Give Birds A Helping Hand

I feed the birds all winter. My belief is it is a great and wonderful thing to do.

It also helps me give something back to the birds that provide me with so much enjoyment all year. Food plots were planted, and they feed deer and other animals and birds from the first green-up until winter.

The birds get fed every day at the feeders. There are sunflower seeds and thistle seed feeders. The woodpeckers get a big chunk of suet, and some of the other birds peck at it a bit.

Pileated woodpecks are large birds and often much larger than this one.

Seventy-five yards behind my house is one of my food plots. There's not much to it now that deep snow has covered the ground although deer occasionally paw through the snow and nibble at the old clover. It becomes a major source of nutrition during the spring months.

It satisfies all the rules that pertain to winter feeding. I no longer can distribute carrots, corn and sugar beets over the once-prescribed 10 X 10-foot area, and each day when I went out, there would be deer tracks everywhere but adding some corn to the winter deer diet is now illegal because of the Chronic Wasting Disease scare.

So far there is no sign of wild turkeys near us, and I seldom see them until the winter weather turns harsh. Right now, our area seems to be inhabited by a few does and young fawns from last spring although it's possible  a buck that has lost his antlers may be coming in, but in all honesty, since the no baiting, no-feeding law went into effect late last August, the deer have not been coming to my food plot.

Mind you: before our brief warm-up two weeks ago, the snow had been too deep for easy deer travel. We seldom see deer once the snow gets knee-high to a human. The deer vacate such upland country and head for traditional low-lying deer yards.

Frankly, I'm not 100 percent sure what comes to dine on the food plot behind the house.  Deer are common in early and late winter, and so too are rabbit and squirrels. On a warm sunny day we occasionally see a 'possum or raccoon waddling about in the melting snow.

Seeing an occasional wild turkey is great fun.

We've enjoyed having wild turkeys stop by in the past, and one winter we helped feed a flock of 40 birds. One, a bird with a 12-inch paint brush for a beard, brought his harem of hens and little ones in every day for a feeding visit.

The birds would fly up onto the deck of our house and try to eat seed from the bird feeder, and they would walk up and down the deck. They usually roosted in trees behind the house but often would roost on the peak of our house roof or the peak of the garage roof.

The big gobbler was having a bad time of it, and a ball of ice as big as a golf ball covered his middle toe. He quit coming for a few days and I was afraid a coyote had pulled him down, but when he showed up, the ball of ice and middle toe were gone. The toe had frozen and broke off.

Hosting a flock of turkeys  was great fun.

The birds came in January and were still here in April. One day, some idiot poached that big gobbler from his car window, ran onto my land, grabbed the flopping bird, threw it into the trunk and rapidly drove away. Those birds never came back to my land.

Birds will come to the winter handout, but once it is started, it must continue. To abandon feeding, especially during a bad winter, will cause irreparable damage to our wildlife.

The largest bird that visits our bird feeders (primarily the suet feeder) is a pileated woodpecker. We have both the male and female of that species, and see them almost every day. Flickers also visit, and they are a fairly large bird. We also get chickadees, goldfinches, grosbeaks, juncos, nuthatches, sparrows and a raft of the smaller downy and hairy woodpeckers.

We feed to help give something back to the wildlife community. It can be a major expense, but I've found that it makes me feel good. And watching the birds as they feed is far more entertaining than watching the soaps on television.

But then, that's just one man's peckish wintertime opinion.

Posted via email from Dave Richey Outdoors