Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Winter Without Birds

They turn off at the feeders here with the advent of warm weather, so also have not had the attendance I usually have. The colder it gets, the more irruptive species I get...Redpolls, siskins, and Pine and Evening Grosbeaks all show up when it's colder than heck...not a sign of them this year.

I've seeing a pretty normal amount of birds in my area but they haven't been visiting our feeder as much the past couple of weeks.

We had a couple inches of snow a week ago and the birds were swarming. Some of it's melted since then and the bird numbers are down. They'll be back if we get more snow.

I live smack dab in the middle of the Pacific Flyway and you ought to see the grinds I drive by. Just yesterday up in the Butte sink area there are literally millions of geese, swans, and ducks of every variety feeding out in the flooded rice fields. When the snows and speckled bellies get up it's like a huge white cloud noisy as hell honking like crazy. It's incredible.

Same thing down at the Sutter bypass. Brazilians of waterfowl. Good year for them I think.

does no snow cause the sparrows to disappear?

Weather patterns are shifted around from last few years. Do not know if that is a problem or not. Usually see lots of crows and robins but not this year.

https://www.allaboutbirds.org/news/...s-something-affecting-their-populations/

Using half the birdseed I would normally use for this time of the year. I haven’t seen a cardinal in weeks, I normally have a good amount of them. I don’t know what the Hells going on.

Chickadees,Blue Jays and Whiskey Jacks,Doves,Grouse,Woodpeckers on the fat bags.Fill up the feeder every other day.Deer bump the feeder to eat birdseed.

Brazilians? Cool.

We're getting pretty frozen here so most of the waterfowl have left. Cranes a long time ago.

One less dickie bird around after this morning. Probably a junco. Was in the chicken yard bending over putting feed in their feeder and heard a screech. Looked up just as a Cooper's hawk took a bird to the ground no more than 10' away, picked it up and flew off to one of the neighbor's trees. Wish I had been looking at the actual hit and wish more that it had been a starling. Them figgers like to get in the one open chicken yard and eat Rosita's food.

Plenty of pinyon jays, so many and so gang like my neighbor calls them the Crips. Quail, scrub jays, juncos, a Townsend's solitaire that comes for water, and the magpies too. Can't forget the illegal alien doves too.

Geno

No free handouts at my place

This ain’t no soup kitchen round here

I wonder if they've all been blasted east by the big blows from CA to NY. It's rather normal around here as we've not seen any major weather, just warmer than usual. Cool, not cold in NW MT.

This is interesting,I just mentioned over the weekend to Mrs Rong that the birds weren't hitting the suet as much.

Same with our suet. Other than squirrels from the woods next door the birds are few and far between. Bird traffic seems to pick up more a week or so after a good snowfall event. Was at a local archery shop Saturday; the owner has 3 or 4 big seed feeders outside the shop and he also mentioned the lack of birds on them. I was there for an hour and a half for my step grand daughters archery league and the only thing on them was one squirrel. At least squirrel season is open until the end of February.

About 10 years ago I saw a starling in my neighborhood and had trouble believing it. Lately I have been seeing lots of them and many huge flocks. We used to have huge flocks of Bohemian waxwings hammering the mountain ash and elderberries. Today I saw a medium-sized flock of them for the first time this season... there were a number of starlings with them.

As the years pass, I think I'm seeing fewer and fewer of the spring/summer insect consumers and put a lot blame on pesticide use. Even killed off some of my kid's herps one summer when we were late taking notice of some community wide grasshopper control. Winter birds, it just seems to depend on temps and snow pack. Not seen a robin around the house in a couple months. Thirty miles south with open ground, they're everywhere.

A somewhat more temporary effect is how many hawks might be plying the neighborhood. Have about 2 Coopers, 1 Gos, and 1 Sharp Shin doing daily visits to Cookie's feeder poles. Nothing pays any attention to Red tails.

Sharp shin a couple days back

Little guy goes to ground and tries to run down quail hiding in our hedge.

Once the starlings show up, they do nothing but multiply and push the other species out.

Seems about right around here if anything maybe a few more winter birds than average. I haven't put any feed out yet but we've got tons of bramble producing shrubs all around us. Wild rose, hawthorn, salmon berry etc. and there's still lots of seed on birch trees. I'll put out a feeder or two in a month or so. Juncos, chickadees, varied thrushes, blue jays and a few types of finches are the most common.

Loss of habitat is the explanation.
There are too many people.

Well, I’m the guy who goes by “Birdwatcher” and might be more informed than some. Are there conspicuously less birds this year nationwide? That’s like predicting climate trends on the basis of local observations. I simply don’t know.

It is painfully obvious here that bird numbers have plummeted in the last five years.