The winter feeding season is rapidly looming, and those of us who feed the birds need to make sure that our feeders, and the areas they are in, are ready. Feeders should be cleaned up before the birds need to start using them. The feeders should be emptied and cleaned with a bleach solution, to kill any bacteria in the wood that have survived the summer. Hang the cleaned feeder in the sun for a few days before refilling, to allow the bleach to dissipate. The areas where our feeders are placed should be cleaned up, if seed has been allowed to stay on the ground for the summer. Check the area to make sure that the birds have a clear approach to the feeders, as well as a good escape route if needed. If you have been having squirrel trouble, put squirrel guards on the feeder poles or hanging lines, so your expensive seed does not end up keeping squirrels fat and sassy.

If you have been feeding suet cakes from the stores, and are not happy with what the results have been, check out this web site, http://www.bcpl.net/~tross/by/suetrecs.html for recipes for some yummy concoctions. (According to the birds!) Using these recipes should increase the time that birds spend working on your suet, and therefore increase your enjoyment. It is fun to watch them working, to winkle out the last scraps of your recipe from the cracks and crannies of the tree where you smeared it. At all times, when cooking up these "bird yummies", you should be very careful to keep the stove temperature low, and watch the fat as it melts, to avoid having a kitchen fire. Having your kitchen on fire totally messes up any increase in enjoyment of your bird feeding experiments!

If you are having trouble because the birds eating up all of your expensive seed are the "wrong birds", there are things you can do to exclude them. For example, if starlings or house sparrows are taking over your feeders, consider switching to a different type of feeder that will allow only the birds you want to feed to get at the seed. Chickadees and nuthatches will happily go into globe feeders through small ports to get at the sunflower seeds, but the sparrows and starlings will not be able to get in. If sparrows are eating your niger seed, try switching to canola. I don't know whether that will help, but canola is sure cheaper than niger! Brace yourselves, I'm not a fan of introduced species that out-compete our native birds. If starlings and house sparrows were not here now, having been brought to North America by some mis-guided people, we would not be having the problems with our native cavity nesters, like bluebirds and titmice.