Regional Guide

Feeding Birds in California

A Mediterranean climate flips the standard North American feeding calendar. Your busiest months are the wet ones, and for half the year a dripping bird bath will bring in more species than any feeder you own.

California is not one feeding region. A feeder in San Diego, one in Sacramento, and one in a Sierra town at 6,000 feet (1,800 m) get different birds on different schedules, and advice written for one is often wrong for the others.

What ties the lowland and coastal parts of the state together is a wet-winter, dry-summer pattern that reverses the usual North American feeding calendar. The busy months are fall through spring. Midsummer is quiet at the seed feeder and frantic at the water.

Two things follow that most guides get wrong here. Hummingbird feeders stay up all twelve months, because Anna's hummingbird does not leave. And from May to October, water does more for your yard list than seed does.

Where this guide applies#

This page is about cismontane California: the coast, the coast ranges, the Central Valley and the southern lowlands, roughly everything west of the Sierra crest and below about 4,000 feet (1,200 m). Boundaries like these are approximations, and a yard near an edge will show features of both sides.

• Sierra Nevada and Cascade elevations above roughly 5,000 feet (1,500 m) behave like the Mountain West: mountain chickadees, bear rules, a short hummingbird season.
• The far north coast and Klamath country grade into the Pacific Northwest, wetter and cooler year-round.
• The Mojave, Colorado Desert and Imperial Valley belong with the Southwest, where heat management and water are the whole game.

Birds at a California feeder#

The state's signature feeder birds are not the ones on the packaging of most seed bags. Oak woodland and chaparral species dominate, and several of them are found almost nowhere else in the country.

Add mourning doves almost anywhere there is ground seed, and cedar waxwings in winter flocks that ignore feeders entirely and strip your toyon and pyracantha instead.

Anna's hummingbird changes the rules#

Most of the country puts hummingbird feeders out in spring and takes them down in fall. California does not. Anna's holds territory through the winter, feeds on nectar in January, and has expanded its range substantially over the last century, helped along by garden plantings and by feeders.

That makes your feeder a year-round commitment, not a seasonal one. Use the plain sugar and water recipe, one part white sugar to four parts water, and nothing else. No red dye, no honey, no substitutes.

The winter risk is freezing, not starvation. In interior valleys and the foothills, nectar can ice up on a cold night. Bring the feeder in after dark and hang it out again at dawn, or keep two feeders and swap them. The taking down hummingbird feeders guidance about waiting two weeks past the last bird applies to migrants elsewhere, not to resident Anna's.

Water beats seed for half the year#

From about May through October, much of California gets almost no rain. Natural water sources shrink to nothing, and a reliable, shallow, moving water source becomes the single most productive thing in the yard. Warblers, vireos, tanagers, waxwings and bushtits will come to water when they would never touch a feeder.

Keep it shallow, no deeper than 2 inches (5 cm), with a rough surface for grip. Add movement: a dripper or a small mister costs little water and multiplies the draw, because the sound carries. The details are in drippers, misters and moving water.

A California feeding calendar#

Seasons here run wet and dry rather than warm and cold, and the feeder year follows the rain.

• September to November. The main buildup. White-crowned sparrows and wintering juncos arrive over a window from late September into October. Start refilling more often, add a ground tray, and check fall feeding for the transition.
• December to February. Peak feeder traffic. Sunflower, nyjer and suet all get used hard. Anna's hummingbirds are on territory and often nesting by late winter, which is genuinely early by national standards.
• March to May. Sparrows and juncos thin out and leave over several weeks. Rufous and Allen's hummingbirds pass through. Feeder traffic drops as insects become abundant.
• June to August. The quiet stretch. Adults bring fledglings through for a few weeks, then most families disperse. Cut seed volume, keep nectar and water going hard. See summer feeding for the reasons a quiet feeder is normal.

Heat, spoilage and buying less seed#

Sunflower seed goes rancid faster in a hot garage than in a cold shed, and birds detect it long before you do. In a California summer the practical rule is to buy no more seed than you will use in about a month and to keep it in a sealed container somewhere cool. The full case is in storing bird seed.

Regular suet cakes soften and go greasy above roughly 90°F (32°C), which mats feathers and turns rancid quickly. Switch to no-melt dough cakes from late spring through fall, or pull suet entirely for the hottest months.

Coastal fog is the counterpart problem: seed absorbs moisture overnight, cakes in the base of a tube, and molds out of sight. Fill tubes half full in foggy months and empty them completely before each refill rather than topping up. What that looks like when it goes wrong is covered in moldy, clumped or wet seed.

Jays, squirrels and ground squirrels#

The California scrub-jay is a cacher. It does not eat at your feeder, it empties it and buries the contents. The fix is not exclusion but diversion: put whole in-shell peanuts on a separate tray 20 feet (6 m) away and let the jays work through those, then use short perches or a caged feeder for the seed you want the small birds to reach.

California adds a pest most of the country does not have: ground squirrels, which climb poles that were baffled against tree squirrels and dig under ground trays. A wide pole baffle set at least 4 feet (1.2 m) up still works, but you also need to stop feeding on bare ground where they can excavate. The pole geometry is in how to stop squirrels raiding feeders.

Plant for birds and the feeder matters less#

More than in most regions, a California yard planted for birds outperforms a yard that only has feeders. Toyon, coffeeberry, elderberry, ceanothus, native sages and buckwheats carry birds through the dry season on fruit, seed and the insects they host, and they need no water once established. Native plants for birds covers the approach, and together with cover and water it does most of the work a feeder usually gets credit for.

A California setup that works#

• A tube of black oil sunflower with short perches, on a baffled pole.
• A nyjer or fine-mesh feeder for lesser goldfinches, which in much of the state are the most reliable feeder bird you have.
• A low ground tray with white millet, October through April, for white-crowned sparrows, juncos and towhees.
• A hummingbird feeder up all year, cleaned every two to three days in summer.
• A shallow bath with a dripper, scrubbed twice a week, running May through October.
• A separate peanut tray for the jays, well away from everything else.

If you are starting from nothing, build in that order and give it a few weeks. How long a new setup takes to get found is covered in how long until birds find a new feeder.