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How do I attract birds to a "water feeder"? (1 Viewer)

SunbirdHill

New member
Hermanus, one hour from Cape Town: we got a bird water feeder and wonder what would be the most suitable place for it. Unfortunately there are no trees around the house, only shrubs. At the moment the feeder is hanging app. 1.5 m from the ground. Now and then a shrike arrives and sits on the branch from where the feeder is hanging but it is not drinking. By the way we don´t want to feed shrikes but sunbirds but as the feeder is now all garden birds could drink from it.

Please: what´s the best place for the feeder, what mixture would you recommend? Many recipes mention red food colouring but in one book we found the following warning: "never use red food dye or food colouring as they are not healthy for birds". True or not?

Most recipes recommend honey but one book is very much against honey ´cause it could ferment.

What is Bovril for? The one book says ProNutro would be good but in our opinion liquid with ProNutro in it will go off in no time. Will sunbirds come to the feeder in summer time at all, I mean there are flowers everywhere.

Seems to be a difficult story... We are looking forward to receive a lot of good advise.
 
Hi SunbirdHill and a warm welcome to BirdForum. i am not personally abl;e to contribute much to answer your questions, but here is a site that might help you with some ideas:

http://web.uct.ac.za/depts/stats/adu/bn9_1_17.htm

It does seem that it takes time for the subirds to learn where the feeder is, and I rather liked the idea of putting a flower at the entrance to show them where to come! if it were me, I would probably try the simple sugar water for a few months to a year and see what the response was. I do hope you have some success. Below I am putting the URL for the South African thread in 'Your Birding Patch' and I hope you will post there to tell us what you finally decide to do and how it works out - maybe even with pics :) Oh, sorry, will post the URL in separate post, my computer is giving me the evil plonk sound. . . .
 
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