Wild Birds

Blue jays are bold, brilliant, and a little bossy at the feeder. Here is how to bring them in on purpose while keeping the chickadees and finches happy too.

A quiet feeder is almost always a fixable problem. Here are the nine most common reasons backyard birds vanish overnight, and what actually brings them back.

There’s a particular kind of magic in that first morning you glance out the kitchen window and see a chickadee swinging on a feeder you filled the night before. Starting a backyard bird-feeding station is one of the easiest ways to bring more life, color, and birdsong into your yard, and you don’t need acreage,…

A flash of red at the feeder changes everything. Cardinals are the bird that turns casual yard-owners into full binocular people — vivid, loyal, present year-round in most of the eastern and central US, and famously devoted in pairs. They’re also particular. If your feeder gets sparrows and finches but never that red visitor, it’s…

You don’t need acres of land to run a genuinely great backyard birding setup. Some of the most active feeding stations belong to people with a small suburban yard, a townhouse patio, or even just a balcony a few floors up. Birds are opportunistic — they’re looking for reliable food, water, and a bit of…

Walk into any well-stocked feed store or scroll through an online bird supply shop and you’ll be faced with dozens of feeder styles, but nearly all of them boil down to three core designs: platform, tube, and hopper. Each one attracts a different mix of birds, holds seed differently, and comes with its own maintenance…

Not every bird in your yard wants to eat 5 feet in the air from a hanging tube feeder. A whole group of backyard regulars — juncos, mourning doves, various sparrows, and towhees among them — are ground foragers by nature, more comfortable hopping and scratching through leaf litter and fallen seed than perching on…

It’s one of the most heartbreaking sounds a backyard birder knows: a soft thud against the glass, followed by silence. Window collisions kill an enormous number of birds every year in North America, and the sad irony is that the more successful you are at attracting birds to your yard with feeders and plantings, the…

A well-stocked feeder brings birds to your yard for a few minutes at a time, but the right plants and shrubs can turn your whole property into a place birds actually want to live. Feeders offer a quick meal; landscaping offers food, shelter, nesting sites, and safety from predators all in one package. If you’ve…

A bird feeder that looks fine from a distance can still be a serious health hazard up close. Wet seed, accumulated droppings, and moldy hulls create the perfect conditions for bacteria and fungal growth, and because feeders concentrate birds in one small space, they can also become a fast way to spread illness through a…