Today I went to the local garden centre and bought a bird table (with roof) and a bird nesting box. I used to have a couple of apple trees but as they were diseased I had them removed but this has meant a huge drop in birds and I miss them, hence the bird table. I spotted a couple of blue tits the other day but they only passed through, hopefully they will now stop for a nibble ande hopefully nest in my new nest box.

I have lots of gulls but I want to feed the little birds.

If you want little birds, forget the table and buy a hanging type of feeder. There are various types available, including split coconut shells, crammed with fat and seeds, or wire ones which you fill with peanuts. Suspend these from a string or wire, and only small birds which can balance, can take advantage of them.
The bird table is still OK for getting rid of leftovers such as stale bread, meat scraps, etc, but the small birds will prefer the swinging, hanging feeders.
We get wood pigeons, magpies, blackbirds, collared doves, etc, on the bird table, and bluetits, great tits, greenfinches, and chaffinches on the feeders. Robins and sparrows hop around under the feeders, collecting whatever gets dropped by the more agile birds. Squirrels also try to get to the feeders, so I have to suspend them from tree branches, on long thin wires.

Here's hoping that you get lots of little birds Sue, & babies in the nesting box soon. The Americans are so lucky to have humming birds, I'm jealous! You seem to have found the answer to those squirrels aramis.

I've just moved & now have a garden with no neighbour's cats & have attracted lots of little birds by hanging different seed & nut holders & fat balls around the garden, not just in one place. A whole 'charm' (isn't that a lovely word) of goldfinches now come to the niger seed holder. There was a greater spotted woodpecker on a fat ball last week.

Feeding the ground feeding birds without attracting rats is my concern at the moment; has anyone any ideas? However, I did wake up in the middle of Friday night & see a beautiful fox on the frosty lawn eating the bird's food - what a treat!

How do you all keep the bird's water from freezing? I used to put a drop of glycerine in the water until I was told that it would coat their feathers & prevent them from flying.

Have just read that you have red squirrels Sue - you lucky thing! I don't suppose you mind them eating the bird's food, they're so charming.

Red squirrels are cute, grey squirrels are admirable for their cunning, but I sure wish they would leave my finch feeder alone.

At least the hummingbirds' feeders are safe as they don't drink nectar out of them!

NOw that we have a kitten, she likes to watch them feed out there....longing to go out and mix it up with them no doubt.

We have no grey squirrels in Jersey, just red. I don't get any at all in my garden, no real trees around, it is a housing estate which is about 35 years old so the only trees are ornamental.

I sometimes see pheasants near, but not on the estate.

I have to have a covered bird table, with hanging bags of nuts and fat/seed balls otherwise the seagulls will pounce and eat the lot.

I have seen bluetits, robins, a blackbird, maagpies and crows and the rotten gulls.

Around here, and also at my mother's down in Texas, we always bought variety birdseed to put in the feeders. We finally got the message after a while - most birds would leave the millet and other kinds, going straight to the sunflower seeds. That's all we buy any more, because we ended up dumping the uneaten seed after a while.

Something is stealing my fat balls. I put one on the table out of its net and that is being pecked at in an orderly fashion but something steals the hanging one, net and all. This morning I thought I would outsmart whatever is taking them and I threaded some string through the net and tied it tightly around the hook. A couple of hours later the fat ball has gone and the net ripped but still attached. I have just hung another up without string. I am a little worried that the thief might be eating the plastic net bag too as I am not finding them abandoned.

This morning I have had a starling, a blackbird, a robin and a starling. Not all at the same time. The magpie can get onto the tray, just small enough, but the crows and seagulls won't be able to get under the roof.

I'm betting on squirrels to be your culprit, Sue, if the little cretins are anything like the grey and brown varieties we have here in the states. They are at once clever yet stupid -it's easy for them to figure out ways to chew through cords and drag things away into the bushes.We've had problems with them for years.
According to one of my friends, they also fancy Belgian waffles, [ heavy on the whipped creme]. I don't even want to know how he came to know their breakfast habits so well.

Belgian waffles with whipped cream kstew? Is your friend running a luxury hotel for those squirrels?

I hadn't thought of leaving meat out for the fox arami, but used to buy dogfood for a hedgehog. He also used to like the middle out of left over garlic bread.

I'm so jealous that you have hummingbirds Bruyere, they sound so exotic.

Those gulls sound a real nuisance Sue. The crows & magpies here are unkooking the fatballs & somehow managing to open them on the ground. We haven't seen any squirrels. A long tailed tit appeared today.

It won't be squirrels, I live on a housing estate quite some way from any woods or decent trees. Yesterday I saw a seagull eating a fat ball and the bag was blowing about on the grass.

I did see a wood pigeon this morning, that was a first for my garden.

Most people don't know or care what birds are visiting their garden. A few years ago I visited some friend in southern California, and was amazed to see hummingbirds feeding in the shrubs right next to their front door. When I mentioned this, my friends said they hadn't noticed them before, or had just assumed they were insects!
A friend of mine, who is a naturalist and wildlife artist, became extremely angry and remonstrated with a 'friend' at a garden barbeque, when he watched him knocking a house martin's nest from his house eaves. His reason was that 'the birds made a mess', but my artist friend told him that what he'd done was illegal, and he intended to report him. He told him 'those little birds have flown thousands of miles from Africa, and you should regard it as a privelege they chose your house to nest on'!

