Why I Oughta...

It is getting back to being the bird feeding time of the year.  I take most of the warm weather months off and feed during the Winter when I don't have to deal (as much) with raccoons and skunks and other large critters.  That means that I'm getting our feeders out of the garage and hanging them up, but it also (this year) meant that I added a new feeder to our program. I found this relatively inexpensive ($4.99 at Home Depot) cage feeder that takes these Peanut Suet Nuggets ($2.96 per bag) that would add a different variety of food to our setup.  Below, you can see the cage feeder - with three perches - and the bag of Peanut Suet Nuggets. I didn't fill the whole feeder, but I think that the bag would fill a little bit MORE than the whole thing, but not that much more.  At $3 per bag, I'm interested in seeing how long this will last and how it performs against the weather; not to mention if it attracts some new visitors.  I normally put out a suet cake (hot pepper) so

Back in January, I mentioned that we had a big, beautiful Northern Flicker visit our feeders but I was unable to get a useable photo of the bird for the blog.  I posted about it anyway .  Welp, fast-forward a month and guess who's back?!  The Northern Flicker.  And why do I know?  The yellow flight feathers are a tell-tale sign.   Also, the size.  Check out this guy in the photo above and how his body is dominating the suet cage in terms of size.  He's much larger than the other woodpeckers who visit our cages and feeders.  Mark it down, dude.  Northern Flicker.  See the yellow in the photo of him taking off below to confirm:

Still going through some of the new birding-related supplies ( like this fruit and seed bell ) I was gifted this Christmas season and that includes today's post showing this other suet cake.  Like the hot pepper one that I posted last week , this one is from Wild Birds Unlimited.  The premise is the same:  make something that the birds will like (and need!) that the squirrels aren't interested in devouring down.  The hot pepper suet version takes a proactive approach:  adding something like red pepper that bothers the squirrels.  This one, takes the opposite approach:  strip everything else away but the rendered fat and the squirrels won't be that interested in it.  You can find this Simply Suet on the WBU site here .  I haven't gotten around to putting the hot pepper version out yet and that's because since about the first of the year, this Simply Suet cake has survived in our feeder.  Which....is a long time!  In fact, I found it on the ground one morning a

Yesterday, I posted the first of a few birding related Christmas presents that the kids gifted to me this Christmas and today comes the next in the line:  a Hot Pepper Suet.  Yeah!  Hot Pepper.  Turns out, birds don't have taste buds?  But squirrels do.  At least that's what this story on Sciencing.com has to say .  As I mentioned in the post about the Christmas bird bell yesterday , we have squirrels like everybody else.  And they go after everything they can, including our suet cage.   My hope here is to run a few squirrel-proof suets and hopefully *teach* the squirrels to buzz off?  They have short memories, I'm guessing, so who knows if it will work?!?

If you look closely at the photo above, you can see a woodpecker on our new suet feeder in the yard.  It is the wood thing hanging from the post on the right.  If you can't see it, and I don't blame you, here's a cropped version with a helpful pointer of where the woodpecker is below: The girls and I bought this suet feeder - which features something called a 'tail prop' at Menards recently and it is hanging there right next to our finch/thistle seed sock.  The thistle seed sock is our second or third of the summer and brings in a lot of pretty yellow finches to the yard.  But, as the weather is turning cooler, we wanted to try our hand at a suet feeder.  I've tried them before - the metal grid-like ones - with no luck.  Either the suet melted away or no birds ever came or the squirrels got to it.   And after poking around on the web, I think I figured out it was because we didn't have a 'tail prop' suet feeder.  Turns out, woodpeckers -