WINTER DINING GUIDE

BIRDS OF A FEATHER FLOCK TO DINNER

By Becca Bacon Martin

Posted: November 18, 2009 at 5:52 a.m.

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SPRINGDALE — If you feed them, they will come.

“But 95 percent of bird feeding is really about getting them up close enough so you can see them,” says expert birder Joe Neal of Fayetteville, author of the new book “Birds in Northwestern Arkansas: An Ecological Perspective.” And “different birds come to different kinds of feed, so if you want to get finches, you’ve got to put out seeds that finches like.”

What a budding bird enthusiast will see also depends on where he puts that feed.

“Cardinals, for example, like black oil sunflower seeds in a feeder that’s kind of up off the ground,” Neal says. “Other birds really like to feed on the ground;

they don’t like to fly up. So you can spread seeds out on the ground for juncos and white-throated sparrows.

“Then there’s a whole group of birds like woodpeckers and wrens who like suet,” he adds. “So if you want to attract woodpeckers, that typically means putting up a suet block or making your own.”

Neal says he has regular visits from red-bellied woodpeckers, downy woodpeckers, “and I have a dozen cardinals at my feeder all the time.”

Sometimes, Neal admits, “the optimal place to put a feeder to watch it makes it easy for squirrels to get to it - and squirrels are every birder’s favorite subject to discuss!” Neal says a baffle set below a bird feeder on a pole keeps the squirrels from climbing it, and putting the feeder away from trees and the house discourages both squirrels and cats.

“The way I’ve dealt with cats is by putting my feeder out where it’s very open, and they don’t have any place to hide,” he says. “They might manage to catch a bird occasionally, but not very often.”

Neal also points out that feeding birds isn’t necessary to their survival, but neither does it keep them from migrating.

“People can leave hummingbird feeders out throughout the fall and into the early part of winter, too,” he says. “Sometimes you’ll get to see something rare, like a Rufous hummingbird from out West.

“That’s the best thing about bird feeding,” Neal says. “It gives people a chance to see birds close up. It allows people to havecontact with wild nature in a close-up kind of environment. And it’s a fairly easy thing to do if you’ve got the time.”

To recognize the birds attracted by feeders, Neal recommends “The Sibley Guide to Birds,” the “National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America” or the “Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America.” His most recent book doesn’t identify birds, he says, but it will put them in context in Northwest Arkansas.

Neal’s book is available at the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History in Springdale, Nightbird Books in Fayetteville or online at the Northwest Arkansas Audubon Society Web site, www.nwarkaudubon.org.

Life, Pages 10 on 11/18/2009

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