the nutritional value of the food in the feeder compensates for this enough and that the flight back to the tree, even with a beak loaded with food, is easier for birds.
I wish there was an option to hang a bird feeder directly on a tree that is growing outside the window, but there's only this one tree and it is placed too close to the road - and even though it's just an internal small road between houses, it's still a rather uncomfortable place to hang a bird feeder at a lower part of the tree, - so placing an additional bird feeder for small birds only in a nearby square is really a better alternative.
The fact that great tits prefer to eat food on trees/shrubs that are located close to a bird feeder in order to waste less energy on flight is especially noticeable when I add a lot of sunflower seeds into the feeder near the summer house - most birds sit on the nearest grape branches to peck sunflower seeds there, and over time the path under the branches is covered with husks from the seeds.
As for flying long distances from roosting places to the feeder, I think that this is not the case for most of these particular birds in the city (both the great tits and the nuthatch) - because they arrive very early in the morning, as soon as it is light enough to fly at all, and in my weekend when I stayed at home I didn't notice any other birds (except for the marsh tits - which also seem to be "territorial" birds and therefore live nearby) later in the day/evening.
But the thing is that visiting such bird feeders looks especially unnatural for nuthatches because these birds can expend even less energy when they have a possibility to cover a part of the distance to a feeder on a tree instead of flying. There are video compilations from one of the Ukrainian Telegram channels about birds, which clearly show how some nuthatches can behave in feeders that are placed directly on/very close to the tree trunk - the bird holds on to the bark of the tree with its paws and claws (and the bird can to descend head-first), but, at the same time, with its beak the bird picks up food from the feeder and then runs away with food along the tree trunk:
https://youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=0GfMJuEwl4c
https://t.me/birds_of_ukraine/327
(I don’t know if you have Telegram, the video is similar to the first one, only at the beginning it additionally shows that, if you notice that nuthatches are visiting your bird feeder, then you better have a feeder with higher sides because these picky birds can rummage through food quite intensively).

Coastliner wrote:
That other one… is it a private or a public feeder? And could you use that one instead or place your own (additional) feeder in the same square? If that's possible and "allowed", it would possibly be a good alternative...

Like most bird feeders in squares/parks in the city, that medium-sized wooden bird feeder was made and installed by schoolchildren from a nearby school (but the square itself does not belong to the school's garden territory. The square is a public place and therefore such concepts as “private” or “public” bird feeder can be rather relative, in theory anyone passing the square or walking there can fill any bird feeder that is placed there - you only have to hope that the people who decide to fill the feeder know that birds cannot be fed with roasted and salted seeds/nuts, rye bread, etc. / or you can hang a piece of paper in a waterproof punched pocket with detailed instructions about the allowed and prohibited food somewhere on/near the bird feeder).

Coastliner, thanks again for your advice and for your patience, I've decided to make and hang an additional wooden bird feeder for small birds in this square, and also to see if I can find a relatively safe plastic/metal variant to hang a feeder near the window (but only for this cold season).
The idea with recycling of cardboard milk boxes to make “disposable” bird feeders is very good in general, but I think this variant is not very suitable in the case of a flat's window from a fire safety point of view.

Coastliner wrote:
sjal wrote:
I will also think about wooden alternatives to feeders like the first two ones you suggested - the idea that there is only one entrance but a wide one (and at the same time relatively low in height).
Perhaps I’ll try to modify it to fit my conditions and will try to implement something like this:
https://vikna.tv/wp-content/uploads/202 ... 68x512.jpg
(with higher sides and without those strange metal staples)


Looks great and good luck! I wish I could build the necessary stuff myself but I've neither the talent nor the tools…

Thanks (I'm much less into coming up with my own designs, but I can make something similar from photos/drawings (there's also an option of asking someone more experienced to do it)). Yes, I also like this handmade bird feeder. I've also found this triangular version of such a wooden feeder in a store abroad - https://www.birdfood.co.uk/media/catalo ... -01_1.webp , but it looks a bit too low in height and narrow and therefore uncomfortable to clean it.

I've also found this trapezoidal feeder which can also be used as a feeder for small birds - https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81s ... _QL50_.jpg - it looks quite heavy in weight and therefore shipping from abroad may be too expensive, but this feeder looks comfortable and it is also possible for me to do a similar feeder myself (I’ll just cover the widest entrance with plywood - the one without sides and with that metal skewer).

The search for bird feeders for small birds in Ukrainian stores (both offline and online) was unsuccessful, but I've come to the city of Kyiv for a few days, and in my free time I will try to search something suitable in garden stores (where there seems to be a better chance of finding feeders for wild birds than in pet stores - which are much more focused on feeders for pets) and at big pet markets there. I wish there was more choice in the design and material of bird feeders for small birds in Ukrainian stores, but it looks like it would be easier to make the feeders myself.
Edit: I didn’t find anything even remotely suitable made of metal/plastic that can be used as a bird feeder near the window here, unfortunately.
I've ended up with this classic wooden bird feeder - https://i.ibb.co/N27y677/20231229-102959-1.jpg
Fortunately, this feeder is quite small in size in general (20cm in length, 13cm in width, 20cm in height), plus those two circular "emergency exits" are suitable for small birds only.
I don’t know if the roof of the feeder can fully protect food inside the feeder in snowy/rainy+windy weather, but then I’ll just clean and dry the feeder in case the food gets wet.
(I will only cover one wide side - the one that will be leaned against the wall near the window, and will polish the sharp edges of upper horizontal part of the side on the other wide entrance (where the birds will sit with their paws) with sandpaper + I will make an additional (and more comfortable for birds' paws) small wooden perch in front of the wide entrance).
---

From my experience, even if you manage to find some more or less suitable things for wild birds here, in most cases you still have to do some additional work and to use additional materials.
During my recent visits to the summer house, I noticed that there have been a few blue tits among the flocks of great tits there - so I decided to try to find and install a tithouse (which can be used by birds both as a shelter on a cold and snowy night and as a nest box during the nesting period) with a hole diameter that is suitable and safe for such small birds, but there weren’t many to choose from. I've chosen this one:
https://i.ibb.co/Jvw4N65/20231217-085108.jpg
(the diameter of the entrance is 30mm - it's a house with the smallest entrance I was able to find here) - the house itself looks relatively OK (except that the inner walls are polished to a shine so that the birds have nothing to hold with their claws, and I had to do the scratches myself - https://i.ibb.co/HTXcfn2/20231217-084526-1-1.jpg), but there is no additional extended wooden board on the back wall to attach it with wire to a tree trunk so you need to have additional materials (boards, nails, screws, wire, etc.) as well as some very basic set of tools (hammer, saw, drill, screwdriver) in any case.
I've also found a good linden house for great tits/sparrows (the diameter of the entrance is 35mm - there are already two such bird houses on the wall of the summer house, I will attach this one to the trunk of a relatively tall tree):
https://i.ibb.co/DbGx4XR/20231217-094939.jpg
The house for great tits/sparrows had a wooden perch under the entrance - https://i.ibb.co/7tGBdg1/20231201-114607.jpg, which is not safe, so I had to cut that down and to make some scratches on the outside of the front wall instead.
Both houses are made of light wood, but since I plan to place them on trunks of dark trees, I had to darken the material, - I used water-based wood stain and only on the outside (and also waited a week for any smell to dissipate), so I hope it's safe enough.

----
During my later visit to the summer house, I saw a flock of Eurasian bullfinches visited the feeders (they were eating sunflower seeds), which made me realize that I need to provide more variety in the food for bird feeders there and include ash and maple seeds. On the other hand, it looks like the birds also ate rowan and sea buckthorn seeds in the garden because there were piles of skins of these berries under the tree/bush.
(It's been warmer these days and the snow that was before has completely melted) -
male bird - https://i.ibb.co/svq0SMN/20231220-120921-1.jpg
female bird (and also a blue tit and sparrows) - https://i.ibb.co/qxkS8RB/20231220-114835-1.jpg

(I've also added various fruit/berry and vegetable seeds in small quantities (crushed cucumber, melon, watermelon, zucchini seeds, pumpkin seed cut in two) and flax seeds)

Coastliner, it's always interesting for me to know if there are any new visitors at your bird feeders.
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Coastliner
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PostPosted: Fri Jan 05, 2024 2:55 pm 
 

Sorry for the late reply.

sjal wrote:
Coastliner, it's always interesting for me to know if there are any new visitors at your bird feeders.


Thanks for asking, but, well, no new birds, instead the old ones seem to be getting fewer as the weeks go by. At the moment there are only a handful of great and blue tits, a handful of magpies, three pigeons, a blackbird couple and the occasional robin.

The two jays went missing a couple of weeks ago (jays are the cutest things ever, almost as large as magpies but too cuddly for words), and the woodpeckers… I don't know where they are gone. In December there were daily visits by a hedge sparrow. Not anymore.

I hope the New Year's fireworks didn't kill or expel many animals here. Bloody fireworks… but now that I think about it it's a bit strange to complain about New Year's war games while you, in the Ukraine, have problems of a far greater scale…

Yep, maybe someday I'll see a nuthatch. Nuthatches, willow tits and bullfinches are also endemic to Germany (where I'm from) but, I guess, they're rather rare in my region. Here, the birds you hear and see when you're on a walk are predominently tits, blackbirds and robins. In the 70s the garden lawns were speckled with sparrows but, sadly, by now they're on their way towards being endangered.

If you want to provide more variety (maybe even to cater for all kinds of birds, soft-bills as well as hard-bills), here's a basic list of recommendations by one of our most well-known ornithologists:

1. sunflower seeds, hemp, peanuts (plus low quantities of grains such as wheat and oat),
2. fat food consisting of oat flakes and suet / fat-coated oat-flakes (he also mentions wheat flakes but, from my experience, the birds prefer oat flakes),
3. fat balls / suet balls,
4. perhaps pieces of apple for certain birds such as blackbirds, fieldfares, green woodpeckers and others; "perhaps" because birds don't really need fruits and couldn't survive on a diet consisting entirely of fruits and berries.

