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Regional Feeding Guides

Three things change when you move: which birds show up, when they show up, and what goes wrong locally. Almost everything else about feeding birds stays the same.

Feeding birds is remarkably uniform across North America. Black oil sunflower works everywhere, a baffle at 4 to 5 feet (1.2 to 1.5 m) defeats squirrels everywhere, and the cleaning routine is the same in Maine and Arizona.

Three things do change with geography, and they are the reason this section exists.

Which species occur. A yard in Vermont and a yard in Oregon can run identical setups and produce almost no overlap in the birds using them. Steller's jays, bushtits and lesser goldfinches are ordinary in the West and absent in the East; Northern cardinals and tufted titmice run the other way.

The calendar. Hummingbirds reach the Gulf Coast in late February and southern Canada in mid-May. Juncos arrive in October in Pennsylvania and never leave the mountains of Colorado. Every date in the seasonal section has to be shifted to your latitude, which is what these guides do.

The local failure mode. Bears in the Northeast and Mountain West. Heat and humidity in the Southeast. Rain and mold in the Pacific Northwest. Wind on the Great Plains. Ants and year-round insect pressure in Florida.

Find your region#

The boundaries are approximate#

No bird has ever consulted a state line. These regions are a convenience for organizing guidance, and the transitions between them are wide. If you live in the Ohio Valley, on the Front Range, in the Texas Hill Country or anywhere within a hundred miles of a listed border, read both neighboring guides and take what matches your yard.

Two rules of thumb help. Elevation acts like latitude, so a yard at 8,000 feet (2,440 m) in Colorado runs a calendar closer to Alberta than to Denver. And your winter is the best single predictor: if your ground freezes hard for months, the northern guide applies to you whatever the map says.

The regional problems worth knowing about in advance#

Bears. This is the one regional issue with a safety and legal dimension. In bear country, feeders come down from roughly April through November, and many jurisdictions set specific dates or rules. A feeder that teaches a bear to associate houses with food frequently ends with the bear being killed. See bird feeders and bears.

Heat and humidity. In the Gulf states and Florida, seed spoils in weeks rather than months and nectar ferments in days. Buy small, fill half full, and expect ants at hummingbird feeders to be a permanent fixture rather than a surprise. Storage matters more here than anywhere: storing bird seed.

Rain. West of the Cascades, the enemy is water rather than temperature. Covered feeders, real drainage and a shorter cleaning interval prevent moldy, clumped seed, which is the region's defining feeder problem.

Winter water. North of roughly the 40th parallel, open water in January is scarcer than food and pulls in birds that ignore seed entirely. Winter water and heated bird baths covers the hardware.

Where to go next#

Once you know which birds your region delivers, the bird profiles tell you what each one wants, and the attracting section turns that into a setup. For the dates themselves, pair your regional guide with when to put out hummingbird feeders and the rest of the seasonal guides.

All 11 guides in this section#