Attract colorful birds to your yard with sweet offerings - East Idaho News
Living the Wild Life

Attract colorful birds to your yard with sweet offerings

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A flash of orange, yellow and black drew my attention as I walked out to my rock shed to cut some rocks after a trip to watch the sage grouse on their leks. It was a male Bullock’s oriole eating on a suet cake I had put out for the downy woodpeckers while a female flitted through the higher branches.

“That’s odd,” I thought to myself as I walked back to get my camera. “Why isn’t it on my orange that I put out yesterday?”

After I got some long-distant shots of it eating the suet, a red-naped sapsucker showed up and chased it away. As I checked the two halves of the oranges, I found both had been stripped clean of all the sweet meat on the inside.

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A male western tanager appears to get more sweet juice from an orange on its feathers than goes down its throat.

“Time to put more out,” I thought excitingly. “Must be a lot more here than just the two.”

I put four orange halves on the trees, set up my camera and hid myself in a shed to watch them. It was not long before a pair of western tanagers and three Bullock’s orioles showed up for the sweet offerings. They were hungry little beauties, with the male tanager being the most aggressive — stuffing his head into the sweetness and getting juice all over his head and breast. It was fun to watch them as they took turns devouring the oranges.

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A male Western tanager hangs upside down to get the meat out of the orange. | Bill Schiess, EastIdahoNews.com

Now is the time to attract many colorful birds to your yard. I hadn’t followed my own suggestions to hang hummingbird feeders with sugar water in them because of the cold air temperatures in the early morning. However, I have now put some out for these sweet-eaters to use before the hummingbirds show up. Some of the Bullock’s orioles will nest in my backyard while the tanagers will nest in the mountains around us. The Kilgore area is a great place for them to raise their young and for us to witness them doing it, but for now they are resting and gaining weight before moving on.

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Now is a great time to put out the hummingbird feeders so when the little bombers migrate through the area, they will have some fast food for their journey. They may also decide to use your backyard as a nesting spot and you can enjoy the thimble-sized youngsters in some of your bushes.

Probably the best food for them will be home-made sugar water made from three to four parts of water mixed with one part of table sugar. You do not have to boil the water and sugar, just mix it together until all the sugar is dissolved. Do not add coloring. The water should be changed regularly and the feeders cleaned to keep harmful mold from growing. If you have multiple feeders, space them apart to stop keep the more aggressive birds from fighting over them.

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A female Bullock’s oriole does the splits while trying to eat out of an orange half. | Bill Schiess, EastIdahoNews.com

I will continue to fill my sunflower feeders to attract the evening and black-headed grosbeaks, lazuli buntings and other seed-eating birds. I also now have a host of American goldfinches visiting my nyger seed sacks along with some pine siskins and Cassin’s finches.

For your information, at the Camas National Wildlife Refuge headquarters is a bird banding project. The last one happened from the spring of 2005 through the fall of 2007 and identified 99 species of birds that used the refuge during their migrations. This one will go from now to the fall of 2024.

To observe and/or participate in the banding is by reservation only and you must contact Brian Wehausen, the refuge manager, to become involved. You can call Brian at (208) 662-5423 to get a reservation.

Have a great week and get those colorful birds coming to your yard.

Living the Wild Life is brought to you by The Healing Sanctuary.

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