
Which Foods Attract Which Birds?
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Not a fan of suet for some reason around here (southern Illinois) black birds are attracted to it and they keep away a lot of the smaller birds.
We use a lot of black oil sunflower and fruit and nut blend.
As the de facto representative of cardinals, blue jays, finches, bluebirds, chickadees, mourning doves, and many more within a mile radius of my homestead, I maintain 9 feeders, including suet, varieties of seed, fruit, nuts, and meal worms. But the overwhelming favorite of my cardinals is safflower seed.
Here in the lakes region of New Hampshire we have fed the birds year round until last summer. Our area has too many bear that are being habituated to bird feeders and garbage bags left out. We used to put the feeders out only from about 8:00am to dusk from April 1 to December 1, otherwise out all the time while they hibernate. Not so this year, as they came out early and became quite brazen and roamed all times of day without any regard for humans. I will be making and installing a 3" diameter thick wall pipe concreted in the ground 4' deep, with feeders above their reach. if the squirrels and doves, and etc. don't eat what falls to the ground enough I will add a system to catch it all. There are two commercial versions we have seen on the market for this but are very expensive to buy so I'll make my own.
My husband and I love watching the birds and it keeps us busy trying to prevent squirrels eating all the bird seed. We have several feeders on our deck plus suet blocks, and we enjoy watching cardinals, woodpeckers, blue jays, sparrows, mourning doves, chickadees, juncos, and sometimes other birds we haven't identified! We have lots of house wrens and robins in the spring, and starlings!
I have been buying the roasted unsalted peanuts from Costco for several years from my blue jays and squirrels.there is one bird food I found that has a combination of split and pieces of peanuts but they are both raw and roasted together is it safe for the birds to eat raw peanuts?
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