Bird feeders

[zxcvbob]

Wife has gotten into feeding birds.  I probably started it by setting up hummingbird feeders this summer.  We're going through a lot of birdseed.  I'm wondering about using fairly high-fat blends of seeds and cutting them 50% with non-medicated chicken scratch?  It would be a lot cheaper.  (the high-fat part is because chicken scratch doesn't have much fat.  And it's winter)  I could also use it as filler when I make suet cakes.

[K Frame]

I don't know anything about that, but please do not use honey to make your hummingbird feeder juice.

It can kill the hummingbirds because it can cause a fungus growth in their throats.

[zxcvbob]

I don't know anything about that, but please do not use honey to make your hummingbird feeder juice.

It can kill the hummingbirds because it can cause a fungus growth in their throats.

No, of course not.  I use just sugar and water.  A couple of times I put a little hibiscus in to turn it light red and acidify it a little but that didn't really do anything.

[griz]

My wife gets a lot of catalogs for things like bird food as a spin off from all the garden stuff she does.  She got some "special" hummingbird food.  The contents list had one item, sucrose.  Yep, very expensive sugar.

On the seed front, I only know they have lots of blends tailored for various types of birds.  I don't know much about it, but I would think scratch would be good for a lot of them.

[grampster]

I buy suet cakes from Family Farm and Home.  I get 16 (I think) cakes in a package for less than 10 bucks.  I put two each in some cages made for suet cakes and hang from a small tree that we can see from the kitchen table.  We get all sorts of birds from sparrows, various types of woodpeckers, jays, cardinals and others.  They last for a good while.

[charby]

I buy 50# bags of black oil sunflower seeds from Mills Fleet Farm This lasts me about 5 months and all the birds in my neighborhood eat it, sans the summer hummingbirds. I also put out cheap oranges and cheap grape jelly for the orioles and cat birds in the spring.

My resident pine squirrel and gray squirrel also enjoy the sunflower seeds too.

[Larry Ashcraft]

A good mix is 50# black oil sunflower seeds and 15-20# white proso millet.  The millet that's swished on the ground gets eaten by sparrows, doves, and turkeys.  Most commercial bird mixes have stuff in them that birds just won't eat, wheat, for example.  We also keep a couple of suet blocks around for the downy woodpeckers.

There's a book called Backyard Bird Feeding by an author with the last name of Tory.  He knows his stuff.  Don't know where my copy is right now.