The house we used to live in had swallows nesting, yes they were messy but they gave me hours of entertainment watching the comings and goings.

Once in that house we found a tiny baby sparrow which had fallen from its nest in our guttering. The parents were looking for it but we had to pick it up as there was no shelter at all and we had neighbour's cats visiting. I spoke to our animal shelter and they said to feed with tinned kitten food until it was bigger and able to fly. We had it in a cage and it was hand trained, would hop on a finger or hand to be fed. After about a week we took it into our garden to see if it could fly and it flew to the fig tree. I used to hold my hand up and it would hop on. Next day it flew to a neighbour's house and we fed it there - then their cat ate it.

Rather sad, but the punchline was amusing - cats will be cats, and that's nature I'm afraid. For the most part, wild birds escape from domestic cats, and in the process, learn to be more vigilant.
As a yachtsman, I sympathise with your earlier post about seagulls and the mess they make. Many yachtsmen have had to scrub off the large amounts of guano these birds leave behind in surprisingly short times. I really wouldn't like to have them regularly perching on my roof, but small birds like swallows and house martins would be very welcome. We don't get either of these, though we do have resident robin, blue tit, wood pigeon and blackbird, year after year - just like the fox, all part of the 'extended family!

We have some huge beautiful bluejays [ though they have bossy, obnoxious personalities] cardinals, tiny wrens and bluebirds, too. Sadly, I haven't seen any hummingbirds since I moved away from our little village about 50 miles from here.

This afternoon there was a red hawk who somehow ended up in our backyard, trying to dive bomb a crow. How that little drama came about, I'm not sure. They were gone, suddenly, and the backyard was still again, after a huge squawking commotion. If it hadn't been winter time, we would've assumed there was a snake up in the trees, headed toward somebody's nest.

Our most obvious winter birds are the waxwings - big beautiful birds that travel in large noisy flocks, eating mountain ash berries. You can hear them sometimes from a block or more away - and don't park your car under an ash tree! Other than that, we only have the ravens, chickadees, and (I think) sparrows - something little and brown, anyway.

I have never had a feeder, because my cat is a very good birder. Even now, when she does not go out (age and ill health) I would not want to encourage birds in the yard - she could GET out, and probably still catch one. I tried to discourage birds nesting in our trees, because she was so good at catching the babies. Cats will indeed be cats - she used to bring her kill in through my daughter's bedroom window. It is a very effective way to get a little girl to clean her room, if she knows that a Barbie outfit left lying on the floor may end up holding a little corpse.

Always been a fan of feeding the wild birds...and two nesting boxes on the wall. Last year we had "Lodgers" in the bird box - blue tits.
We have nuts, in the red netting hunged up on the washing line over the winter months, and we always throw out crusts for them. The birds are sometimes lucky enough to get crushed up biscuits - when me and Mum are dieting!

I found a thief, a flipping crow. He was eating the peanuts having got the net onto the ground. Now I need to buy more nuts.

In the last two days I have had a wood pidgeon, a collared dove and some chaffinches as well as my robin, starling and blackbirds, and not to mention the flipping crow.

I have now bought a container for the nuts nd fat balls and see how that will work. I also found cheaper seed.

Hey Sue,

Using blackoil sunflower seeds and mixed seed without peanuts or corn. Mix the two bags together in a bucket that has a top. Otherwise you'll have chipmunks and squirrels moving in.

The resultig special blend will attract more songbirds than crows, and you'll get some fun woodpeckers too.

If the crow's are still persistant you can purchase some special feeders that are weight sensitive. It will close down when anything heavier than a cardinal lands on it.

Take some photos for me when you get a chance. I need some photos for my web site.

Bird, Sue lives in Jersey, thats the Channel Islands, not New Jersey. The types of birds that she would see are totally different from the ones you talk about. In my garden we mostly get starlings, blue tits, sparrows and robins. We have a pair of nesting robins in a large bush in the corner. doves and pigeons used to be a problem until we removed the bird table and started hanging feeders from hanging basket brackets.

One of my favourite favourite topics! Definitely a hanging bird feeder is smart, I want to get one for the bauhinia tree right outside my window. I'll bet the gulls grabbed that fat. Which gulls Sue? At this time of year in the northern hemisphere many birds will be going for bugs to feed young, even those that normally eat seeds. Soft, high protein food is good to give, try offering finely chopped boiled egg. Seriously. Darker seeds are good too, rape and niger, poppy seed and hemp. Goldfinches especially love those

In Israel our usual garden birds include Sunbirds (a little like hummingbirds, sip nectar and hover a little, and male is iridescent but they also have a song and many musical calls. I hear one calling right now just outside. They love the bauhinia and cape honeysuckle and other flowering bushes and trees. Also Bulbuls, Senegal doves, great tits, greenfinches, blackbirds, the latter three well known to the Brits.. (we also get European robins but only in winter) sometimes also hoopoes and ring necked parakeets and always lots of house sparrows.
There's a lot more stuff in the valley next to us. Happy to share, whoever would like to know.

Now I read over again and see it was a crow LOL yes that would be crowish. Carrion crow, yes? Corvus corone? We have a different race, same species here.. one of the Hooded races and big gangs of them. Also squadrons of jackdaws but they rarely come down into the garden. A couple of species of raven too in some parts.

I feel that I must point out, for those avid bird feeders who may be unaware of the danger, that the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds recommends that net containers for such things as peanuts and fat balls should not be used as birds have become entangled in them with fatal consequences.