Winter is my least favorite time of year.

I live in Michigan. I love gardening very much and it’s a long stretch between fall and spring. I prepare myself for the winter months with mini projects such as decluttering and organizing. I add eBooks to my Kindle, create TV series and movie lists, and start my garden plans for spring. I like to bring nature indoors with easy-care houseplants. I also like to have fresh cut flowers, blooming plants and hyacinth, amaryllis, or tulip bulbs to remind me that spring is right around the corner.

A few years ago, I added a two-tiered lazy Susan to my dining room table and I decorate it for the seasons and holidays. Additional small pick-me-ups such as throw blankets, toss pillows and scented wax tarts bring in pops of color and soothing scents.

Being a family of six, I didn’t always have the extra money to add as much aesthetic style to my home, but I discovered the value of low-cost luxuries. After spending much of my adult life being frugal (iykyk), I’m now all about simple things that add quality to my life.

I am feeling all of the changes in the past 5 years almost as if it happened all at once.

My kids aren’t kids anymore. I spent many years being a mom of young kids and then teens and now they’re all young adults. I thought I had a good grasp on all of the things that I’d do as an empty-nester, but turns out, this transition is not for the weak! But through some soul-searching, I realized it was time to get back to the basics of things that bring me joy. I reflected on my childhood. I love lists, so I created a list of all the activities I liked as a kid. Some things I simply can no longer do. For example, I am not going to go water-skiing. The good news is that I have a nice bucket list of things that I want to do and I’m still able to do. I also have promises that I’ve made to myself.

One of the things on my list is birdwatching.

I was given a field guide as a child and I loved everything about reading it and learning about birds. My parents and grandparents were birdwatchers. I already had a good working knowledge of Northern birds. I had backyard feeders a couple of times as an adult, but I was always too busy to enjoy actually seeing any of the birds. Some years, I’d simply hang a thistle sock.

Last summer, after seeing the robins and finches nest on my front porch and in my hanging flowers, I bought a couple of bird feeders.

I didn’t think through any of the bird-related purchases.

I went to the store, bought a couple of feeders, some birdseed, hung them on my unused clothesline t-posts and waited. It’s funny because that same week, I considered removing the t-posts entirely. One is a little crooked from me pushing it to see if they were cemented in and measuring to see if it was under the length required for city pickup.

The birds started to visit.

Then I noticed one of the feeders broke. One of the feeders is a hopper feeder pictured below and it’s cute, functional, squirrel proof and a good purchase.

The other feeder was a tube feeder and the ports would fall out. It was pretty much a waste of money. It’s Wild Wings: Wide Deluxe Easy Clean Metal Wild Bird Tube Feeder. I don’t recommend it.

The remaining hopper bird feeder hung empty.

I was busy wrapping up yard work in the fall and my youngest daughter was leaving for her first year away at college and my oldest daughter was off to Laos for a year as a Fulbrighter. I could see the feeder from my kitchen window whenever I did dishes. I always looked at the progress in my yard and gardens and wished that I had taken more photos or had videos of it all. I considered getting a web cam or a smart feeder. I’m used to enjoying many things without actually having to buy them. Remember the Sear’s catalog? I’m aging myself, but as a kid, I would mark off things that I wanted, but there was a lot of joy simply flipping through it. So a smart feeder seemed to be one of those things that I saw, loved, but didn’t necessarily need to buy.

Fast forward to December

While Christmas shopping for my kids, there was a stack of smart feeders on display at Costco. I impulsively grabbed one and popped it into the cart and announced to my husband “Merry Christmas to me!” He was thankful he didn’t have to shop for me, so it was win-win. I didn’t research smart feeders. I didn’t give it much thought at all.

Once the holidays started to wind down, I filled my new smart feeder and my hopper feeder from the previous summer with birdseed. The smart feeder has an app that notifies me when a bird is at the feeder and it takes about a 10-15 second video clip depending on your settings. It’s a bit subpar from what I expected. Not horrible, but sometimes the sensor doesn’t pick up birds at the feeder and  99% of the time incorrectly IDs the bird. Yellow-eyed penguin? I don’t think so! It became super funny and entertaining even if it was wrong so often. I don’t need bird ID, so it was fine.

All was going well for a couple of weeks.

The following birds came to the feeders:

• Tufted Titmice
• Cardinals
• Blue Jays
• Chickadees
• Downy Woodpeckers
• Red-bellied woodpeckers
• Nuthatch
• Mourning doves
• Sparrows
• Purple finches

At this point, I’m invested.

