Adding life to your world – just add birdseed

Feeding birds through the winter was one of the things I loved about the Carcross cabin. On a particularly cold day I’d have several dozen birds feeding at once, on a platform feeder and on the ground. As hard as I tried, I was never able to attract more than the occasional bird to the Granger house, and I never did understand why. Oddly, the new tenant now has a couple of pine grosbeaks regularly visiting the platform feeder that I left on the back fence.

Last week, I built a couple of platform feeders for the Mary Lake house, and the next day they were being used. We’re now getting up to 25-30 birds first thing in the mornings. The 2 photos below (click to enlarge them) were taken just after 3:00 pm yesterday, and show a chickadee, some small redpolls and large pine grosbeaks (the red male and yellowish females). They were shot with my Canon Digital Rebel with the 75-300mm zoom set at 180mm and 160mm. The bird feeders took about half an hour to build out of scrap plywood I had beside the bench.

Having a few birds makes a huge difference to the way we feel about this property (and the cats love watching them!).