HOW TO EAT LIKE A BIRD

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Garden centers, feed stores, pet-food stores, and specialized mail-order catalogs are all good places to buy birdseed. Catalogs offer the convenience of shopping at home and delivery right to your door—saving you the trouble of hauling around heavy sacks. Mail order is also convenient for city dwellers who may live a considerable distance from the nearest farmers' co-op. Avoid buying birdseed at the supermarket. Even if the mixture offered is a reasonably good one, it will be markedly more expensive.

Any quantity of seed or seed mixture will contain some chaff, weed seeds, plant parts, and the like. This is natural and inevitable, but some brands are cleaner than others. Try several different brands and settle on the one that seems to have the least waste materials.

Seed should be stored in a cool, dry place. To avoid rodents, store seed indoors (the garage is the traditional place) in metal, glass, or heavy plastic containers. Plastic or galvanized-metal trash cans with tightly fitting covers are good choices, particularly for those who buy large quantities of seed. Fifty pounds of sunflower seeds will only half-fill a 30-gallon trash can. Smaller plastic bins (a wide range of sizes is available), gallon pickle jars, and the like are suitable for storing smaller quantities.

How to Feed

A seed dispenser can easily be improvised from an empty plastic soda bottle. Using sharp scissors, cut horizontally four-fifths of the way around the bottle just below the shoulder. Tilt back the spout top, fill the bottle by scooping it through the seed, and tilt the top back. Invert the bottle into the filler opening of the feeder. Eventually the spout top on the soda bottle will break off. Dispose of the bottle in an ecologically sound manner and make another filler. A funnel with a wide mouth also works well; pour or scoop the seeds through the funnel into the feeder. (The top third of a plastic soda bottle also makes a handy and inexpensive funnel.)

Some bird feeders have more than one container for the seed. The manufacturers suggest putting different kinds of seeds into the containers to attract different birds. If you do this, you will find that the part with the sunflower seeds empties quickly, but the food in the other parts is ignored or eaten at a much slower rate. Use separate feeders for different foods.

Suet

Woodpeckers, chickadees, titmice, nuthatches, and other birds will eagerly eat suet, especially in the winter. Suet is simply beef fat, generally but not always the fat from around the kidneys. It is found for under $1 a pound at the butcher counter (free to good customers), or it can be purchased at feed centers in cake form (often with seeds or peanuts mixed in).

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