HOW TO GET BIRDS TO COME TO YOUR FEEDER WHEN YOU CALL THEM (also a useful way to observe cardinals) 1. Get a feeder that you can service easily, as you'll be doing so at least twice a day. I use a small plastic one that sticks to the outside of my window, so I can reach it out the window. 2. Put good, yummy food in it. You can use expensive mealworms, nuts like hulled sunflower or pecans, fruit, etc., because you won't be distributing very many of them. I even put a tiny water dish in the feeder and they drink it. 3. Let the food run out every day. If necessary, leave the feeder empty most of the time. If birds don't come promptly enough, gradually shorten the length of time that food is available, until they come when called. (Mine currently get fed only ten minutes at a time; then I remove the feeder and uneaten food. This training is necessary in order for the cardinals to get waxworms before the house sparrows do.) You will now have created very attentive birds. Since food is only available for short and unpredictable times, they'll try to learn when it comes out. These will be birds that live nearby (either are on territory, or winter residents), close enough to hear you call. It won't affect this process to have other feeders around that you keep filled 24/7, as long as they attract different bird species than those that come to your "short interval" feeder. 4. When you put food out, blow a referee's whistle. Or just yell, "Come here birds!" - it makes no difference (you won't feel as stupid with the whistle, though). It's amazing how fast they show up, starting when they hear the window open, or even see the blind go up. They sit in the trees and watch the food being put out. It appears that they also try to train you back; at about the time I usually wake up, they make noises outside my window. With the current set of birds, I doubt this is intentional, but the cardinals of 2004 were so consistent and persistent that I think they were trying to prompt me. The benefit to this system is that your good food goes to the birds you want to feed - very little is wasted on house sparrows. FOLLOWING NESTING CARDINALS The feeder can be used to find cardinal nests and babies. The female cardinal will come off her eggs to eat when she hears the whistle, then go back to incubating, so you can watch where she returns to and find the nest there. Once the babies fledge, they can be located deep in the brush and trees by watching the parents take them mealworms. The cardinals that I watch start nesting in April, and stop feeding their last babies in September. During this time, they normally raise three nests, one after another. However, if something goes wrong (e.g., a predator eats the eggs), the nesting cycle is interrupted and they start over. The cardinals' behavior at the feeder can help you tell what's going on inside the nest. The male feeds the female throughout the summer. However, usually when I see him doing this right at the feeder, it means the female is laying eggs. She lays one a day until she has two or three or four, then starts sitting on them. If the female is incubating, she usually chips the whole time she's off the nest, including while at the feeder. In cool or rainy weather, she does not like to leave the nest very long. In hot weather, she may leave it for half an hour or more. Thus, if you know the birds now have eggs, and suddenly the female stops chipping, or you see her hanging around in the trees not foraging and not attending the nest, something may have killed the eggs. Many animals you might not suspect are bloodthirsty killers, that eat not only eggs, but baby birds as part of their normal diet. This group includes ALL our eastern tree-dwelling squirrels - fox, grey, and red - and chipmunks. They are important nest predators. It includes all omnivorous animals; raccoons will kill captive birds the size of a vulture, and eat any birds they can. If you love birds, don't feed raccoons! It also includes cats, which kill fledglings for fun, and which get food subsidies from people, so that their number per acre exceeds that which a brood of fledglings could ever hope to escape. (If you begin watching cardinals, and see their efforts to raise babies, you risk becoming biased and using words such as "bloodthirsty". I no longer see any cuteness in most mammals. In 2007, my pair's first four of six nests were all depredated shortly after the babies hatched. The female laid at least 8 eggs before fledging a single baby. The mortality of fledglings between the time they leave the parents and the following spring is very high - 75%?? - so this pair may not have had any offspring survive at all. I believe the predator in this case was a single fox squirrel.) The eggs should hatch within 13 days. If the eggs have hatched, and the feeder contains mealworms or waxworms, both parents will eat briefly, then take a worm or several to the nest. They often make a special soft call when carrying food to another bird. However, if they come and just wolf down worms and never carries one away, then there are no young babies. (Or, possibly, the babies are completely stuffed with food.) They don't give young babies seeds, only insects, so to see this you have to put out worms. An amusing aspect to feeding mealworms is that my birds leave other insects in the feeder. I believe that often they have caught an insect, are on their way to the nest, stop at the feeder, see the mealworms, put down the bug they're carrying, pick up some mealworms instead, and depart without retrieving the original bug. This behavior has given me an interesting sample of what they eat: Thin grey robber fly, treehopper, queen ants w. wings, carpenter ant, jumping spider, unknown spider, stinkbug, larva possibly lacewing, Japanese beetle, click beetle, unknown beetle, 3 spp. of weevils, sm caterpillar, sm wasp, solitary bee, Anthrax tigrida fly. ID is often difficult as the insects are damaged or are only fragments. It's also funny to watch them with hulled sunflower. The seed is ready to eat, but cardinals seem to feel that something should be done. So they carefully rotate each seed in their beaks, removing the delicate papery covering from the seed, and leave these "papers" piled in the feeder. Again, if the female has been incubating for more than 13 days, and you don't see the parents start to carry worms away, something bad may have happened. When the babies first leave the nest, both parents feed them. After they are partly grown, the female stops feeding them and starts another nest. The male keeps feeding the fledglings, giving them seeds and insects, until the next eggs hatch. Then he abandons the fledglings and starts feeding the new hatchlings. Thus, if his life is successful, he feeds other birds every day from late April to mid-September. The feeder-calling method described here enables you to locate all the birds, right up until when the fledglings leave the territory. At that point fledglings become a mystery, and no one is certain where they go. (Apparently Bob Levy has successfully followed fledglings in Central Park, NYC, but this is an unusual environment. They are very difficult to track or locate or re-identify. However, he has an easier time with his cardinal fledglings. He doesn't use a feeder, but walks around the park handing them nuts. Thus his cardinals bring their fledglings out to see him, while mine hate me because they usually only see me when I'm bothering their nest.)