Why (oat) flakes? Because all birds, even sick birds, can eat and digest them quite easily. Sugar- and salt-free, of course. If there are no fat-coated flakes available, you can also bathe the flakes in e.g. sunflower oil. That'll do. (As long as hard-bills find something that's more to their liking, e.g. nuts, it can happen that they ignore the flakes altogether, though.)
Why fat? Because, as he explains elsewhere, the muscles responsible for flight need fat to function properly and untiringly, which is particularly important in the breeding season.

So fat food (the fat food you can buy here is a mix of fat-coated oat flakes, peanuts and raisins or sultanas) and fat balls are very useful. There are just three problems with fat balls:

1. In winter, it can happen that the birds largely ignore them simply because they don't cover long distances in the cold (in other words: they don't need as much fat as in summer).
2. In spring and summer, i.e. in the breeding season, it can happen, that the birds, especially the tits, feed big chunks of nuts or unpeeled sunflower seeds, which are often an ingredient of fat balls, to their young, which can be dangerous for them. Therefore I'd choose fat balls that don't contain big chunks or unpeeled sunflower seeds.
3. If you hang a fat ball somewhere, not all birds can reach it. Some, e.g. blackbirds and robins etc., just aren't climbing artists because of their body structure. But on the bird table: no problem.

You probably know all this already but I just thought fat shouldn't be forgotten if we're talking about food.

sjal wrote:
From my experience, even if you manage to find some more or less suitable things for wild birds here, in most cases you still have to do some additional work and to use additional materials.


:crash: Indeed! For example: my robin feeder. If the birds are too active or if the wind is too strong, it swings like mad. :grumble: To prevent this, I fastened the feeder's bottom to a perch located below the feeder using a small metal ring, a piece of string, one of the feeder's drainage holes and a piece of wire (long story…).

Sometimes even the trees need some amendments and extensions. :roll: A couple of days ago, the branch right below the milk carton for the pigeons (and anybird that's interested) just broke off. Crack! Bye, bye, branch… Problem: how could a hungry customary pigeon reach the food if the perch is gone?

So I constructed an artificial branch using the handle of an old spade, a ring screw and a piece of string: directly below the milk carton the tree trunk branched out, and I stuck the handle through the gap and fastened it to a different tree trunk located behind the first one by means of the ring screw and the piece of string. Sounds complicated, looks complicated, is absolutely simple but is so bizarre that I cannot even describe it vividly and intelligibly. (Now the tree looks as if somebody had run a wooden sword through it.)

(Fun fact: those two tree trunks are the remnants of a) an old plum tree and b) a "wild" tree of unknown sort and origin. One of them is dead, the other's still alive. Bombshell news: the two trunks seem to use the same root system, in other words: at some point in the past, the one that's still alive decided to grow out of the roots of the dead tree…)

Anyway, now the pigeons' perch is back in the same spot where it was before. It couldn't have been any other spot as I could never hang the milk carton anywhere else. It's the only spot suitable for big birds.

Great idea with the nesting boxes (especially as a winter hideout!), and – since you said "there are already two such bird houses on the wall of the summer house"… – have there been any breeding successes yet?

I, too, would definitely buy two or three boxes (probably for half-cavity breeders, e.g. robins, or open-nesting birds, e.g. blackbirds, because those often seem to get overlooked; most nesting boxes I see in garden stores and in the gardens around here are for tits and the like) but, unfortunately, I wouldn't know where to put them. There are just no suitable walls or trees. Shame because the more nesting spots the better.
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Ali Gothika
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PostPosted: Sun Jan 07, 2024 8:36 am 
 

I have a calico cat named Tiffany..She is mostly an outside cat--She is 10 now and is a little senile...Still feisty though cause she always wants to fight the neighbors cat...I adopted her from the pound, the lady there said she was a runt...So, I saved her...
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PostPosted: Sun Jan 14, 2024 6:46 pm 
 

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sjal
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PostPosted: Sun Jan 14, 2024 8:31 pm 
 

Coastliner wrote:
Sorry for the late reply.

Sorry, I should have mentioned here at the beginning that there is no need to apologize, I think this format of one reply in 1-2 weeks is not late at all, to me it’s very OK because you need to set aside some free time to watch birds, plus more thorough instructions about bird feeders and the nuances of feeding wild birds, as well as sharing your personal experiences and observations are very informative and helpful, and I'm very grateful that you are posting it here in this format.
(I, in turn, need some time to try to implement some of it into reality and to observe the results).

Coastliner wrote:
Thanks for asking, but, well, no new birds, instead the old ones seem to be getting fewer as the weeks go by. At the moment there are only a handful of great and blue tits, a handful of magpies, three pigeons, a blackbird couple and the occasional robin.

The two jays went missing a couple of weeks ago (jays are the cutest things ever, almost as large as magpies but too cuddly for words), and the woodpeckers… I don't know where they are gone. In December there were daily visits by a hedge sparrow. Not anymore.

Hope the jays are fine. Since they can gather and hide a lot of food in the warm season with intention of using it in the cold season, the first thing that comes to mind is that they decided that it's time to use their own food reserves more actively instead of visiting bird feeders (although I don't know how/if this process depends on the weather in these birds).
We have a second wave of cold weather and snow these days in Ukraine (there were days when the temperature reached minus 17 degrees Celsius in the region where I live, and there was also a strong wind from the north), and, from what I saw these days in the city, it seems that the nuthatch preferred not to waste energy on flying to the feeder and it seems the bird stayed closer to personal food stores instead, but, as soon as it got a bit warmer, the bird started to visit the feeder more often and regularly.

It's harder to assume a positive theory with the sparrow (and with those small birds that do not store food in general).. I have never seen a hedge sparrow, but I've read that they can be both resident and migratory birds.
Is it possible that one could meet some flock of birds and join them, and they flew away in search of food in some other direction/bird feeder?

I saw flocks of Eurasian tree sparrows at the feeder near the summer house almost every time I visited there, but I think I haven't seen house sparrows during this cold season.
There also seemed to be only tree sparrows at the feeder in the city. I saw the flock for the first time this year a few days ago when the weather was at its coldest and snowiest (now I see the sparrows at the feeder every morning and sometimes in the evening). They are a bit too noisy and "untidy" for a feeder near a window, plus sometimes there are a bit too many of them at once at the feeder - and then it is a bit difficult for the tits to get to the feeder - https://i.ibb.co/0hSsQtG/20240112-080437-1.jpg (although it is still possible to do, and tits usually do not wait for the sparrows to fly away, i.e. not like with the nuthatch - https://i.ibb.co/X5VsFn9/20240107-082710-1.jpg), but, on the other hand, I've got a chance to see if tree sparrows would eat these seeds with the mysterious name “seeds of meadow herbs” - although to me it looks more like seeds of field herbs (I don’t know which ones exactly, but they are intended specifically for birds), which I randomly found and bought at a pet market on my recent visit to Kyiv:
https://i.ibb.co/qMLw3xQ/20240112-115429.jpg (I mix them in small quantities with proso millet)

Spoiler: show
I've finally got rid of those plastic bottle feeders, but not in the way I planned.
I hung that classic wooden bird feeder near the summer house (completely closed one wide entrance and replaced the side of the second wide entrance).
The small round entrances are perfect for great tits and blue tits - the birds flew inside without any problems, but the problem was that the wide entrance in height turned out to be suitable for bullfinches, and these birds completely occupied the feeder (the way they eat at feeders is the same as they eat ash/maple seeds in the trees - they just sit in one place for quite a long time and eat the seeds one by one, these birds are just masters at saving energy) - and the tits had to go back to the old big feeder.
I think the main reason bullfinches prefer that small bird feeder is that it is located relatively far from the house (most birds fly to the feeders from those thickets of apple trees and ornamental bushes across the road), but I hope that the bullfinches also fly to the big feeder (that is located in front of the house) when I leave - besides the sunflower seeds, I also left them a bunch of ash seeds there.
I've made the side of the wide entrance even higher (but with possibility to move it to clean the feeder and to add food there) so that only tits/sparrows could get through there, and I've also made wooden platforms for bullfinches under the round entrances - they can sit there and take food through round holes, but cannot completely get inside the feeder (I watched them for a while and they didn't try to get inside through those entrances, so hope it's safe for them).
https://i.ibb.co/KDtXSK8/20240115-094642-1-1.jpg
https://i.ibb.co/nCgzXdZ/20240115-103903-1-1.jpg

As for the feeder near the window in the city, I took the risk of giving the two-story wooden bird feeder a try, hopefully that metal structure (an old TV antenna) near the window can protect even this type of bird feeder from visit of larger birds. I didn’t change anything in this feeder, only attached a wooden perch to the bottom and screwed in two metal screws with a hook of this type - https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/imag ... EOTwwrFI&s (one on top and the other on the side - for additional safety) to drag the wire and to hang the feeder. I'll probably also add a horizontal partition at the second floor to make the top entrance a little smaller and more protected from pigeons/crows (along the lines of those 2 small holes I've made there).
It's not the easiest feeder to clean, so I just try to put food for 1-2 days only, plus I remove, wash and dry the feeder once a week. After the snowiest nights there was a lot of snow on the roof and on the perch, but there were almost no snow inside the feeder (the feeder is placed with an entrance to the east and usually the wind is not so strong/frequent on that side).

As for the blue tit on the photo with the nuthatch, I saw the bird for the first time a few days ago at this feeder, now the bird is also a regular visitor here.


Jays are interesting and beautiful birds, but it seems they are much more “wild” and cautious here, because I have never seen them at bird feeders. The only place where I saw them here was in the forest outside the city (and only from afar - by using binoculars).
Magpies and woodpeckers are more common here. I saw magpies both in the city and not far from the summer house (although the bird did not visit the feeder when I was there).
As additional information, I read that both jays and magpies can kidnap (as a food) chicks from nests/nestboxes of small birds - so this is one of the reasons to make nestboxes without a perch under the entrance.

