The birds are not pleased we’ve decided to adjust in light of the salmonella warning. Here they are staging a protest while the Birdcam feeder is offline for cleaning and adjustments.
We’ve been seeing quite a few regular visitors lately at all our feeders, so needless to say, we’re dismayed about the outbreak. We haven’t seen anything in our neighborhood, but we intend to try to do what we can to help out.
After doing some research, we came up with an initial strategy. We’ll see how it goes and adjust if necessary.
First, we’re taking our hopper feeder off line for a while. Quite a few birds visit this one and there is usually quite a bit of feed that gets knocked to the ground where others forage. This is a wooden feeder that’s harder to clean, so by taking it offline, we reduce the concentration of birds on it and under it.
That leaves a thistle feeder (tube and peg perches) and the tube feeder which has the Birdcam on it in proximity. We also have some feeders in the back, so again, this will help reduce the concentration of visitors in close proximity.
For the Birdcam feeder, we are removing the seed tray on the bottom. More birds and bigger birds tend to perch on the seed tray and feed on the bits that get knocked out of the feeder. Eliminating this tray means fewer birds on the feeder and no place to concentrate a place of transmission. It will be easy enough to clean under the feeder and with the reduced number of visitors, this should help out.
We have two feeders in the back, so one of those is going off line too. The remaining feeder in the back is a small tube feeder without any seed tray which can be cleaned very easily. The various web sites recommend these type feeders so there is only a limited amount of birds congretating at the feeders at any one time which is part of the goal to reduce sources of transmission.
On top of that, we’ll try keeping the amount of feed in each of the feeders lower so that they are empty more often and there is less waste when we clean them. On cleaning, we’ll step up the frequency of cleaning the feeders and use the recommended 10% bleach solution to help keep things in check.
Hopefully, with a little additional vigilance on everyone’s part, we wont have to shut them all down.