Come on, if you’re a birder, you can guess what happened next!

First the squirrels! Then the starlings!

And that’s when things got serious! I was laughing at the squirrels because they fell more often than hitting the food jackpot. But they were also scaring all the birds away.

Keep in mind, earlier I mentioned that I didn’t think through any of this bird feeding and watching stuff. This is evident by my next few feeder choices. This can happen to most anyone new to anything. There’s joy in the process and when it comes to feeders, there are things I can do to make some of them work for me while others were simply bad choices.

I bought a peanut feeder (pictured empty above).

This feeder holds whole peanuts. It was cheap and I figured why not and later realized when reading my neighborhood app that some neighbors are really bothered by whole peanut feeders! I had never considered the nuisance to neighbors. Birds will carry them off to eat elsewhere and drop the shells anywhere and this can be a choking hazard for their pets and just a mess for them to deal with. I took mine down for now.

Then I decided to get a bigger feeder.

You know, so I didn’t have to refill it as often.

It has dual chambers, multiple ports and perches, mesh screen and is durable. The main issue is that the top screws on. When the wind blows, it could easily unscrew. I hung it from a swivel hook to combat that problem. This is a poor choice if you don’t have a lot of backyard birds. It holds 10+ pounds of seed. The seeds will mold if they’re not consumed quickly. However, it’s a decent feeder and I’m happy with it. Of course, then I needed a scoop for seed. Yes, I could have used any number of cups and containers, but that scoop was staring me in the face at the store and seemed PERFECT. Except the part that I need a scoop to fill the scoop. My husband is a saint. There I said it.

Then I bought the wooden feeder pictured below.

You know, to even out the t-posts. Can’t have it looking all imbalanced.

It gets a lot of birds, but there’s not really a very good perch on it. I’ll probably add some small sticks to extend the perch a bit because right now, only smaller birds can eat from it. The woodpeckers love the suet feeder and use it daily throughout the day, but you can see that I filled it with lower quality seed and then I bought a case of suet. It was on sale! Yes, I know I could make it. I’ll get to that soon.

Then I added another suet feeder and a mealworm feeder and cameras.

I can’t see the feeders very well from any indoor vantage point and the smart feeder wasn’t picking up all of the birds that visited. I’ve tried adjusting the settings and no, it’s not the battery. It is what it is. So I had my Blink backyard cameras and I moved them. This meant, I needed mounting clamps or poles for the cameras. Then I bought more Blink cameras. So there’s 4 out there now. Just getting the mounting clamps was crazy as Amazon kept shipping the wrong clamps!

And I still needed to solve my squirrel problem!

They were starting to climb the camera poles. So I moved the poles further away from the feeders and used mounting clamps on the feeders that I could clamp onto. Most retail baffles fit around smaller poles and I was trying to find a baffle for the clothesline t-posts because the squirrels were trying to climb that the most. The silly thing is that once they got up there, they couldn’t access, but my yard has no less than 20 squirrels at any given time and there was always a squirrel that tried.

I wrapped my t-post poles with HVAC pipe.

It snaps on and locks. Ignore how wonky it all looks. Don’t judge! Or judge with a smile because you can see how I went from one unused feeder to all of this. Plus I haven’t adjusted things after adding the snap lock pipe. It’s cold outside and I’m a wimp! The pipe is working well. The squirrels tried to climb it a few times and they failed miserably.

I didn’t leave the squirrels out.

I put food in a big bowl for them to enjoy and share with the ground feeding birds and bunnies. Plus, they’re fine. Big oak tree in the backyard and a bumper crop of acorns. You did see how chonky the squirrel is in the pic, right? They’re eating well. I love watching them chasing one another through the yard. Not anti-squirrel at all. But I’m trying to attract birds. Need to stay focused on BIRDS. I say this because our yard has turkeys, coyotes, raccoons, opossums, chipmunks, moles, mice, birds of prey, bunnies, snakes, skunks, bobcats, foxes, bats, porcupine, etc. and all of this within city limits!

I’m getting ahead of myself.

I’m going to share some of the work I’ve done in my yard and gardens in the form of a wrap up of 2024.

I’ll also introduce the cast of characters in my life, some topics on home and living, food and recipes, houseplants, fruit trees, thrifting, writing, photography and of course, more about my birding journey which is so much fun and there’s always so much to do! Laugh with me because I’m always in way over my head.

People that made it this far, you’re my kind of people!