Coastliner wrote:
Great idea with the nesting boxes (especially as a winter hideout!), and – since you said "there are already two such bird houses on the wall of the summer house"… – have there been any breeding successes yet?

Yes, I hung the nestboxes last winter, and both bird houses were taken over by great tits, and the birds had chicks there. When I cleaned the houses in the autumn after the nesting season, there were no eggs/dead chicks inside, so hopefully they are all alive and well.
In theory, sparrows can also have a nest in nestbox with 35 mm diameter entrance, but these birds seem to prefer nests under a roof with wavy slate of a house here.
I will take into account the recommendations for food during the nesting season and will think about alternatives to sunflower seeds (such as sunflower hearts, walnuts and peanuts crushed into small pieces).
The main reason sunflower seeds seem to me to be the best for use in feeders near the summer house is that husk can longer protect edible part of the seed from affect of weather/other external conditions. For the same reason, I don't put oat flakes there - they are too vulnerable to rain/snow. I only add whole oat grain to the feeder there sometimes, but this is of course more suitable for hard bills. *sigh*

Coastliner wrote:
Why (oat) flakes? Because all birds, even sick birds, can eat and digest them quite easily. Sugar- and salt-free, of course. If there are no fat-coated flakes available, you can also bathe the flakes in e.g. sunflower oil. That'll do. (As long as hard-bills find something that's more to their liking, e.g. nuts, it can happen that they ignore the flakes altogether, though.)

I've added some oat flakes to the feeder in the city, but it seems great tits have either become too "conservative" in food there or are not experienced enough and do not know that it can be eaten at all - all the members of the flock gathered at the feeder and unsuccessfully tried to figure out what to do with these flakes, they took oat flake in their beak and then just threw it down, and after that tried to find pieces of that kind of food they were used to. -
https://i.ibb.co/xqcH7Wn/20240109-084132-1-1.jpg
I only had "hard" flakes (those where on the package is written that they need to be boiled, cook for 10-15 minutes - when to use it as a food for humans, of course), maybe to try using softer and smaller ones?
Fortunately, this flock looks quite healthy and strong so they can eat sunflower seeds quite easy, but it might be good to give their diet a bit more variety.
I also add halves of peanuts to the feeder from time to time - both the great tits and the nuthatch eat it (as well as crushed walnuts).

Coastliner wrote:
even sick birds

(Speaking of sick birds... I think this is important to mention here: what do ornithologists recommend to do when, in the midst of the cold season, someone notice a sick bird with a contagious disease (such as avian pox in great tits) at a bird feeder? Temporarily stop feeding?)

Coastliner wrote:
You probably know all this already but I just thought fat shouldn't be forgotten if we're talking about food.

Thanks for this information! No, I knew only part of it and always thought that birds need more sources of fat in a feeder in winter rather than in summer.
I would only add to point 3 that, when it comes to this kind of food on the bird table, it is necessary to remember that there is a higher risk that such food can attract cats - so you need to make sure that they don’t get in there.

I think I need to mention that those sources of fat that ornithologists recommend here are...different, to put it mildly - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salo_(food)
I don't eat this kind of food myself, and rarely buy it for birds either (but when I do, I always choose only fresh and unprocessed+unsalted one). I only use it in cold frosty weather (to prevent the fat from hight temperatures and also to prevent the birds' feathers from getting covered with the fat), it especially helps with the situation near the summer house because it serves as a source of energy for birds when all other food in the feeders has run out.
I'll try to search fat balls/suet balls for birds in Ukrainian online stores, and, if I don’t find it, then I’ll buy the necessary ingredients and make it myself.

Taking this opportunity, that you know German, could you please say what is written here - https://www.riffreporter.de/de/umwelt/f ... -interview
Is it too critical and should it be taken into account or is it still acceptable to give fat/fat balls/suet balls for birds but not too often?

I will also try to find hemp seeds here.
I will also add some raisins and sultanas to the bird feeder near the summer house on my next visit there.
I have already placed raw fruits (pieces of apple) near the feeder there, but it seems there were no blackbirds or fieldfares at all, unfortunately. Blue tits are the only birds I saw who pecked apples (a bit) there, I didn’t even know before that these birds could eat it.

---
Coastliner wrote:
I hope the New Year's fireworks didn't kill or expel many animals here. Bloody fireworks… but now that I think about it it's a bit strange to complain about New Year's war games while you, in the Ukraine, have problems of a far greater scale…

Yes, fauna, including birds, in Ukraine suffers from military actions a lot - most of all, from the fact that many bird habitats are destroyed/polluted - some forests are burned, a lot of trees are damaged/"killed" by artillery, rivers and lands in war zones are polluted with heavy metals and fuel from heavy equipment and shells, etc. etc. Some of the habitats were quite unique so it puts certain species of birds at risk of extinction here. :(
People also need to understand that this is partly a problem on an international scale - in the south of Ukraine, in the regions where there were/are intense military actions during the war, there are routes of many migratory birds that fly further to Europe, and it is very difficult to predict the extent of the negative effect on these birds due to the war.

As for the life of wild birds in the city where I live (in Khmelnitsky region), I think loud noises are the main negative impact on the birds here during the war - not far from the city (fortunately, in the opposite direction from the territory of summer houses, plus it is also quite far from that forest outside the city I mentioned earlier) there is an active military airfield, and planes (mostly military and cargo) can take off from there 5-10 or more times a day.
Plus the Russian military from the first days of the full-scale war regularly is trying to destroy this airfield (and also it seems is trying to destroy the city as a whole) - so the birds also suffer from explosions (and possibly fires) due to Russian missiles/Shahed drone attacks here.

But this does not mean that the problems of wild birds in countries where there is no war should be discounted because of this - these problems are also equally important to mention and to pay attention on them.
The official ban on distribution and use of fireworks in Ukraine these days is one of the few positive things that happened for birds here during the war.
Fireworks can affect not only wild birds /animals by the way - https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the- ... -wildlife/ , pets can also suffer from this - I remember reading a story about a relatively old (but he was still quite active) family dog ​​who was so scared by the loud sounds of fireworks that he had a heart attack and died because of it.


Spoiler: show
This is completely off topic (sorry, once again, the OP): the mention of fireworks in the context of birds also reminded me that I prefer to avoid films where people celebrate Christmas and New Year's Eve (even in cases the films are very nature-related), not only because I'm not religious, but also because those films tend to contain scenes/episodes that can turn the whole film into nonsense.
As one of examples of it for me is the film “Eia’s Christmas at Phantom Owl Farm” (2018), which I once watched with my sister and her little son (for whom this film was actually intended because my sister thinks that her son is still a bit too young to watch documentaries about owls and birds of prey in general). One of the plot lines was that the forest was saved from deforestation because the film’s main characters noticed a great grey owl there and made efforts to make the forest a protected area (by proving the fact that this is the nesting and hunting place of this owl).
Throughout the film, the characters demonstrate their love for wildlife and wild birds, but at the end of the film the same people were glad to see the explosions of fireworks in the sky near/above the forest on New Year's Eve.


---

Coastliner wrote:
Sometimes even the trees need some amendments and extensions. :roll: A couple of days ago, the branch right below the milk carton for the pigeons (and anybird that's interested) just broke off. Crack! Bye, bye, branch… Problem: how could a hungry customary pigeon reach the food if the perch is gone?

The story with the tree branch is very impressive :) ; I’ve never made artificial branches in a tree.
It also seems that the local pigeons in the city where I live are so used to having food thrown to them directly on the ground here that I’m not sure they would get to such feeder in a tree at all, even with the help of a branch.
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PostPosted: Thu Jan 25, 2024 10:18 am 
 

Just a quick answer to one aspect, the longer post follows as soon as possible.

sjal wrote:
I will also add some raisins and sultanas to the bird feeder near the summer house on my next visit there.
I have already placed raw fruits (pieces of apple) near the feeder there, but it seems there were no blackbirds or fieldfares at all, unfortunately. Blue tits are the only birds I saw who pecked apples (a bit) there, I didn’t even know before that these birds could eat it.


The raisins are primarily meant for soft-bills such as blackbirds and robins. If there are no such birds in the area, the raisins probably won't get eaten because many tits don't really like them and often throw them out instead. But maybe there are indeed blackbirds and robins (etc.) somewhere in the area, and the new food elements you offer will attract them to the feeder. I have a similar problem with food for hard-bills: I just don't see sparrows or finches here, so I'm unsure whether I should feed seeds and the like. It's a real dilemma. The regular birds here would largely ignore the seeds – but maybe the seeds will attract brand new customers. I tried it once last year but it didn't really work, so the seeds went to the pigeons.

The raisins should be unsulphured, i.e. typical bird food raisins, since sulphured raisins for humans are poisonous for birds. I completely forgot to mention that they should be unsulphured, and that's the reason for this quick answer, but I hope you know that already and haven't provided raisins for humans.

Also, if people feed raisins (and sultanas or even grapes), please make sure that cats and dogs cannot reach them because raisins are under suspicion of being lethal to cats and dogs (kidney failure).
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PostPosted: Wed Jan 31, 2024 11:48 am 
 

sjal wrote:
Sorry, I should have mentioned here at the beginning that there is no need to apologize, I think this format of one reply in 1-2 weeks is not late at all, to me it’s very OK because you need to set aside some free time to watch birds, plus more thorough instructions about bird feeders and the nuances of feeding wild birds, as well as sharing your personal experiences and observations are very informative and helpful, and I'm very grateful that you are posting it here in this format.
(I, in turn, need some time to try to implement some of it into reality and to observe the results).


In my case, the problem isn't really that there isn't enough spare time but that I literally need days to write a long post addressing different aspects. I just can't do this. If there are many aspects that warrant a response, writing a post can take weeks or even longer. For example: I think I'll have to ignore the fireworks problem, which is worth a whole new thread, as well as many other important details in your last (and previous) post(s) (such as the planting of bird food sources etc., which is a whole world in itself).

