So we feed the birds every winter, and spring/summer/fall if it’s not bringing the bears onto the deck. This year the price of black oil sunflower seed has gone up to $23/40lb bag and hasn’t come back down. Last season we were paying $18/40#. I’m unable to find any article explaining the increase in price, but have wondered if it was related to the derecho in the upper mid-west this past summer. I’ve also found most brands are putting more and more corn in their mixed seed and suet, which is a cheap filler the birds don’t eat. I’m to the point with suet that I may begin purchasing beef suet at the butcher and freeze it in batches for the suet feeders. Royal Wing used to offer decent suet, but it’s loaded with corn now.
Anyone know why the cost went up on sunflower seed, and what’s your most reasonable source for seed and suet?
I wonder if it is related to this:
Ukraine is likely to significantly slow its sunflower seed crushing operations from April, after 2020-21 sunflower seed production turned out significantly lower than forecast and following a large volume build-up of crushed seeds over the September-December 2020 period.
Sunflower seed stocks may fall to 3.1mn-3.2mn t by April, according to crushers’ latest data. This would be 1mn t lower than where stocks stood on 1 April 2020 and the lowest level since the 2015-16 marketing season.
The fall in stock levels the result of a 15pc reduction in this year’s sunflower seed production, following dry weather conditions. According to Ukraine’s ministry of economy, the country harvested 13.1mn t of seeds in the 2020-21 marketing season, while crushers’ estimates are a bit lower, at 12.2mn-12.3mn t.
In the US the 2 top growers (by a wide margine) are North and South Dakota
My wife has birds (cockatiels/conure) but those mixes have no sunflower seeds in them///we usually have a big bucket of waste seed every few weeks i dump for the outside birds which then pick thru them.
Bird feeding has become obsessive…Walmart devotes more space to bird seed than to frozen food, than to mens footware, and almost as much as the gardening section!
I’d say most birds are way overfed.
And cats could also make a living without any supplemental feeding at all if we let them roam about!
If the practice of " Bird feeding " , is understood as the supplementary feeding made by humans to wild birds.
I think I also practice this “sport”.
The starlings of my population incessantly devour my cherry trees.
I installed long ago an acoustic booster with the sound of birds of prey to scare them away , and the starlings dance “La Macarena” with these noises hahahahaha.
Fortunately, they only attack cherries, so in the very near future I will have to mount posts with anti-bird netting in all the lines of my cherry trees (5 fruit trees lines with more than 100 cherry trees) It will be then when I stop to practicing bird feeding
Regards
Jose
I just stopped protecting my apples this past summer/fall after the birds just ravaged them. Its too much to protect. The nice thing is one day there was an oriole in there pecking away.
I stopped growing sunflowers because the finches just sit in them all day once the seeds start filling and then they drop them all over the ground, leading to mice moving in.
Yes, the mice and the huge amount of waste are certainly issues. This spring I’ll rake up the dropped seed and it will fill the tractor loader.
I received a new feeder as a Christmas gift and put it outside first of the year. No birds came to visit. After a week, deer emptied it. I refilled…no birds for several days, then a little guy landed, took three peck, and flew away. I read an article from a Wisconsin newspaper in which a naturalist responded to a readers question regarding the lack of birds at their feeder. The naturalist mentioned that he had heard this repeatedly and suggested that it is the results of the “mild” winter. Because of the lack of snow, birds do not need to supply their diet at the feeder. I guess that could be the case, but I have seen few birds around here in general - a crow or blue jay now and then. So if you’re dishing out for the feed, I hope the birds are appreciating it! 
Last winter was low turn-out for us. This year we have both Evening Grosbeak and Red Polls that we refer to as the 'little piggies". Our Purple Finches and Gold Finches are absent this year.
Hi warmwxrules.
I don’t know what your orchard will be like, but mine is tremendously big.
Fortunately, I was intelligent and I have organized my orchard by fruit varieties, that is, I have lines together of plums, lines together of pluots, lines together of peach trees, cherry trees, persimmons, apple trees, pear trees, etc … …
So I can mount specific protection for each variety thus saving a lot of money.
