Seasonal

Fall Bird Feeding

Fall is when your feeder stops being a hobby and starts being infrastructure. Migrants need fuel, resident birds are hoarding for winter, and whatever you set up in September is what the winter flock will use.

Fall feeding does two jobs at once. It supplies fat to migrants making long flights on a tight energy budget, and it sets up the station that your winter residents will rely on for the next five months. The second job is the one people underestimate: birds that find your feeder in September are the ones queuing at it in January.

It also explains the most alarming thing about October feeding. Your seed disappears at three times the summer rate, and it is not because the birds have suddenly become greedy. Chickadees, titmice, nuthatches and jays are hauling it away and hiding it.

This page covers migration fuel, caching behavior, the annual restock and reset, and the specific problems fall brings. The winter menu itself is covered in winter bird feeding.

Fall migration and what it needs#

Migrating songbirds put on fat before and during a journey, sometimes increasing body mass substantially before a long flight. That fat comes from whatever is high in oil and quick to eat, which is exactly what a good feeder holds.

For migrants, offer:

• Black oil sunflower and sunflower hearts, the highest-value general seed.
• Suet, safe to reintroduce once daytime highs drop below roughly 90°F (32°C). In most of the country that is September; in the Deep South and Southwest, wait for October.
• Fruit, which pulls in thrushes, cedar waxwings, gray catbirds and late Baltimore orioles in a way seed never will.
• Water, which migrants detect from farther off than food. A dripper doubles the range.

Leave nectar feeders up about two weeks past your last hummingbird sighting. Late birds are frequently juveniles or stragglers, and an available feeder helps rather than delays them. The timing argument is in when to take down hummingbird feeders, and the broader migration picture is in feeding birds during migration.

Caching: why the feeder empties#

Several of the most common feeder birds are food-storing species, and fall is when they work hardest.

Black-capped chickadees hide single seeds in bark crevices, under lichen and in curled leaves, thousands of items across a fall, and remember the locations well enough to retrieve many of them weeks later. Tufted titmice and white-breasted nuthatches do the same. Blue jays work at a different scale, carrying multiple acorns or peanuts at a time in a throat pouch and burying them across a wide area.

Practical consequences:

• Your October seed bill is real and temporary. Consumption spikes, then settles.
• Whole peanuts and peanut halves are cacheable currency. A peanut feeder is the fastest way to attract jays, titmice and nuthatches in fall.
• Cached food is not wasted. It is winter insurance stored in your neighborhood's trees, and a good fraction of it becomes oak seedlings instead.
• A bird taking one seed and leaving is normal. Chickadees always feed this way, caching or not.

Caching also changes how birds use a feeder. A storer wants to grab and go, so short visits, a queue of birds waiting a few feet away in a shrub, and a feeder that empties between breakfast and lunch are all normal October behavior rather than signs of a problem.

The fall calendar, month by month#

Shift the whole sequence roughly a month later in the South and about two weeks earlier in the far North and at altitude. The regional guides go into local timing.

Restocking after a summer break#

If you paused for bears, heat or vacation, do not just pour new seed into an old feeder.

1. Strip and inspect. Take every feeder fully apart. Check for chewed ports, cracked plastic, rusted springs and mold in the base. Cold makes weak plastic brittle, so anything marginal in September will break in January.
2. Wash properly. Hot soapy water and a brush, then a dilute bleach soak, then a full rinse and complete drying. The method and dilution are in how to clean a bird feeder.
3. Throw out old seed. Seed that sat through a humid summer is likely rancid even if it looks fine. Start the season with a fresh bag.
4. Fix the storage. Buy in quantities you will use in about a month and keep it in a sealed metal or hard plastic container in a cool, dry place, as covered in storing bird seed.
5. Start small. One sunflower feeder and one suet feeder for the first week or two, then add. It takes a few days to a couple of weeks for birds to find a restocked station, and a yard that was busy last winter usually comes back at the fast end of that range.

Fall problems worth heading off#

Blackbird flocks. Migrating common grackles, red-winged blackbirds and starlings move in large flocks in fall and can strip a station in a morning. Short-perch tube feeders, safflower seed and caged feeders are the standard responses, detailed in grackles and blackbirds taking over.

Bears, still. Bears feed intensively in fall before denning and are more likely to find feeders in September and October than in June. In bear country, keep feeders down until there is consistent snow cover.

Wet seed. Fall rain plus mild temperatures is the worst combination for mold. Feeders need working drainage before the rainy stretch, not after, and an open tray left out in a week of drizzle is a write-off rather than something to dry out and reuse.

Leaf cleanup. Raking every leaf off the yard removes the insects, spiders and seeds that ground feeders spend the winter working through. Leaving leaf litter under shrubs and along fence lines costs nothing and feeds sparrows, towhees and thrushes long after the feeders freeze.

Squirrels. Squirrels are caching too, and their fall effort at your feeder is the most determined of the year. Now is the time to get the baffle geometry right rather than in midwinter, per how to stop squirrels raiding feeders.

A fall checklist#

• September: deep clean and inspect every feeder, dump old seed, reintroduce regular suet, restock with fresh sunflower.
• September: install or reposition poles and baffles while the ground is workable.
• October: add peanuts and a ground tray, expect consumption to spike from caching, rake up the hull layer.
• October: leave nectar up two weeks past your last hummingbird, then clean and store the feeder.
• November: get the heated bath or bath heater in place before the first hard freeze, not after.
• All fall: buy seed in month-sized quantities and store it sealed and cool.

Get that done and winter needs little more than refilling on a schedule built around dawn and the last hour of daylight.