For some reason, writing (especially in a second language) is a bit (only a bit) easier for me when there are grave disagreements but I'm rubbish when it comes to chatting. This is why this will probably be the last long post, from now on only short ones with one aspect each or so (< Case in point: these few sentences above took me more than two hours and a couple of nerve endings to write. What should I write? Where can I find the right words? How can I make myself understood? *sigh*).

Furthermore, after one and a half years, I'm still really at a beginner level in the realm of bird feeding. So it's great to hear that one or two statements are regarded as helpful but I just don't believe I could ever be of much help considering the thousand open questions I have myself.

sjal wrote:
Hope the jays are fine. Since they can gather and hide a lot of food in the warm season with intention of using it in the cold season, the first thing that comes to mind is that they decided that it's time to use their own food reserves more actively instead of visiting bird feeders (although I don't know how/if this process depends on the weather in these birds).


Good idea. Maybe it's the food storage. I always forget that some species save up food for a rainy day. Magpies, for example. If there's an overabundance of food, they tend to fetch something from the feeder and immediately bury it in the lawn or a flower bed nearby and then plunder their storage days, weeks or months later.

By the way, meanwhile, I've seen one of the jays and one of the (three) woodpeckers again, but only once. Maybe they've found a feeding site with food that's more to their liking.

Your new wooden feeders are awesome, and yes, your description of the bullfinches's feeding behaviour reminds me of a couple of videos I once watched on Youtube (can't find them again now). Most of the time they seem to shoo all the other birds while sitting on the food until they're finished.

sjal wrote:
two metal screws with a hook of this type - https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/imag ... EOTwwrFI&s


Small world. That's exactly the same ring screw I used for the artificial branch. :nods:

sjal wrote:
As additional information, I read that both jays and magpies can kidnap (as a food) chicks from nests/nestboxes of small birds - so this is one of the reasons to make nestboxes without a perch under the entrance.


Indeed, nature's gruesome, and I really wonder why there still are nest boxes with perches on the market. Cute, fluffy squirrels are also said to plunder nests sometimes. Hard to imagine that they would kill and eat hatched or unhatched chicks, isn't it? :ugh:

sjal wrote:
I will take into account the recommendations for food during the nesting season and will think about alternatives to sunflower seeds (such as sunflower hearts, walnuts and peanuts crushed into small pieces).


Yes, I, too, will have to cook up a plan for spring and summer in order to avoid last year's (possible) mistakes. Last year I provided hacked sunflower hearts and hacked peanuts but there are ornithologists who say: 'No sunflower hearts (not even peeled and hacked ones) or nuts of any kind during the breeding season'. Other ornithologists say the opposite…

Most seem to greenlight tiny low-calorie wood bird seeds / herb seeds etc. – but will they get eaten? Are tiny seeds really the food tits want and need? As I said, last year they showed no interest in seeds, so I'll have to delve into the breeding matter to dream up a halfway decent breeding season diet, and I hope the stuff I'll choose is available around here.

The one food I'll definitely use again is this one. It's soft oat flakes with a coating consisting of animal fat (they don't say whether it's bovine fat or insect fat), milled peanuts, milled peeled sunflower hearts, milled dried apple pieces, milled insects (they don't say which insects; mealworms or fly larvae I guess), minerals (although some ornithologists say: 'No minerals in the bird food!') and milled meadow herbs. In short: the coating seems to consist of many of the ingredients you usually find in feeders, only in milled form. It's meant for parent birds and nestlings as well as aged and weak birds and appears to be the bird food counterpart to baby food, i.e. food you can eat if you have no teeth and a sensitive digestive tract. It smells awful, a bit like rotten fish, but last year it was very popular, especially among the magpies. (There was one day when I had to re-fill the food bowl five times in a row because the magpies went nuts about the stuff.)

(It won't be enough, though. I'll have to find other feed types and probably new and different feeders, silos, to be exact, as the bird table isn't suitable for seeds because there are many narrow gaps in the wood that can swallow everything that's small enough.)

I don't know, but maybe there is a Ukrainean analogue to the "Aufbaufutter" (build-up food) designed for nestlings?

sjal wrote:
I've added some oat flakes to the feeder in the city, but it seems great tits have either become too "conservative" in food there or are not experienced enough and do not know that it can be eaten at all - all the members of the flock gathered at the feeder and unsuccessfully tried to figure out what to do with these flakes, they took oat flake in their beak and then just threw it down, and after that tried to find pieces of that kind of food they were used to. -
https://i.ibb.co/xqcH7Wn/20240109-084132-1-1.jpg
I only had "hard" flakes (those where on the package is written that they need to be boiled, cook for 10-15 minutes - when to use it as a food for humans, of course), maybe to try using softer and smaller ones?


Yes, I meant soft flakes. In my experience, only the pigeons here seem to eat hard flakes (although all kinds of flakes aren't really suitable for pigeons as they swell when they're moistened and can clog up the crop).

The fat food ("Fettfutter") I serve this winter is this one. It consists of fat-coated oat flakes as soft as silk, sultanas and peanuts. I don't know whether the tits here eat flakes because the feeder is 20 metres away from the window and my old binoculars don't help. You just can't see who eats what. Let's say I don't expect tits to eat flakes in normal circumstances but in the event of sickness flakes are the kind of food they can easily swallow and digest. In normal circumstances the tits take the peanuts while the soft-bills such as blackbirds and robins take the flakes and the sultanas. You'll probably never see a blackbird or a robin at your window feeder because it's too high up, so I'm not sure if flakes really make sense in your case.

If you, nevertheless, want to carry on with the flakes, I'd use fatted soft flakes or soft flakes drenched in sunflower oil. As I understand it, flakes don't sate you. Instead, flakes are not much more than the vessel for the actual nutrients, which are fat or oil, and if you consider making fat balls yourself, you've probably already come across numerous recipes involving flakes and fat or sunflower oil.

(If memory serves, the easiest way to oil flakes is to pour some sunflower oil over the flakes, wait a couple of minutes so that the oil can seep in and wait again until the flakes are relatively dry and not soaking wet. But there are also methods involving cooking pots or frying pans. I've read that one of the oil's positive side effects is that it makes the flakes more durable and weather-resistant.)

sjal wrote:
(Speaking of sick birds... I think this is important to mention here: what do ornithologists recommend to do when, in the midst of the cold season, someone notice a sick bird with a contagious disease (such as avian pox in great tits) at a bird feeder? Temporarily stop feeding?)


That's a good question with two conflicting answers. As far as I know, most people recommend to stop feeding for at least two or three weeks (or even for half a year!) and then continue with squeaky clean feeders (brush, boiling water, even vinegar in special cases) to prevent the spreading of diseases (many of those people reject wild bird feeding altogether as they think it does more harm than good; some even think that bird feeding is the reason for the worldwide bird die-off!) but some, including Berthold, say: stopping is the worst you can do because birds need food more than ever when they're sick and weak.

For all I know, there are different camps in ornithological circles advocating different and even conflicting opinions to many open questions – which, to me, raises another question: Is there anyone who really has a clue?

Personally, I don't know what I would do if I discovered sick or dead birds near the feeders… I think I'll try to find answers when that question arises.

sjal wrote:
Thanks for this information! No, I knew only part of it and always thought that birds need more sources of fat in a feeder in winter rather than in summer.


I thought so, too, until one ornithologist (don't know who that was, some article on the internet) said: 'The birds in my garden ate over a hundred fat balls in summer but only two in winter' or words to that effect, and until the birds here began to largely ignore the fat balls last winter.

sjal wrote:
I think I need to mention that those sources of fat that ornithologists recommend here are...different, to put it mildly - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salo_(food)


Probably okay. I've even seen people recommend dog food and the like.

In his standard work on bird feeding (sadly, it doesn't seem to be available in English), Berthold reminds the reader of the times when e.g. hunters left large pieces of foxes (etc.) behind or especially to the birds and that the birds consumed every last piece of meat and fat.

I think both meat and fat balls seem to be a kind of simulation of carcasses in the wild and that those food types aren't as far removed from nature as it might at first appear.

sjal wrote:
Taking this opportunity, that you know German, could you please say what is written here - https://www.riffreporter.de/de/umwelt/f ... -interview
Is it too critical and should it be taken into account or is it still acceptable to give fat/fat balls/suet balls for birds but not too often?


Okay, I'll try to paraphrase the gist: According to the study by Voigt-Heucke, the interviewee, fat balls seem to be responsible for a decrease in breeding successes. The three possible reasons mentioned by Voigt-Heucke are: the fat-intake before the breeding season (as fat is not the most wholesome food in the world), the stress experienced by the tit hens at the feeders and the germs left at the fat balls by all the different birds. She says further research is needed to either substantiate or refute the thesis that fat balls (and bird feeding in general) can reduce the breeding success rate.

In my book by Berthold, the author doesn't reference this study but only a study by Plummer (decrease in breeding successes after providing fat balls in a field trial in Britain, see: Peter Berthold, Gabriele Mohr: Vögel füttern – aber richtig. Fifth edition, Kosmos 2021, p. 55; I know, you'll have no use for this bibliographical reference but what can I do?), which is also referenced by Voigt-Heucke. Berthold's speculation is: the reason for the decrease is the fact that they fed only fat balls and nothing else – which, to me, doesn't seem to be a substantive argument (because the fat balls surely weren't the only food source the tit hens found outside).

As I said: there are many conflicting opinions and the question whether anyone really has a clue.

Personally, I'll stick to the general consensus that accepts fat as essential until that consensus changes.

As for the fireworks: as I said, it's such an important aspect that it might be worth a different thread and I don't want to write more and more pages on the fly. Maybe I'll return to it later but not now. It seems I've already produced a sky-high wall of text. :nono: Hopefully, it's readable, and hopefully, both the fireworks and the bombs stop as soon as possible.
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PostPosted: Fri Feb 02, 2024 2:57 pm 
 

No mention of pet rocks yet? Those used to be a real thing.
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PostPosted: Sat Feb 03, 2024 6:02 am 
 

^
I've "Googled" "pet rocks", read about it, and still can’t believe that this whole story happened, especially to adults.
It looks really depressing that there were people who fell for it and bought it. :(
There are so many "normal" less expensive alternative ways to observe/help/take care of real living organisms and also to get positive emotions from it.

