Bird Watching: Over 3 weeks and no birds!?, 0 by PeeperKeeper

PeeperKeeper wrote:
I know you probably get this question here all the time, but I'm a beginning birdfeeder and wondering why the birds don't seem to be finding my feeders.

I hesitated to make this post because my main question is similar to the post by Depsi (which was very helpful, by the way) but I wanted to ask more and didn't want to hijack Depsi's thread. There are two main differences between my situation and Depsi's (aside from being in totally different areas of the country) and they are 1. Depsi said there were lots of birds around her area coming to birdbaths before she put out the feeders whereas I see surprisingly few birds even though it's a relatively rural area. and 2. I've had my feeders out longer than she had at the time she posted.

We just built and moved into a new house in a neighborhood where everyone has about 2 - 4 acres so the houses are spaced far apart. I've always thought it was kinda strange that I didn't see that many birds around our place, but that just made me look forward to luring them in with feeders when we finally moved in.

Here's what I've got:
1. Two ceramic feeders with WBU's mix of BOSS, safflower, peanuts, millet, etc. These are each hung from a freestanding crook and a trellis (see pics).
2. A small yellow thistle feeder with nyjer from WBU in it.
3. A cedar feeder that has three compartments, one with just safflower, one with a suet cake and one with suet pellets. The seed in this feeder is from Lowe's. According to the guy at WBU, their (Lowe's or HD) seed is always at least a year old by the time it goes on the shelves, so maybe it's a bit stale, but this is the only one I've seen a bird go to.
4. Two suet cages, each with half a suet cake and half a cake of seed hung further back in the woods. The WBU guy said it will temp the birds who don't know what suet is to try it if there's something in the cage that actually looks like the food they're used to, so I got a couple cakes that are just seed packed into a form.
5. A birdbath I just put out yesterday.
6. All of this is near our swimming pool and deck which were just built this year along with the house, so I'm thinking while the sight of water might attract some birds, they can't actually get to it and it's all new stuff so maybe they're still nervous about it.

So here are my questions:
Is it unusual for them to take this long to find feeders? I have a friend who took a birding class and he said he thought they usually found them amazingly quickly. I did see one titmouse (I think) go to the safflower in the cedar feeder, but I watched all weekend and no one else even scoped any of them out. Saturday a female Cardinal (I think) flew over and I got all excited, but she didn't even seem to notice the feeders. I've been checking for dropped seed which would indicate one had at least landed on a feeder, but there's nothing.

Is there a bad time of year to start trying to attract birds, and if so, is this it? Someone said something about them eating a lot of grass seed this time of year, but would that make them not come to feeders?

Here are pics of my set up. First the blue ceramic feeder at the edge of the deck. There is a big drop off of about 6 or 8 feet from the back of the pool to the ground below. The feeder is on a ledge along the dropoff.




This message was edited Dec 9, 2007 10:46 PM