Outdoors: Filling feeders a wintertime life-saver for many birds

Feb. 5—When winter sets in with a full complement of its nastiness, life is tough for most of God's creatures, but snow, ice, cold, and fierce winds can make things especially difficult for birds.

They don't have the body mass to store a lot of fat and reserve energy, and their metabolism has demands comparable to those of a blast furnace. It takes a lot of fuel to keep a bird's system humming, and the smaller the bird, the higher the demand for high-energy food.

And birds are the outlier when it comes to wildlife and supplemental feeding. While putting food out for deer, geese, and other animals is strongly discouraged, in the harshest seasons in the harsher climes, birds often need that nutritional help.

"There's no question at all that they are more likely to survive winter if they get fed," Australian scientist Darryl Jones said in an interview posted on Cornell's Lab of Ornithology website. Jones conducted an extensive study of the practice of bird feeding. "Some species that may be having a hard time, especially in an urban environment, benefit from the food they find in people's yards."

Emma Greig, who directs the Project Feeder Watch for Cornell, said studies have shown supplemental feeding increases the chances of birds surviving the harsh conditions we are currently experiencing.

"In the dead of winter when there's snow covering everything and it's super cold, birds benefit from being able to come to feeders and being able to get some suet or black oil sunflower seeds, something nice and fattening," she said.

Tim Gilson, a manager at Nature's Corner on Angola Road where bird feeders and bird feed are a busy aspect of the business during the winter months, said birds need the types of food that carry a very high-calorie load.

"They need a lot of fat to get through these cold nights, so the most important foods are the high-energy ones like suet and nuts and peanut butter," Gilson said. "A lot of them might not get through the winter if we didn't feed them."

With houses and shopping malls and factories and highways gobbling up space on the landscape, many of the natural food sources birds historically relied on have been crowded out and are in a much shorter supply. Seasonal mowing and tilling remove other food sources.

"When we get deeper into winter and their food sources get to zero like now, they will find the food we put out," Gilson said.

"And they will come to rely on it, so it is a good idea to continue filling the bird feeders through the winter and well into spring and beyond. They'll be nesting and raising hatchlings in spring and will need that additional energy from high-fat foods."

Deb Sepanski, the store manager at Wild Birds Unlimited on Monroe Street, said that with the heavy snow of the past week, accompanied by temperatures below freezing and dangerous wind chills, birds are searching for the food fuel they require.

"With the way their metabolism works and the way they burn more calories, they need everything we can give them, especially when things are so cold and snowy," she said. "They are flocking to the feeders when the weather gets like this because they are finding the food they need to survive."

Sepanski said that after the warmer than normal fall the region experienced, more birds have stayed and are in search of food.

"We are seeing lots of cardinals and there have been recent sightings of orioles and bluebirds," she said. "We are fortunate because we have so many birds that come to our area. Everything we can give these birds to help them through the winter is important, and that might mean filling the feeders a couple of times a day."

In his study on supplemental feeding of songbirds and backyard birds, Jones found that Americans spend more than $4 billion a year on feeders and seed. The options are many and feeding the birds does not have to be an expensive endeavor.

The experts recommend sunflower seed as the meat-and-potatoes offering for bird feeders, with black oil sunflower seed the top choice. Larger birds such as blue jays and cardinals can handle big seeds like striped sunflower, while the smaller birds do better with black oil seeds since the hulls are easier to remove. Seeds with the hulls already removed or sunflower seed chips are other alternatives.

Peanuts for the birds come still in the shell, as kernels, or in peanut butter, and these are a magnet for bringing in blue jays, cardinals, chickadees, woodpeckers, and nuthatches.

The finches will come to feeders filled with thistle seed, and anything that spills over onto the ground will be cleaned up by mourning doves and sparrows. Millet brings in juncos, tree sparrows, cardinals, and mourning doves, while cracked corn is appealing to a wide range of backyard birds.

If those aggressive and invasive starlings take over the feeding area, a lot of wise birders will switch to safflower seed. This offering keeps the starlings away and is readily consumed by chickadees, nuthatches and cardinals.

Suet, that white layer of fat trimmed from domestic livestock during butchering and processing, is a high-calorie bomb that many birds love. Suet can be placed inside a wire cage feeder, or simply hung in a mesh onion bag.

Custom recipes are often backyard crowd-pleasers, too. My mother was a serial bird feeder — the mosaic of many gardens and grottos in our yard held multiple feeders — and the birds seemed to prefer her bacon grease and bread crusts mix over any of the commercial offerings. Apple scraps and stale crackers were regular additions to that backyard smorgasbord.

Sepanski added we can help our birds weather the winter by leaving the seed heads on plants in the garden so birds can use them as a food source. They can later harvest nesting material from the garden early in the spring. Water is another essential element for birds, so keeping a water source available near the feeders is recommended.

"We need to feed birds and do the other little things that help them survive," she said. "We want this to be an area where birds thrive."