In my school years (late 90s - early 00s) there was this thing, a "digital pet”, - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamagotchi
The reasons tamagotchi was popular, especially among children, were similar - it was a cheap way to have a "pet".
The worst thing is that it was marketed as a toy that could teach children responsibility. In fact, this only distracted children from their lessons at school and also made them more anxious.
I really hope that things like these have gone away these days.
(I also hope that a tradition of making, hanging bird feeders (+nestboxes) and feeding wild birds by schoolchildren will continue here).
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PostPosted: Sat Feb 03, 2024 6:30 am 
 

Coastliner, thank you very much for sharing your knowledge and experience about wild birds and sorry that I was too importunate and asked too many questions at once. I will explore everything you wrote in this long and detailed post, will reply about it later.
And from now on I will only ask questions for which I cannot find information here at all.

Coastliner wrote:
Furthermore, after one and a half years, I'm still really at a beginner level in the realm of bird feeding.
So it's great to hear that one or two statements are regarded as helpful but I just don't believe I could ever be of much help considering the thousand open questions I have myself.

It's really informative and helpful for me, don’t even doubt it.
One of the reasons is that, unfortunately, the situation with ornithological research and study of wild birds in Ukraine is much less developed than in Europe in general.
And reading about your personal practical experience and observations is also very informative and interesting.
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PostPosted: Sun Feb 04, 2024 4:13 am 
 

sjal wrote:
Coastliner, thank you very much for sharing your knowledge and experience about wild birds and sorry that I was too importunate and asked too many questions at once. I will explore everything you wrote in this long and detailed post, will reply about it later.
And from now on I will only ask questions for which I cannot find information here at all.


Don't worry, there weren't too many questions at once. I'm just too easily overwhelmed if I have to organise my own thoughts (Sometimes it even happens in the "Now Playing" thread when I need half an hour for two frickin' lines of description and grammar! :crash: ). And there are, of course, a lot of thoughts as your stories suggest you're more experienced than me (planting of food sources, nest boxes etc.).

Anyway, two important (and hopefully informative) addresses in English are:

https://www.rspb.org.uk/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Soc ... n_of_Birds
(Very experienced organisation concerned with the preservation of birds and other wildlife. There has been wild bird feeding all year round in the Uk and the US for decades, while it's still pretty new to Germany.)

...and...

https://www.birdfood.co.uk/
https://www.cjwildlifetrade.com/
("Just" a bird food brand but they also seem to dabble in research.)

…but… just after citing those addresses I came across this passage *sigh*:

"Bird table and feeder hygiene is very important. Brush off debris every time you put out fresh food and scrub the table with a mild disinfectant solution weekly."
https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildl ... d-wildlife

Most ornithological and nature protection organisations in Germany (e.g. NABU, LBV, BUND) are way more cautious and critical than in other regions and would respond: 'No disinfectant of any kind! A brush and boiling (or at least very hot) water are enough.' (Personally, I agree with that, wild animals shouldn't come in contact with chemicals or soap or similar artificial substances.)

My advice would be to consult different sources, take different opinions into account and then come up with your own solution. There are also tons of German sites dedicated to wild birds, e.g. this brilliant (and massive!) site:

https://wp.wildvogelhilfe.org/ (wild bird relief)

It's a guide to the entire life of wild (garden) birds, from the egg to the food and from the food to the grave. They even tell you how you can raise chicks yourself. Maybe you can use Google Translate (I think it can also translate entire websites), or maybe I could try to summarise chapters or passages.
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PostPosted: Thu Feb 15, 2024 1:30 pm 
 

Coastliner wrote:
By the way, meanwhile, I've seen one of the jays and one of the (three) woodpeckers again, but only once. Maybe they've found a feeding site with food that's more to their liking.

I'm glad you saw the jay and the woodpecker, hope they (or their grown young) will visit your bird feeders again. :)

Coastliner wrote:
Your new wooden feeders are awesome, and yes, your description of the bullfinches's feeding behaviour reminds me of a couple of videos I once watched on Youtube (can't find them again now). Most of the time they seem to shoo all the other birds while sitting on the food until they're finished.

A bullfinch (only one female for some reason) visits (regularly) the feeder in the city too and is definitely a "non-friendly" bird when it comes to "relationships" with smaller bird species at a feeder, - when this bird eats at the feeder, it drives away all the tits and sparrows from the first floor of the feeder and also the bird tries to pinch with its beak those birds that are trying to take something from the upper floor:
https://i.ibb.co/qypVhYW/20240126-084756-1-1.jpg
https://i.ibb.co/G9g1Xk9/20240126-085001-1.jpg
But this one bullfinch flies away as soon as it eats its daily intake of sunflower seeds in a few minutes, so I never chase it away.

Spoiler: show
Coastliner wrote:
In my case, the problem isn't really that there isn't enough spare time but that I literally need days to write a long post addressing different aspects. I just can't do this. If there are many aspects that warrant a response, writing a post can take weeks or even longer. For example: I think I'll have to ignore the fireworks problem, which is worth a whole new thread, as well as many other important details in your last (and previous) post(s) (such as the planting of bird food sources etc., which is a whole world in itself).

For some reason, writing (especially in a second language) is a bit (only a bit) easier for me when there are grave disagreements but I'm rubbish when it comes to chatting. This is why this will probably be the last long post, from now on only short ones with one aspect each or so (< Case in point: these few sentences above took me more than two hours and a couple of nerve endings to write. What should I write? Where can I find the right words? How can I make myself understood? *sigh*).

I sometimes use paper and a simple pencil first to jot down/formulate and to write a (part of) reply in English - for me it's easier than using keyboard on laptop, but much more often I typed these replies here using smartphone's screen keyboard and late at night.
(It happened 3-4 times a month during this winter - that I sat at the train station at night and was waiting for a transfer to another train)
I didn’t pay as much attention to grammar there, and the main problem with this type of reply was that it took much more time to insert quotes, plus it was an additional strain on the eyes ( which should always be protected in general and if you want to watch birds in the wild in particular), - so I don't recommend this method to use for writing a long reply at all, even if it might save your free time a bit.

Thank you for your time and for your help with my questions here, I really appreciate it. I think there is no such need to reply about everything that I write here anymore, I will try to search additional information from different sources and to draw conclusions + to correlate it to the realities here in Ukraine myself, as you advised.
And maybe the links that you posted here can also be interesting/informative for some other people who read this thread here.

Thanks a lot again for all the information and for the links.
It was an enlightening read, and I will continue to explore it in more detail.
I read the information (only few selective articles so far) from those links that were in English.
As for the link in German, I honestly don’t know if I will use Google translate here - to me results of such translations are much worse and using them for reading would look more like disrespect for people who wrote those articles and for native speakers of German in general.
I think I'll just be glad that there is the fact that such articles and websites exist in Europe in general, it's great.

I've found from an article about feeding birds that there is a risk that some peanuts contain aflatoxin, and now I will be even more picky about the quality when I buy this, even if the peanuts look normal (I don’t eat peanuts myself at all, so I knew nothing about it).

As for raisins, I knew about sulfur dioxide and only bought dark-looking ones and where it was not indicated that it was processed with it (although I still always soaked any raisins in warm water before eating since I read that sulfur dioxide can at least partially neutralized by soaking).
If you say that great tits don't particularly like raisins (and I haven't seen any blackbirds near the summer house), maybe I won't buy raisins this year and instead of it I’ll try to buy big sweet grapes this summer, dry them myself, and then try to add them to the feeder next cold season. I have some of this type of grapevines near the summer house but never dried the grapes - simply because those big grapes were eaten as soon as they were ripe (both by humans and birds).

Thanks for the clarification about flakes. I've bought and added soft oat flakes one morning, but the great tits ignored them too.
But when I checked the feeder in the evening, there were no flakes at all. There's still a flock of tree sparrows that visits that feeder in the city, and the birds always look so hungry when they come here - usually there are no any seed or grain left in the feeder after their visit at all, so I think it was them (and not great tits) who ate the oat flakes.
I will add soft oat flakes to this feeder until the end of the cold season but not too often - in my opininion, non-processed proso millet is better for sparrows.

As for the source of animal fat (salo/lard) that ornithologists recommend here: from what I saw, local birds (tits, nuthatches, and even sparrows sometimes, plus crows sometimes not only pecked it but also tried to steal a whole piece of it if they had access to it) have always eaten it during winter months, so I think I will continue to use it as an additional source of energy (in small portions and not too often) for birds during winter season, plus I will also try adding different types of fat balls/suet balls in winter/early spring/late autumn a bit (taking into account the recommendations for safety).

As for feeding birds during the nesting period, taking into account all the important nuances of food safety, probably insects that live in my fruit/berry garden and vegetable/herb garden near the summer house are all that I can "give" birds - because it seems such a ready-made food mixture as you described does not exist here, so I’ll probably give up the idea of adding any food to bird feeders in the mid/late spring and summer at all and will only provide them with water for drinking and bathing.

Coastliner wrote:
Most ornithological and nature protection organisations in Germany (e.g. NABU, LBV, BUND) are way more cautious and critical than in other regions and would respond: 'No disinfectant of any kind! A brush and boiling (or at least very hot) water are enough.' (Personally, I agree with that, wild animals shouldn't come in contact with chemicals or soap or similar artificial substances.)

Yes, I fully support your and those ornithologists' opinion who recommend using only water/boiling water when washing/disinfecting bird feeders and nest boxes.

Coastliner wrote:
And there are, of course, a lot of thoughts as your stories suggest you're more experienced than me (planting of food sources, nest boxes etc.)

