House Finch Eye Disease shuts down feeding station
Feeder placement and cleaning is important to prevent disease spread
It’s time to regroup at my bird feeding station. I hate to do it mid-winter, but mild weather is forecast the next few days and I have signs of disease at the ol’ feedin’ hole.
My bird feeding station typically is a busy place but I was bequeathed a few more feeders and this year things got just a little out of control. As of today all my feeders are down for a few days while everything gets cleaned up and sanitized—and some local birds (hopefully) learn new habits.
My feeding station has become a spreading point for House Finch Eye Disease. As of yesterday it has been visited by at least two birds with signs of the condition. It could have come to my station just by chance or it could be because I set up my station this year and let things get too messy.
Having several more feeders, I reasoned, might help spread out the birds that come to my feeding station every winter. Previously I had two smaller tube-style feeders with a finch-mix feed in them and at times, especially in very cold weather, the finches practically piled up on each other fighting for a spot at those tubes.
Now I have three of those tube-style finch feeders and one of them is about three feet long and is a larger diameter. Plus I have five more feeders with black-oil sunflower seed in them and a tray feeder that gets a mix of the sunflower seeds and anything else I’m in the mood to purchase, like peanuts or mealworms. The blue jays go crazy over peanuts. Bluebirds come in for the mealworms.
My thought was that I was giving the birds more spaces at the table and allowing them to spread out. Avoiding overcrowding at feeders by placing several feeders a few feet apart is a good strategy, generally. In retrospect I think I might serve the birds better with a few less feeders in the safe space I have available.
A 10-foot by 20-foot area along the privacy fence on the west side of my yard is a pretty good spot for the birds. It lacks under-story brush this year (but some is planted and will grow), but the proximity to the fence and a nice tall redbud tree gives the birds places to land before coming to the feeders and makes it tricky for hawks to easily swoop through to grab a bird for a snack.
But as in any situation when wildlife becomes concentrated diseases can spread. House Finch Eye Disease once killed off half of all House Finches in eastern North America, and it can hit purple finches and goldfinches as well.
The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Project Feederwatch is the top source for information about the disease. People who participate in Feederwatch (it’s $18 a year) are encouraged to report sightings. I signed up this year.
Feeders have to be kept clean and, while I admit I’m not always the best at it, every couple of weeks they need to be taken down and cleaned with hot soapy water and possibly sprayed or dipped in a 10-percent bleach solution. I usually spray them down because I have the mix on hand for cleaning my Lab, Whiskey’s kennel.
Don’t re-fill the feeders until they are good and dry.
Seed hulls that collect around the bases of feeders should be raked up as well—even if the juncos and sparrows are doing a good job of spreading them around.
I gather up hulls in a scoop and scatter them in deep grass not far from the house. They’ll add to the soil but it’s better that they’re not concentrated under those feeders in a way that they might harbor bacteria or mold that can spread disease to the birds.
I have been aware of that conjunctivitis disease in finches and I try to keep my feeders clean because of it. House finches have been fewer this winter and the larger number of feeding spots for the gold finches seemed to work out well early this season.
I thought I had a pretty good thing going and I wasn’t concerned about traffic at the feeding station until a couple weeks ago. That’s when the red-winged blackbirds invaded the place.
A local flock of red-winged blackbirds made the station a regular part of their daily rounds. At several points I counted 150 to 200 blackbirds in my backyard. Things just got just a little too crazy—and messy.
The weekend before last I cleaned everything up and sprayed down feeders with that 10-percent bleach solution. Ten days later I walked out and saw two sick house finches and everything was an absolute mess again.
The wild blackbird crew had gone through about 50 pounds of sunflower, thistle and white millet in a week and polished off about half the contents of three suet feeders.
Daytime temperatures will be relatively mild for a few days and the birds—especially those blackbirds—have plenty of other food options now. A few days will allow them time to get into a new travel pattern and then I will restock and place feeders out again. I’ll have to keep an eye out for the sick finches. I doubt the two I saw yesterday will last long. One was so blind I almost caught it by hand.
That’s not a happy new year’s start at the feeder station but we’ll regroup and make things better. Seems to be a lot of that sentiment going around right now.