As the days grow shorter and the nights get colder, I thought I’d take a moment today to offer some fall birdfeeding tips for your backyard:

1) Thoroughly clean feeders, and your feeding area, in preparation for the winter activity.

2) If you don’t offer suet in the summer (it is fine to offer suet in the summer, especially reduced melting varieties, but many people do see less action on it in the warmer months) now’s the time to put it back out. Suet, in various forms, is a favorite of woodpeckers, nuthatches, titmice, and chickadees. You can also try suet blocks with other ingredients – such as real fruit and dried insects – to add more nutrition or to try to attract an atypical feeder visitor.

3) If you haven’t been feeding a mix that contains White Proso Millet, now is a great time to start. Most of our native ground feeders, such as Song and White-throated Sparrows, Dark-eyed Juncos, and Mourning Doves prefer this over just about anything else and can be enticed to remain by including this inexpensive seed in your offerings. Some people prefer a blend that included millet, or White Millet can be purchased on it’s own and scattered on the ground or a tray feeder. (Make sure that it is in fact millet however – millet sometimes gets a bad rap because people mistakenly refer to another small round seed, Milo, as millet. Milo, the commercial name for sorghum, is a cheap filler whose low fat and protein offers little in nutritional value to our feeder birds. Pigeons and blackbirds like it, as do mice and other rodents, but more often than not the stuff either rots or grows below your feeder!)

4)Add fat and protein providing peanuts. Split peanuts, or a woodpecker mix that contains mostly split peanuts, can be offered in a tray or specially-designed mesh peanut feeder. This is especially popular with woodpeckers, nuthatches, chickadees, titmice, and Blue Jays.

5)Take part in Cornell’s Project Feederwatch and submit your sightings to Ebird.

And remember, food is just one part of the mix. Shelter and water are also critically important in the winter. Dense plantings and Roosting Boxes can provide good cover, but even a loose pile of branches and brush will do wonders in attracting birds. Brush piles are the simplest and least expensive way of providing the dense tangles that many species, such as Cardinals and Sparrows like to see in the vicinity of a feeding station.

As we know, there isn’t much open water in Maine in winter, so offering heated bird baths are a great way to attract even more birds to your yard. Today’s heated birdbaths are energy and cost effective, require minimal maintenance, and come in a variety of styles. I am always impressed by the activity at the heated birdbaths that we provide here at the store and in our home yard.