As for nest boxes, I would rather say that I, too, am only at the beginning at exploring it. I only have experience in providing nest boxes on a house with brick walls (at a height of 3.5 meters) where, firstly, the structures to which the nest boxes are attached are stable and, secondly, there is no any risk that a cat or a squirrel will get there.
I wish there were options to hang more nest boxes on walls of the summer house, but due to its design there is only options to do it on the east and the west sides of the house. There are already two nest boxes hanging on the east side (three meters apart), and as for the western side - I read that it is not recommended to hang a nest box in a way its entrance will face the west (plus it seems to be on the windier side there).

With a placement of a nest box on the tree trunk/on a tree branch, it becomes more complicated - because you need to try to find a trunk/branch where risks that predators like squirrels or cats will get there are less possible, plus, when choosing a fastening method, you need to take into account that a tree is a living and growing system and therefore some fastening methods can be short-lived.
At first, I planned to use a thick rope or wire and then just to take it off after each nesting season (and then to hang the nest boxes somewhere else), but it looks like even during/after only one season something like this can happen: https://youtube.com/watch?v=GGPmqkpEfpg
(this video is in Russian - a man there shows how wires can cut into a bark of a tree)
so I decided to use stainless nails (2 nails for an additional vertical/horizontal wooden board on the back wall of a nest box - for safety) to attach nest boxes to trees.

I recently found and bought another good nest box for great tits/sparrows - this one has an entrance with a diameter of 35 mm but at the same time the box has a wider bottom - https://i.ibb.co/jV52zH3/20240209-100055-1.jpg (the only problem with this nest box was that it was all held together with nails, but I had already replaced them with screws on one of the roof pieces - so there is an option to remove one part of the roof and to clean the box after nesting season. And, as usual, I also made scratches on the walls inside).
I don’t know if any birds will settle there this season, but I still decided to hang it now.
At first, I was planning to hang it near the summer house too, but then I decided to hang it in the city - I have a garage (on the outskirts of the city) with a small area of a land plot that is completely fenced at the back of the building - and there is a very tall walnut tree growing inside. The fence is solid (not mesh) and is 2.5 meters high - neither cats nor squirrels can get in there, so I think this place is quite safe. Plus in the surrounding area there are many different deciduous trees/small orchards and land plots - both small vegetable gardens and grassy areas where birds can find insects for their chicks.
Spoiler: show
Edit: I already hung the nest box on the walnut tree, this is what it looks like (at a height that also is approximately 3.5 meters and the entrance is facing the southeast):
https://i.ibb.co/BVHh5gQ/20240218-100925-1.jpg
https://i.ibb.co/hZbfQsD/20240218-100956-1.jpg
I tried to find a way to nail an additional wooden board vertically and only to one thick branch but was not able to do it and I had to nail it horizontally to two different branches. I’ll see if any bird visit here this year, and I’ll observe how the branches 'behave' during growth, maybe I’ll try to come up with some better location of this nest box on the tree next year.


The idea of "half-cavity" and open nest boxes for robins, blackbirds or some other birds is also interesting, thanks for mentioning it, I'll try to hang one near the summer house too. The designs for these nest boxes look simpler and don't require any additional tools (like a jigsaw), and I have a lot of suitable sized wooden material, so I'll try to make a few nest boxes myself this February-March.
This is also a type of nest boxes where birds themselves can more easily "clean" the nest from previous settlers, so perhaps I will hang a few on trees in the windbreaks near the area of the summer houses (I just need to find trees that are tall but at the same time that I can climb onto without a ladder).

Spoiler: show
My close relatives also have an old house in a remote village in the Khmelnitsky region, but since no one has lived (permanently) there for many years, that house is very unkempt, and I rarely visit there these days either.
(before the full-scale war, the family, although they lived in the city, still visited the village relatively regularly and grew vegetables on a plot of land there, but now most of my relatives who have children (including my sister and sister’s son) moved to Poland and decided to stay there (my closest relatives already received citizenship and found housing (and a job for my sister) there, and for the safety of the child the family decided they not to return to Ukraine at all. Only my sister's husband lives in Ukraine these days. Before the war, they were planning a second child, but these days there is a risk that the first child will grow up without his father/become a half-orphan. :( ).
There is no electricity connected to the house and there is no clean drinking water near the house anymore, and, unfortunately, the village as a whole is rather declining/becoming less inhabited over the years, but the house is quite high and wide and there is an option to hang several nest boxes there - so maybe I’ll visit there in early spring. There are many old tall trees around the land plot near the house, and therefore I never thought that there was any need to hang additional nest boxes there, - so I think it's more of a kind of "psychological act" (I don’t know how to describe it correctly/more or less clearly). If the house is unsuitable for human permanent habitation (including for internally displaced people who lost their houses during the war), then perhaps it could serve as an additional nesting place for birds. (Maybe I’ll take some photos of it and post it here if I visit there this spring)
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PostPosted: Mon Feb 19, 2024 5:25 am 
 

Speaking of bullfinches, I just tried out hemp seeds (with a picture of a bullfinch on the packaging), but, alas, the song birds don't eat them! :crash: This test shows that hemp seeds (upper left corner) are popular with all kinds of birds, even with soft-bills such as blackbirds but the individuals here seem to ignore what they don't know. It's the same as with the tiny wood bird seeds last year. But at least the pigeons seem to like hemp… but then again they seem to like everything.

sjal wrote:
I've found from an article about feeding birds that there is a risk that some peanuts contain aflatoxin, and now I will be even more picky about the quality when I buy this, even if the peanuts look normal (I don’t eat peanuts myself at all, so I knew nothing about it).


Yes, aflatoxins are definitely a problem. Maybe the best bet is to buy expensive nuts from a renowned seller but even then everything will probably always be like a game of chance…

sjal wrote:
As for feeding birds during the nesting period, taking into account all the important nuances of food safety, probably insects that live in my fruit/berry garden and vegetable/herb garden near the summer house are all that I can "give" birds - because it seems such a ready-made food mixture as you described does not exist here, so I’ll probably give up the idea of adding any food to bird feeders in the mid/late spring and summer at all


Oh… if you really want to stop, mid/late spring might be a bit too late. I don't know about Eastern Europe, but in Western Europe the tits' breeding season already starts in the second half of March, i.e. in winter. So, personally, I'd try to use up unpeeled sunflower seeds before that time. (Unpeeled sunflower seeds aren't the best summer food anyway because nest-building and feeding parent birds just don't have the time to unpack all the seeds. After all, the chicks need to be fed with insects every thirty minutes.)

On the other hand, stopping *might* (nobody really knows) be worse than providing the wrong kind of food. Berthold is a fierce advocate of year-round feeding. In fact, he's the one who started this new trend in Germany, following the long established practice in the UK and the US. According to Berthold, feeding is more important in summer than in winter (Peter Berthold, Gabriele Mohr: Vögel füttern – aber richtig [roughly: Feeding Birds – but Properly]. Fifth Edition, Kosmos 2021, p. 9). If there isn't enough natural food around, he says, parent birds tend to feed on the insects themselves and let the chicks starve – or they bring lots of berries, which will also lead to starvation (ibid., p. 59; also: p. 46 and p. 125). And if the parent birds can't find much for themselves either, they'll enter the next winter in a weakened condition and maybe won't survive the frost.

Opponents of bird feeding during the breeding season say they found dead chicks with sunflower seeds in their throats, whereas Berthold says from experience (hand raising): chicks simply spit out inappropriate food (ibid., p. 59). He says those people are misled by their findings and argues that parent birds carry on feeding even if sick chicks are close to death. A chick that's about to die anyway is too weak to throw out inappropriate food, and that's what those people found in the nests (ibid., p. 90/91).

Who is right? I don't know.

This is an article from the "Wild Bird Relief/Aid" site:
Spoiler: show
sjal wrote:
As for the link in German, I honestly don’t know if I will use Google translate here - to me results of such translations are much worse and using them for reading would look more like disrespect for people who wrote those articles and for native speakers of German in general.


Well, I tried it and Google's translation (German -> English) is pretty good and the result a fluent English text. Barring a few obvious hiccups, the translation is fine:

Year-round feeding

The debate about bird feeding flared up again some time ago because some well-known researchers, including Professor Peter Berthold, the former director of the Radolfzell Bird Observatory, and his wife Gabriele Mohr, recommended year-round bird feeding. In making this recommendation, you refer to research results from neighboring countries such as Great Britain. The relevant scientific studies show that year-round feeding of birds only benefits the animals and does not harm them, as long as the year-round feeding is species-appropriate. Similar studies were recently carried out in Germany to clarify this issue and involved not only birdwatchers (ornithologists) but also veterinary specialists.

The arguments used by the proponents of year-round feeding are consistent, although they are certainly not 100% applicable to all regions of Germany. For example, it is said that the natural food supply for wild birds has become increasingly limited in recent decades due to human intervention. This is undoubtedly the case in urban centers because bushes, hedges and small forests have been destroyed on a large scale in order to be able to build on additional areas. In addition, in most gardens the natural flora has been replaced by humans with exotic ornamental plants. Native wildflowers and herbs that could feed birds are called weeds and meticulously removed from the “perfect” lawn and colorful flower bed.

But anyone who thinks that the situation for birds in rural regions would be better is wrong. It is by no means the case that paradisiacal conditions prevail everywhere. Due to intensive agriculture, many wild plants that once served as food for birds and many insects have disappeared. Fewer insects mean even less food for the birds, which suffer massively from the disappearance of plants as a result of human intervention - especially in the countryside, which is no longer idyllic everywhere! The fact is: Where there used to be space for wild plants such as thistles and the like on the edges of fields, today hardly any such plants thrive because herbicides are used in order not to “endanger” the monocultures by causing other plants to grow between what people have planted has. Climate change, caused at least in part if not almost entirely by humans, is also contributing to the decline of many food sources for our native wild birds.

Due to the strong changes in nature, birds find little food, and not just in winter. In many places, this also applies in the warm season, argue the proponents of year-round feeding. In order to ensure a livelihood for a larger population of birds in these areas, food should be provided not only in winter, but also in spring, summer and autumn - but it is essential to provide species-appropriate and seasonal food that is tailored to the different needs of the birds during the individual seasons is. For example, high-quality feed should be provided, especially during the breeding period, because this optimally supports the newly fledged young animals as well as the adult birds.

