Vancouver is mild, gray, and wet, like Seattle to the south. Here we have a densely populated downtown apartment jungle that is home to 40,000 people in one single square mile of glass, concrete and steel! Just two blocks away we have Stanley Park, which is six miles to walk around: lovely forest, big trees, trails, and a seawall.
We've had a total of 22 species of birds visit our concrete balcony eight storeys up from an alley of pavement, cars, and dumpsters. Today we'll have our usual Black-capped Chickadees, (one) Song Sparrow, Dark-eyed Juncos, unfortunately-resident House Sparrows, and perhaps one or two House Finches and Pine Siskins.
There should be a great many more siskins and finches, but the big numbers have been destroyed by open sunflower seed at feeders. That seems pretty evident by now. We used to use the centres of sunflower seeds, open and broken. The birds loved it; it was the favourite food. Then we noticed the sick and dying birds. Apparently there are moulds, and salmonella, that are implicated. The bottom line has been that our experiments with traditional, unbroken sunflower seed have given us two years of bird-feeding now without a single dead bird. But I hate to see such low numbers. I'm afraid people use the criteria that if the seed is "dry" it's okay--and in this climate, at least, that isn't good enough. Hopefully you folk don't have the same problems where you live.
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