Bird Watching Tips for Backyard Birding

Bird Watching Tips for Backyard Birding
Hello, welcome to Expert Village. My name is Wayne Petersen, director of the Massachusetts Audubon Society Important Bird Areas Program and we’re here this afternoon at the Daniel Webster Wildlife Sanctuary in Marshville, Massachusetts. Next we’re going to talk about backyard birding, a place where everybody has an opportunity to get involved and where many people's interest in birding first begins. In thinking about backyard birding there are a variety of things to keep in mind that will maximize the experience. One of these is obviously to ensure the safety of birds which means by locating your feeders in places where they are relatively close to shrubs that birds can quickly escape into or trees that they can fly up into, that’s an important thing to keep in mind because obviously the safety of the backyard birds are as important. Likewise if you have a cat, you should keep the cat indoors. Unfortunately lots of folks have the feeling that if they put a cat out the front door and their bird feeders are in the backyard, there won’t be a conflict well unfortunately that’s not the case. Likewise having your feeder situated in places where you can see them is important, so you want to put them a place where you have ready view ability from a window or whatever. Likewise in order to have the feeders be relatively free from what some people would describe as pesky competitors like squirrels, it’s important to have baffles of this sort on the pole and as you can see and as we’ll mention shortly there are lots of different types of bird feeders and so on that can be put up for birds. Birds will find them and in addition to hanging feeders like this that are filled with seeds with the appropriate baffle to keep pesky squirrels and things away. It’s also to put bird seed right on the ground, lots of birds will happily feed on the ground and actually don’t like to necessarily feed off the ground. So again you’re trying to provide a mix of sort of overall landscape level considerations that will be compatible with the location of your viewing station or windows as well as provide conditions that are hopefully going to ensure the safety of the birds that you’re trying to attract to your yard.