Nevertheless, many people are unsettled because opponents of year-round feeding continue to claim that this practice would harm the young animals. But in Great Britain, for example, this could not be confirmed in extensive field tests. In order to better understand the situation, let's consider two average pairs of birds raising young animals in a thought experiment.

There is not much food within Pair A's territory and there is no feeding station set up by humans. While raising their young, the adult birds have to provide their offspring with food by traveling long distances to track them down. These long search flights cost energy, so the basic consumption of the adult birds is also increased. They also have to find more food for themselves, which is hardly possible for bird pair A. Their young do not receive the optimal amount of food and start life with slight deficits if they have not already starved to death. The adult birds are exhausted from the strenuous rearing of their young; they are thin and underweight. They could die by next winter at the latest - as well as their offspring, because even during a "fat summer" the birds may not be able to replenish the deficits that arose during the growth phase. Especially since both the adult birds and the young birds often moult over the course of the summer, which deprives them of additional reserves of strength.

The situation is completely different for bird pair B. They live in an area in which, like bird pair A, they cannot find enough natural food, but they have year-round access to a reliably operated feeding place set up by humans. The parent birds will search the area thoroughly and collect natural food to feed to their offspring. However, she doesn't have to fly long distances to feed herself because the feeding station is nearby. This means that human feeding provides them with readily available energy, which also saves time - time that they can invest in finding food for their offspring without suffering from malnutrition themselves. In addition, in such a situation, nestling mortality is often reduced because the offspring do not have to starve. Both the adult birds and the young animals start the next winter in the best conditions because they were able to eat optimally. Year-round feeding brings a great advantage to both the adult birds and the young animals.

The scientists' observations have also shown that the adult birds only feed food provided by humans to their offspring if they cannot find any natural food themselves. To ensure that titmice, for example, do not feed their offspring broken peanuts, which could have fatal consequences for the young birds, people can adjust the feed during the raising of the young in an area that is extremely poor in natural food. It is best to put out small-grain bird food at the feeding place and also provide live feed insects, for example buffaloes or small mealworms, in case the adult birds are actually unable to find natural food typical of the species. Even many an exhausted adult bird will certainly be happy to help itself to the food insects. For example, robin parents, who are insectivores, often readily accept feeder insects as readily available food for themselves during the strenuous rearing of their young.

Furthermore, it is important to always put out the food in good time, ideally so that the early risers among the birds can already find food while the bird lover wants to sleep in a little. Remember that in summer it gets light at five in the morning! That's why it makes sense to top up the food again late in the evening (be careful, protect the feeding area from small mammals!) so that there is enough food for the hungry birds early in the morning. Also remember that the birds need a constant supply of food during your summer vacation! A helper must therefore be organized to feed the animals while you are away and to keep the feeding area reliably clean all year round.

Attention: In times of bird flu, many people wonder whether it might be dangerous to run a bird feeder. The State Association for Bird Protection in Bavaria (LBV) published a statement on this in November 2016, which shows that feeding is not a problem: Bird flu and winter feeding: Don't panic! – Bird flu is not dangerous for garden birds

Source: https://wp-wildvogelhilfe-org.translate ... r_pto=wapp

sjal wrote:
and will only provide them with water for drinking and bathing.


But then you should refresh the water and clean the bath every day in the warm half of the year (every day? yes, every day!) because salmonellae and trichomonads (flagellates) can kill birds, especially green finches. I'm not sure if that's possible because you would have to visit the summer house every day… It's all rather complicated.

To revisit one aspect from one of your previous posts:

sjal wrote:
If someone has a plot of land with a garden or just noticed somewhere that birds were eating some berries/other plants, could you please write here - which ones?


In my bird book by Berthold (ibid., p. 122/23), I found a list of botanical recommendations for a small bird paradise, plants as a food source and/or as a nesting place:

Trees: fruit trees, rowan trees, lime trees (linden trees).
Shrubs: blue elderberry, honeysuckle, bird cherry, juneberry, alder buckthorn, spindle tree, dogwood (cornel), viburnum (wayfaring tree), juniper tree, buddleia (butterfly bush, summer lilac), blackberry, hawthorn.
Bushes: corn thistle, cotton thistle, woolly thistle, globe thistle (interesting for insects as well as for certain birds, e.g. goldfinches, because of the seeds).
Twiners: clematis, ivy, field rose, bryony, grapevine, woodbine, trumpet vine (hummingbird vine).
Apart from that: small teasel, chicory, angelica, star thistle / cornflower / knapweed, meadowsweet, knotweed, melilot, nettles and field weeds (those weeds the farmer doesn't want on his field) and a proper compost heap where insects like to live and where you can dump crushed eggshells (song bird hens who have to produce eggs happily ingest eggshell pieces to get hold of calcium).

As I said, I'm no botanist. Plant names are all Greek to me but maybe you are able to make sense or even use of some exemplars on the list …

And, again, please remember that fruits and berries should be seen as an additional food source. If there are lots of berries in a region but not much else, the birds can starve with full bellies.

sjal wrote:
At first, I was planning to hang it near the summer house too, but then I decided to hang it in the city - I have a garage (on the outskirts of the city) with a small area of a land plot that is completely fenced at the back of the building - and there is a very tall walnut tree growing inside. The fence is solid (not mesh) and is 2.5 meters high - neither cats nor squirrels can get in there


Oh yes, they can! Squirrels at least… I think they can get anywhere. They can run up and down a house facade like an insect. Ok, that's beside the point, a fenced space is probably better than most other places, and the rest is nature, and you can't do much about it.

One thing you could do – and that's also a recommendation by Berthold – is to feed predators (as far as I recall he mentions jays and magpies but he could have easily mentioned squirrels as well) to minimise their "need" to plunder nests. That's why jays and magpies are more than welcome at my feeders. A magpie with half a delicious fat ball in its belly is less likely to go on a killing spree than a hungry magpie.

More nesting boxes... Yay! :) Brilliant. As for half-cavity and open nest boxes high up in a tree: As far as I know half-cavity and open breeders choose their nesting places close to the ground (between ground level and ca. 2 meters), so trees probably aren't needed.

This reminds me… Fifteen or twenty years ago, I did some gardening and spotted something strange in a bush directly in front of my face. I didn't recognise what it was but ten or twenty seconds later it dawned on me that what I was looking at was the eye of a breeding blackbird hen at knee-height! She seemed to be pretty calm and just stared back. I can't remember whether she was sitting on eggs or hatched chicks but I immediately left her alone. Today such a nest would be impossible here because of the neighbour's cats. They seem to kill everything in no time. Pigeons, tits, robins, sparrows, blackbirds… one by one. They bite the magpies' legs off out of boredom and similar nonsense. The blackbird hen that had been living in the garden for maybe a year and waited for me to bring breakfast in the early December and January hours seems to be gone as well (In November, December and January I saw her ten times a day; I haven't seen her for two weeks now). The cats are innocent, they do what they do, the people aren't because they made it clear that they do not care. So, in a way, I'm in a kind of war myself at the moment, and I hope I can prevent more meaningless animal deaths. I just don't quite know how yet.
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sjal
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PostPosted: Sat Feb 24, 2024 11:53 am 
 

Coastliner wrote:
In my bird book by Berthold (ibid., p. 122/23), I found a list of botanical recommendations for a small bird paradise, plants as a food source and/or as a nesting place:

Trees: fruit trees, rowan trees, lime trees (linden trees).
Shrubs: blue elderberry, honeysuckle, bird cherry, juneberry, alder buckthorn, spindle tree, dogwood (cornel), viburnum (wayfaring tree), juniper tree, buddleia (butterfly bush, summer lilac), blackberry, hawthorn.
Bushes: corn thistle, cotton thistle, woolly thistle, globe thistle (interesting for insects as well as for certain birds, e.g. goldfinches, because of the seeds).
Twiners: clematis, ivy, field rose, bryony, grapevine, woodbine, trumpet vine (hummingbird vine).
Apart from that: small teasel, chicory, angelica, star thistle / cornflower / knapweed, meadowsweet, knotweed, melilot, nettles and field weeds (those weeds the farmer doesn't want on his field) and a proper compost heap where insects like to live and where you can dump crushed eggshells (song bird hens who have to produce eggs happily ingest eggshell pieces to get hold of calcium).

As I said, I'm no botanist. Plant names are all Greek to me but maybe you are able to make sense or even use of some exemplars on the list …

And, again, please remember that fruits and berries should be seen as an additional food source. If there are lots of berries in a region but not much else, the birds can starve with full bellies.

Thank you very much for the list!
I have some of the trees/shrubs/twiners, and I’ll see what else from the list I can find, plant and grow here.
And I have already decided to sow a bit of that mix of "meadow herbs" seeds that I bought for sparrows - because it turned out that tree sparrows here eat it (and also in order to find out what herbs are included in the mix).
I would also add flax (Linum usitatissimum) to the part of the list with chicory and cornflower flowers that you can sow in a flower bed - it also has nice blue flowers (plus the seeds are edible for birds).

Coastliner wrote:
But then you should refresh the water and clean the bath every day in the warm half of the year (every day? yes, every day!) because salmonellae and trichomonads (flagellates) can kill birds, especially green finches. I'm not sure if that's possible because you would have to visit the summer house every day… It's all rather complicated.

You describe what is the best/correct to do in theory, but in reality, people here keep collected water all spring and summer in open wide multi-liter metal/plastic barrels in order to water seedlings in gardens/greenhouses, and therefore birds here have free access not only to specially prepared clean water in drinking bowls/bird baths but also to that water that is not particularly fresh/clean anyway.
I usually just fill birdbaths to a minimum - then the water will not stagnate there and will simply evaporate in hot weather.

Coastliner wrote:
Oh yes, they can! Squirrels at least… I think they can get anywhere. They can run up and down a house facade like an insect. Ok, that's beside the point, a fenced space is probably better than most other places, and the rest is nature, and you can't do much about it.