For example, for pear apple trees, I need a very fine-caliber anti-insect mesh to avoid fruit flies (Ceratitis Capitata) and Carpocapsa (Cydia Pomonella)
Cherry and apricots are not attacked by fruit flies, because they are early harvest varieties, so you have to place anti-bird mesh, and for stone fruit I have no problems.
So if the installation is done by me, with the help of my employees (they always help me in the work of my fruit orchard).
It would be enough to go to a metal scrapyard to buy galvanized metal posts, and buy good quality industrial mesh rolls with ultraviolet protection.
It is not so difficult or expensive, to do something like what I show you in this photograph and my orchard would be free from pest and birds problems.
The protection meshes would be placed on metal posts, so that they can be rolled up in winter (they remain rolled up and protected), and at the beginning of spring they are unrolled, covering the trees completely.
In my case it is a project that I have to carry out, but imagine the quality of the fruit that I am going to harvest.
The price of the poles in a junkyard are very cheap, and the high quality rolls of mesh cost 120 € ( 145 $ ) the rolls of mesh are 12 x 50 meters (40 x 164 feet) in size, so that each mesh roll covers an area of 600 square meters (6,458 square feet).
It may seem like an expensive installation, but if it is done little by little it is not so expensive and it is a tremendously useful investment.
Regards
Jose
My spouse and I have always enjoyed feeding and watching birds. We are so indulged that we both have these monoculars. However, we have recently moved to a new home that is located in a subdivision and adjacent to a relatively small natural creek that also provides drainage for the subdivision. The creek varies in amounts of water carried depending on rain but is the home of many different animals such as squirrels, raccoons, armadillos, birds, small fish where the creek constantly holds water, etc. It is fenced between the edge of our lot and the creek, so limited animals other than squirrels, birds and occasional raccoons enter the yard. As we began to feed the birds, however, we soon noticed that there were rats coming from the creek area and feeding on bird food at night dropped on the ground by the birds. We have stopped feeding the birds altogether and have not had any difficulty with roof rats or seen them at night for a number of months.
The question is how could we begin to feed birds safely again? The only way we have considered would involve carefully picking up any food remaining at the end of each day. Are there other suggestions, or is this just an issue of deciding how to live with other animals trying to do the same?
I recommend Audubon Worm Treat instead of seed.
@clove2 We also had to stop feeding birds and having an on ground compost pile because of rats.
@Richard From the picture online, looks like the Worm Treat has sunflower seeds and meal worms. Being omnivores, I suspect that the rats will eat both. Have you had experience with this bird feed not attracting rats?
We took down our bird feeders after we read the warning about avian flu that although there is a very low risk of an outbreak among wild songbirds, it is recommended to take down bird feeders if you keep domestic poultry.
Even more sadly, once the Canada geese made their annual return to raise their goslings, we started to keep our poultry in pens, giving our ducks no access to our pond, since waterfowl have been identified as birds that carry and transmit bird flu without getting sick from the disease. Our ducks, turkeys, and chickens co-habitate. I haven’t seen the geese in a few days, so the birds should get their release soon.
I saw an article about a month ago speculating that black oil seed will get even more expensive as Ukraine is a major producer. I stopped feeding this spring, it draws in the bears that otherwise keep their distance. I am on the fence about feeding the birds this fall / winter, if seed is as high as anticipated, we’ll skip it. It’s probably for the best right now with avian flu being an issue.
@Vlad
I have 8 JT Eaton bait stations on my 1/4 acre property and use JT Eaton bait. The rats seem to consume all of the different flavors at the same rate. I prefer the “Top Gun” for it’s smaller size. I drop it down gopher holes outside our perimeter barrier adjacent to the street, then backfill with compacted gravel to keep strays and other wildlife out.
As for the rats, I’ve only found a few dead ones among my potted figs. I don’t know where the rest end up dying. All the individual owls, hawks, and falcons that we recognize by markings keep returning every year so it seems the claim of “no secondary kill” is valid. It could be though that the coyotes or crows are carrying away the deceased and their numbers don’t seem to be decreasing either.