Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Where are all the birds coming from?

We're in the midst of a very mild winter. We have no snow and we've had very few days when it didn't get above freezing. It should be easy living for the birds. However, our feeders are overwhelmed with SBB's (small brown birds). Juncos, house finches, and several species of sparrows mainly. I've had to start rationing or they'll bankrupt us buying feed. We've never had them in these numbers before.

Same here. Hundreds of sparrows, and a few starlings are making it tough for the other birds . We still have some woodpeckers, cardinals, titmice, nuthatches, but not in the numbers we used to have. Would love to wipe out an entire generation of sparrows!

You mean this country is going to the birds.

Thanks for the reminder, the dog food was left out this morning, the starlings love it.

Too late, all that's left is bird poo

I noticed a couple 100 plus flocks of snow geese yesterday! Thats about a month early. Front yard has the little birds described earlier, plus a few varied thrush! The thrush are not common in the basin, usually found in the forest, surrounding the area!

Everything is pretty much normal here except we are seeing a much larger number of cardinals in the yard at the same time

Very normal here except fewer cardinals.

Eggs...last I checked

lol

We have Robins out the ass.

I am going through black oil sunflower seed at an alarming rate too. About the same as RC with a few chickadees thrown in. I can't remember this many birds at this time of the year.

We have the usual moocher sparrows and a ton of mourning doves but also lots of finches. Thing that is surprising is a number of Mountain Bluebirds. Normally do not see those until March...?

They're living up there with you on welfare instead of heading south for the winter.
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My neighbor and I kept the starling at bay with 22lr racking up truck loads they sure do love suet cakes, we had to switch to Benjamin 22 PCP as 22 are getting hard to find and don't want to deplete my stock of 22lr

The mourning doves always migrate out around Labor Day but we have a good supply of collareds. They stay for the winter. Even in the summer we don't have a lot of mournings any more. The collareds have pretty well replaced them here.

Cardinals, Jays, sparrows, Collared dove and finches. Extremely mild weather to date and they are wearing our feeders out!

How dry was it this past summer?

The birds you’re reporting feed mostly on last years grass and weed seed crop.

Robins flock up and become wandering fruit and berry eaters in the winter, the numbers in any given location dependent upon the berry crop. Around here it’s cedar and hackberries that pack em in about every four or five years. This year like most around here there’s hardly any.

Seems around here there are less mourning doves every year. Im wondering if the wind turbines are getting them. Almost no doves seen in 200 miles from Abilene through Pecos in West Texas this winter. Im hoping they dont go the way of the passenger pigeon. I dont know what the population needs to be to keep them viable.

There was hundreds of mourning doves around here when the last front blew through, just that one day. Didn’t stay, nothing to keep em here in the city.

Hadn’t seen that many mourning doves in a while.

The local breeders are still around, albeit much reduced because of White Wings, same with Inca Doves. White wings carry a parasitic worm more often lethal to other doves. Doesn’t seem to bother the collared doves tho.