That fence is made of metal sheets outside - which I read about is also specifically used wrapped around tree trunks to protect bird nests from squirrels and martens (didn't use it on trees, but I can confirm that it is effective as a fence that protects walnut trees from squirrels. Plus I have never seen a cat inside the territory there either).

Coastliner wrote:
Oh… if you really want to stop, mid/late spring might be a bit too late. I don't know about Eastern Europe, but in Western Europe the tits' breeding season already starts in the second half of March, i.e. in winter. So, personally, I'd try to use up unpeeled sunflower seeds before that time. (Unpeeled sunflower seeds aren't the best summer food anyway because nest-building and feeding parent birds just don't have the time to unpack all the seeds. After all, the chicks need to be fed with insects every thirty minutes.)

Thanks for the warning, this year I will stop feeding in mid-March (But I think I'll also observe behavior of birds - if the birds will continue to fly to the feeders in search of food, then perhaps in the morning I will pour some small pieces of food into the feeders - like milled (using a grinder) "meadow herbs" seeds/milled sunflower hearts - as you described - during the nesting period).
The city where I live is closer to the north of Ukraine, and last year (and usually every year) the spring was quite cold here - house martins (for me these birds are a ''guide" when I think about a real arrival of spring and stable presence of insects - both flying and crawling/jumping) arrived here in April.
And I didn't notice much activity by great tits/sparrows near the nest boxes until late March last year.

Coastliner wrote:
As for half-cavity and open nest boxes high up in a tree: As far as I know half-cavity and open breeders choose their nesting places close to the ground (between ground level and ca. 2 meters), so trees probably aren't needed.

That's good then - because I can definitely hang such a nest box at a height of 1.5-2 meters without having to lug a heavy long ladder into the windbreaks near the area of summer houses - for a height of 2 meters I'll just take a small folding stepladder there.
And on the walls of the house in the village I will also hang it lower than I planned.
Thanks for the information!


Quote:
But anyone who thinks that the situation for birds in rural regions would be better is wrong. It is by no means the case that paradisiacal conditions prevail everywhere. Due to intensive agriculture, many wild plants that once served as food for birds and many insects have disappeared. Fewer insects mean even less food for the birds, which suffer massively from the disappearance of plants as a result of human intervention - especially in the countryside, which is no longer idyllic everywhere! The fact is: Where there used to be space for wild plants such as thistles and the like on the edges of fields, today hardly any such plants thrive because herbicides are used in order not to “endanger” the monocultures by causing other plants to grow between what people have planted has.

I'd say that the situation is very much depends on the localization here because most of the use of herbicides in Ukraine is by very large agricultural holdings (the lands on which they sow crops can be located near villages - because they usually rent land shares (which were allocated to people from villages during the period of "collective farms" here)), but the situation is different directly inside villages because people there on plots of land near their houses grow vegetables for themselves - people do it to survive in villages - so that they and their children have something to eat. I am sure that most ordinary people from villages here do not use any herbicides at all.
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 28, 2024 3:33 pm 
 

sjal wrote:
I usually just fill birdbaths to a minimum - then the water will not stagnate there and will simply evaporate in hot weather.


Ah, okay, no problem then I guess because I've read somewhere that sunlight is a good disinfectant if the dry bird bath is just left in the sun for 24 hours. Some people say the sun is as effective a disinfectant as boiling water. After 24 hours, germs and similar unwanted stuff should be dead.

sjal wrote:
Thanks for the warning, this year I will stop feeding in mid-March (But I think I'll also observe behavior of birds - if the birds will continue to fly to the feeders in search of food, then perhaps in the morning I will pour some small pieces of food into the feeders - like milled (using a grinder) "meadow herbs" seeds/milled sunflower hearts - as you described - during the nesting period).


I'll probably do the same but I'm pretty sure I won't find suitable milled sunflower hearts here. The ones I know are so irregular that the milling doesn't make much sense as half of the pieces are as long as the unmilled ones – and pointed. So I'll probably have to cut every single sunflower heart by hand – like last year. :grumble:

sjal wrote:
the situation is different directly inside villages because people there on plots of land near their houses grow vegetables for themselves - people do it to survive in villages - so that they and their children have something to eat. I am sure that most ordinary people from villages here do not use any herbicides at all.


Okay, I must admit that I don't know anything about the state the insect world is in outside of Germany. Here we lost 80% in the last 40 years. It's really dramatic. Here people could say: "Do you remember the 70s?" – "Uhm, wait, wasn't that the decade when the windscreen was always full of squashed insects?" The windscreen is probably a good benchmark if people wonder whether the chicks will have enough to eat…

On a lighter note… What do jays do when they want to have the food for themselves? Right, they imitate cats (at 0:39). ( :aww: )
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PostPosted: Sat Mar 02, 2024 7:26 pm 
 

I had a west highland terrier for 15 years. It passed away a few months ago. It had a problem with its legs, (I think the breast cancer she got made its away to her legs or something like that). I gave her cortisone (Aldecort) at first and she recovered a bit but some time later, it wouldn't do anything and the dog couldn't move its back legs and I had to bring her down. Lots of great memories. She would sleep in my closet whenever I left my door open, I taught her to bark, sit, shake and lie down on her side at command, when I spoke to her playfully she would lower her ears and kind of smile by licking opening her mouth and licking her teeth. This breed is very clever! They are actually used in hunting to hunt small animals. West Highland terrier's faces look like they are out of a cartoon by the way. lol
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sjal
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Joined: Tue Apr 04, 2017 9:15 am
Posts: 305
PostPosted: Tue Mar 05, 2024 2:44 pm 
 

Coastliner wrote:
sjal wrote:
the situation is different directly inside villages because people there on plots of land near their houses grow vegetables for themselves - people do it to survive in villages - so that they and their children have something to eat. I am sure that most ordinary people from villages here do not use any herbicides at all.


Okay, I must admit that I don't know anything about the state the insect world is in outside of Germany. Here we lost 80% in the last 40 years. It's really dramatic. Here people could say: "Do you remember the 70s?" – "Uhm, wait, wasn't that the decade when the windscreen was always full of squashed insects?" The windscreen is probably a good benchmark if people wonder whether the chicks will have enough to eat…

I''ve found and read information about long-term observations of the decrease in numbers and diversity of insects that have been carried out in Germany - the results of the observations really look very sad, such decrease of insects can lead to very serious consequences - and not only for birds but also for Earth in general.
Probably the situation is similar when it comes to other European countries.

I only wrote that a use of herbicides by ordinary people in villages is much lower here - every time I visit villages these days, I have not noticed a decrease in number of plants such as nettle or common knotgrass, for example. There is a lot of free land in the villages that I visit, and these lands are densely covered with weeds that have always grown here and are native to this region. And ordinary people mainly use only mechanical methods to reduce the number of weeds directly in their vegetable beds.

As for the use of other pesticides, the situation is probably worse because many people grow potatoes here and many of them use some kind of chemicals to get rid of colorado beetle (and therefore there is a risk that some insects that are native here may accidentally die/suffer because of it).
There have also been several cases of mass death of bees in local apiaries - as a result of uncontrolled use of pesticides by agrarians in large fields. I don't eat honey and don't have an apiary, but the pollination activity of bees is truly invaluable - so I always try to attract these insects to the garden (including those kinds of bees that live wildly and do not belong to an apiary).

I also have been looking for information on what could be done to make a piece of land more attractive and comfortable for insects and found that, in addition to organic gardening, you can make special "houses" for insects.
Something like these ones, for example: https://www.samotuzhky.com.ua/118366
Many of those designs look like something that could be made relatively easily and from scrap materials, so I'll make something similar from those photos and will place it somewhere on the land near the summer house.
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Coastliner
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Joined: Tue Mar 23, 2021 7:49 am
Posts: 655
Location: beyond the blue on some ancient, tattered Fates Warning cover
PostPosted: Sat Mar 16, 2024 3:17 am 
 

sjal wrote:
I also have been looking for information on what could be done to make a piece of land more attractive and comfortable for insects and found that, in addition to organic gardening, you can make special "houses" for insects.
Something like these ones, for example: https://www.samotuzhky.com.ua/118366
Many of those designs look like something that could be made relatively easily and from scrap materials, so I'll make something similar from those photos and will place it somewhere on the land near the summer house.


Good idea and cool designs. I've already seen a couple of insect hotels in gardens or on the edge of a forest. More and more people seem to understand that it's better to do something.

But, well, there seems to be a bit of work and knowledge involved if one wants to do it properly. So I think, for the time being, the stone as a landing spot in the bird bath (which has to be cleaned regularly along with the bath because of insect diseases) is the only thing I can provide for insects. However, those hotels are certainly an interesting side alley, especially if you want to find out how insects live and what they do.

Meanwhile… no news in birdland…

Except for, perhaps, … Recently, there was a Eurasian collared dove at the feeders for the first and, hopefully, only time – "hopefully" because it managed to enter the small bird table where there are only fatty flakes, nuts and raisins, and flakes can be bad for pigeons (as already mentioned, flakes swell up in the crop). The collared dove, originally native to India but, more or less, domesticated in Turkey and now everywhere in Europe, is much smaller than the usual wood pigeons that visit the milk carton here three times a day, so it can reach nearly any place a blackbird can reach. I hope it was only passing through because daily visits would probably mean the end of the flakes, i.e. the end of the blackbird and robin feeding.

Speaking of pigeons, meanwhile I managed to get hold of a small bag (4 kg) of real pigeon food (with maize, peas, wheat, vetches, sorghum etc.) (usually the available pigeon food comes in 25 kg bags – and how do you use up so much food if you're not a breeder caring for dozens of pigeons?). Previously, the three pigeons here only got the food the songbirds had rejected which wasn't as wholesome as the new stuff. The only downside is: the tits seem to mistake the peas for peanut pieces, take them out of the carton, realise their mistake and throw them away.

I hope they're able to learn. Otherwise bird feeding will turn into pea gathering… :|
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