THAT OUTSTANDING RED BIRD OF WINTER
from the January / February 2017 WISP
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If you enjoy putting bird feeders out in the winter months and you are blessed with having cardinals in your area, here are some useful hints.
The single most attractive feeder food for cardinals is black-oil sunflower seed. They also readily eat striped sunflower. For the bird feeding gourmet, higher-priced sunflower chips, sunflower hearts, and safflower seed are readily accepted cardinal treats. But cardinals also eat millet, cracked corn, and small fruits.
Which types of feeders do cardinals favor? Well, they can’t hang upside-down or cling nimbly to a tiny perch like a chickadee, titmouse, goldfinch, or nuthatch. But standard hopper feeders and wide-open platform feeders are great for them. Also, they’ll perch on a seed tray if one is attached to the bottom of a tube feeder. And cardinals feed on the ground as well.
Over a year, a cardinal’s diet includes about 70 percent plant matter and about 30 percent animal matter. But if you look season by season, the picture changes. Of course, in Northern winters, almost all food will be from plants.
Cardinals will snap up mealworms offered in a tall-sided feeder with a rain-protecting roof. This protein source may be particularly useful to cardinals while they are raising their young in spring and summer. Young cardinals are fed almost exclusively insects and other invertebrates.
But you can also provide more “natural” foods by planting trees that provide cardinals nourishment. Cardinals eat tree buds and flower buds and blooms in spring, and berries throughout the year. They will take ripe berries from hollies, sumacs, cherries, mulberries, dogwoods, and hackberry, among many others. Dense shrubs and small trees conceal nests and provide shelter.
Like other birds, cardinals require safe, clean sources of water for drinking and bathing. Bird baths should be emptied and refilled daily if possible. Also, feeders and bird baths should be cleaned using a bleach solution of nine parts water to one part bleach at least once a month. Rinse well and allow to air dry before refilling.
A small backyard water feature with moving water, such as a small pond with recirculating pump and filter, will draw cardinals and other birds close to your home. Make sure the vegetation around the pond is not too dense, so as not to shield a cat seeking easy pickings at the water’s edge.
As you prune, clean up, and plant in your yard, keep cardinals in mind. You can attract cardinals to nest by planting or maintaining trees and shrubs and, where possible, fostering tangles of vegetation.
Not all vines are desirable for you and your habitat, however. Some vines are invasive and can take over and even kill trees and shrubs. These include fast-growing, introduced vines such as porcelainberry, kudzu, oriental bittersweet, Asiatic wisteria, and English ivy.
Poison ivy is native. Although its berries are relished by birds, the plant is a nuisance or danger to most humans. Most people given some contact with it have some type of allergic reaction to poison ivy. Greenbrier, Virginia creeper, and native wisteria are among the easily controlled native vines.
Another backyard habitat element is the brush pile. Fashioned from loosely arranged dead branches and other yard brush, this heap provides added shelter for your cardinals, wrens, sparrows, and other wildlife. If you have room in your backyard, you can “plant” tall dead tree limbs in the ground. These bare snags provide look-out and singing perches for cardinals and other birds.
The cardinal’s thick bill provides the cutting and crushing power needed to extract the soft seeds from their protective husks. Among the plants that cardinals feed upon are wild grapes, blackberry, dogwood and mulberries, various grasses, sedges, hackberry, and knotweed. They may also be busy scouring your trees and lawn edge for beetles, crickets, grasshoppers, katydids, cicadas, leafhoppers, caterpillars, moths, true bugs, flies, spiders, centipedes, snails, and other invertebrates.
Howard Youth is a freelance natural history writer and Bird Watcher’s Digest field editor. He has written two
BWD backyard booklets: Enjoying Cardinals More and Enjoying Squirrels More (or Less!). See more at
watchingbackyardbirds.com.
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from the March / April 2017 WISP
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Actually, it could be spring before that happens, but circumstances warrant that I’d better start looking
now, just in case the contingency contract on Sunny Brook goes through before its April deadline, and we’re
suddenly stuck with nowhere to go.
Yes, Sunny Brook went up for sale by owner at the end of October, and two and one-half weeks later, we
had a contract. The buyers, however, need to sell their beautiful home out of state first, and they have five
months in which to do it. Meanwhile, the search has begun for us (the sellers).
I have looked at several possibilities in this area. I really like Cedaredge and have confined my search
to Delta County. Doug and I did return to Pagosa Springs to have a look around. Unfortunately, property prices have skyrocketed in that area, due to the Durango “effect” (outrageous housing prices in that college town) and outlying areas have suddenly become very desirable. Kind of what happened to Aspen when I lived there in the ’70s-’80s. No one except the wealthy could afford to buy anything in that cute but sophisticated ski town.
I have lived in several places since leaving my Wisconsin homestead at age 19. Michigan was home for seven years (during college), with a summer spent in Kentucky; then a brief return to Wisconsin before my first husband and I, along with toddler son Ryan, landed in Aspen, Colo. We were able to purchase a manufactured home 20 miles away from Aspen, and lived there for six years, commuting to our jobs and adding Marty (in 1980) to our family.
Then it was almost a year in Oregon before we returned to Colorado, this time to Delta. That’s when our youngest son, Scott, arrived (in 1985). After the divorce, I moved to Paonia to be closer to work, and for the next 17 years I made my home there with my second husband. Circumstances with his health beckoned us to move to a lower altitude, so reluctantly we sold our mountain property on Stucker Mesa and bought property in southeastern Ohio that bordered Wayne National Forest.
Two years and some months later, I sold the home and moved back to Colorado, to Pagosa Springs with my dog and my cat. Within six months I met Doug, who moved into the cabin across the road. The two of us teamed up and tried out Washington state (in Forks), but found we missed the Southwest ... so, back to Colorado.
From our rental in Bayfield, we focused on finding a place to buy. Last March we put an offer on this charming minifarm outside Cedaredge ... and we moved to this quaint area of Delta County last May. It was a dream come true ... but, unfortunately, dreams can fade. After seven months, we made the decision to put Sunny Brook up for sale, not realizing it could mean a winter move.
But I’ve moved in winter before. It was January when I moved from Delta to Paonia, and January again when Ethan and I moved from Paonia to New Matamoras, Ohio. And now that January is here again, it looks like I may have escaped another January move. Hopefully, the weather will ease off before we have to give up this beautiful place.
Eileen, my real estate agent, has been showing me a lot of places in this area — some good, some not so much — but I know that when the time is right, the perfect place for me will materialize. For instance, I would like to have a mountain view, room for my chickens, and a garage. After this huge home we live in now, it will take some getting used to if I move to a smaller place, but I’ve always been able to turn a house into a home, and will be able to get a dog and a cat again.
Stay tuned for the next episode of “Wispy House Hunters!” Nobody knows what the next couple of months will bring. But isn’t that what makes life exciting?
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Ann Ulrich Miller, publisher of Wisp, is a novelist and memoir writer. Visit her Author Web site at AnnUlrichMiller.com.
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MARCH MADNESS MEANS MOVING AGAIN
