Are all the birds holding a grudge against us?! (1 Viewer)

We have a pretty nice setup for feeding the birds. We've been going through 40 pound bags of sunflower seeds every 3 weeks and suet cakes every few weeks also. (I'd be refilling the sunflower feeders every couple days). We have a birdbath that we change / fill the water every couple days. We have a squirrel feeder that we keep well stocked with cracked corn. The birdhouses previously had blue birds that raised a couple broods and finches raised a family in 1 this year also.

We went away for a week to see the eclipse in August. Came back and the feeders were empty as I kinda expected.

Filled them back up but since then, there's been practically NO birds - really! 1 or 2 every couple hours. Vs. before - I'd count a dozen at a time all through the day. And NO squirrels at all!

I half joke - Are they annoyed at us for making them have to look elsewhere for food for a few days!? - how do we win them back?!

Am I wrong to think they would do better elsewhere in the neighborhood (is our setup pretty good? Those 2 long feeders are droll yankees that hold several pounds of food!!!).

i forgot to attached picture

i forgot to attached picture

I find they will quit my yard for up to weeks at a time but they come back eventually. One time a sharpshinned hawk was hanging out quite nearby, but mostly it's not for a reason detectable by humans- or at least not me.

Autumn is the time of plenty for many of the birds that visit your garden. Trees are laden with ripening nuts and acorns and wildflowers are all releasing their seeds. Most of this abundance will also be their preferred diet. Don't worry, the birds will remember where food has been previously available and will return in good numbers as winter draws in.

That is just a lovely feeder arrangement!
Thoughtful of you to have a bush right beneath the feeders, it makes it easier for the small birds to disappear if a threat materializes.
The only thing I'd add is that warm weather spells in the fall are really lean times for feeder watchers. Even here in NYC, the Central Park feeders are essentially deserted, just a lone Downy working a suet block this morning.
The NYC Audubon staff that maintains them tells me that when it is this slow, they have to be careful the seeds don't get moldy after it rains. I think that may also be why they have not yet put out the thistle seed feeders.
Please keep us posted, your setup looks made for picture taking.

Hopefully the birds have all returned by now, because you indeed have a nice setup (so nice of you to feed the squirrels too!). However, if they haven't, I definitely have experience in this department since I feed my birds at work. So on holidays and weekends, and occasional vacations, the birds must fend for themselves. Like this past Labor Day I took almost a week off and it took the birds a lot longer than usual to return. For a while I only had a handful of birds visit, mostly doves, but then slowly but surely more and more started returning. A new group of house sparrows have turned up (but then has also slightly dwindled due to a stealthy roadrunner) and then the white-crowned sparrows have migrated back, so now it's a constant hubbub of activity.

Don't think you have this issue since you've got an array of food set out, but I have also noticed a shift in their preferences. Before, none of the birds even so much as looked as the suet cakes, but now they can't get enough of the stuff. (As I was writing this, a CA thrasher beat the northern mockingbird to the suet cake, which I've cut into cubes and stuffed into a tall brush to avoid squirrel face-stuffing, and flew off with the cube in his long, narrow beak :eat. Have even seen the doves and nothernn mocking eating bread recently, which I always set out as "squirrel bait."

Also, make sure everything's fresh. Seems like they're pretty pampered and might not like stale bird seeds.

I had the same thing happen to me around the same time as the eclipse. I've never been able to really put my finger on it, other than maybe theres an abundance of natural food thats out there for them to eat, or they started going south.

I feed sunflower hearts, and like you I was going thru so much everyday, and the suet cakes, I was putting out new cakes everyday also. They were really eating a lot. I had a lot of doves and pigeons and squirrels too, hanging out trying to get the stuff that dropped to the ground. I use all squirrel/dove proof feeders, so it was mostly going down the throats of the songbirds.

Then it was like someone dropped bombs in my tree tops or something. I eventually took all my feeders down but one for the sunflower hearts, which gets filled about halfway once every week maybe if that, and 2 suet feeders that hold 2 cakes each. They are eating more suet than anything right now, which is strange, because they always wanted sunflower seeds. The fights I've seen over the sunflower seeds were unreal at times. Now they fight over the suet. I keep my feeders really clean too. I have many, that way I can just go grab a clean one and keep going, while the dirty one soaks in the bubbles.

This is my first year at feeding, so I'm learning new stuff all the time, but this one really puzzled me. They seem to be slowly making their way back from what I can tell. I'm excited to see what birding in my area is like in the fall and winter, I started back in the spring when you see bird stuff show up at the stores. Learned lots of lessons 3

I hear the cardinals everywhere, but they dont eat. I saw a red one and 2 females eating the lantana seeds by the garage this morning, and I can hear the wrens also but I cant see them. There is this one that comes everyday and sits on my chair on my front porch and calls out, but it never eats either that I can see. Behind my back fence there are some tall sunflowers, and you can see the small birds landing on them from my kitchen window, so I guess they are getting fresh sunflower seeds.

It's still warm in the Dallas area, but the cold fronts are starting to become more and more lately, and this next weekend will be down in the 30's they say, so I'm hoping a lot will show up looking for food. I have to say that my yard looked a lot like yours. Had all kinds of feeders hanging everywhere in my trees just swaying with the wind and not one bird on them.

I have cardinals that constantly visit my feeders. When I put my first feeder out a while back, I couldn't get a cardinal to visit my feeder. Now, I have scores of them feeding throughout the day, especially in the evening. The cardinals and other birds will come around, especially with the incoming cold fronts. You just wait

Check out a picture of a cardinal munching away at black oil soil flowers at one of my feeders!

Thats nice! I've been thinking about getting one of those platform feeders like yours, but I want the one with the roof. I'm hoping it will help keep the larger birds out. The doves and pigeons bully so much in my yard.

I want one of these :t: