Enjoying Winter Wildlife for the Snowbound

This time of year can be tough on us “outdoorsy” types living in cold northern regions. For those that are sick or elderly, it’s a lonely and isolated time of year when it’s too dangerous or risky to venture out onto icy sidewalks. What can we do to entertain ourselves? Here are a few ideas that I hope will inspire my fellow wildlife lovers…

Hang feeders just outside your window, so you can watch birds from a cozy spot indoors:

Hang bird feeders where you can watch them from the comfort of your warm living room! The "cage" suet feeder (at left) excludes the larger birds, and a tray feeder (at right) filled with safflower attracts many songbirds, but NOT squirrels or house sparrows!

When choosing a spot for your feeders, pick a spot with nearby shrubs or trees, to give birds a safe place to dive when danger appears. A feeding station crowded with birds makes easy pickings for sharp-shinned hawks, and although hawks are a natural predator in our ecosystems, bird feeders are an unnatural habitat and you don’t want to encourage too many bloody massacres.

Evergreen shrubs and trees provide the best winter cover, but shrubs with twiggy and dense branching structures (such as crabapple, native viburnum, hawthorn and mulberry) can protect birds from wind and snow, and give them a place to seek shelter during the worst of the winter weather. Just remember to be VERY careful about situating trees too near your house. Always consider a plant’s mature width and height before planting anything too close to your foundation, or you may have a maintenance headache further down the road as the tree outgrows its spot. In the photo above, an eastern hemlock tree planted next to our house is great cover for the birds visiting the feeder, but it it will need to be cut down soon, because (although it’s slow growing) it wants to be an enormous tree and was planted MUCH too close to the house.

American robin eating crabapples.

Feed single varieties of seeds that attract our prettiest winter birds and discourage the feeder thugs such as house sparrows and European starlings, who tend to crowd out the more shy native birds. I have found that a tray feeder containing safflower seeds attracts northern cardinals, nuthatches, a variety of native sparrows (including our resident song sparrow who thanks me with his lovely song when spring arrives), chickadees, and tufted titmouse. Plus, squirrels don’t tend to eat safflower seed, which means I have to fill the feeder far less. The squirrels have their own corncob feeder on a tree in the woods nearby. Thistle seed feeds tiny songbirds such as American goldfinches and pine siskins. The “spillage” from feeders also attracts ground feeders such as juncos and common red-polls. A suet feeder will provide small woodpeckers, Carolina wrens and other small winter birds with fat and energy at a time of year they need it most, but use a cage-type feeder that will exclude squirrels and the larger birds who will gobble an entire block of suet in one fell swoop.

This cute chickadee spent most of a winter storm taking shelter in this shrub just inches from our dining room window. Photo copyright Ellen Sousa.

While you’re watching the birds out the window (hopefully with a mug of something hot and tasty in hand), compile a list of the birds you see and participate in a Citizen Science project such as a winter bird count. If you have trouble identifying the birds that visit your feeders, use your digital camera’s zoom lens to snap lots of pictures that you can later view on your computer to compare against a field guide to birds (either online or using a good old-fashioned book!). This is a good way to nail down the ID for some of those sparrow species that look very similar! And who knows, you might discover a new love for photographing wildlife. Taking photos of birds does require some patience, they’re spooky and I think an opening/closing camera lens looks a lot like the eyes of a blinking predator, but if you sit very still (and better yet, use a tripod to keep the camera still), you’re bound to get some good shots. If you’re like us, and you don’t always wash your windows as often as you should, your photos might have a few spots on them, but hey, there’s your motivation to fulfill at least one New Year’s resolution…

And while you’re snowbound anyway, use the season to plan your 2011 gardens! Enjoy the seed catalogs that are pouring through the mailbox now and look for wildlife-friendly annuals, perennials, shrubs and trees to add to your habitat garden. Resolve to leave more of your perennial plants (including liatris, black-eyed susan, coneflower and anise hyssop) standing next fall to provide feed and habitat for foraging winter birds. Above all (as our own Meredith O’Reilly wrote so eloquently last week here), resolve to include nature in your promises for the coming year. We are ALL having a hard time finding ways to survive the extreme weather that nature is throwing at us, but if we consider the needs of wildlife in our surroundings, I think we will find that nature will help us to buffer the many storms that lie ahead.

Ellen Sousa is a garden coach, writer and teacher living on a small “habitat” horse farm in central Massachusetts. She learned to appreciate the entertainment provided by winter birds near the house during one longggg New England winter when she was housebound with a double-broken leg. Visit her New England habitat gardening blog at blog.THBFarm.com

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