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Spring Cleaning For Your Feeders Spring is right around the corner and it’s time to do spring cleaning with your feeders and bird baths. It’s important to keep the food and water sources you provide for your feathered friends clean. Having feeders with moldy seeds can cause birds to become sick, spread disease and may even be fatal to the bird. So make sure to keep those feeders and water supplies clean. Before you get started cleaning your feeders and bird baths be sure to protect yourself. Since birds can carry disease and germs, you want to make sure to either use gloves when cleaning, or thoroughly wash your hands with antibacterial soap after cleaning a feeder. Also, I recommend you wear an old pair of shoes when walking around feeders and be sure to remove them before entering your house. This will prevent tracking bacteria into the house that could be harmful to pets and/or children. To keep your feeders clean you can use a 10-1 mixture of water to bleach in a spray bottle, spray feeder generously and let stand for about 10 minutes, rinse thoroughly and let it dry in the sun. If you have a tube feeder and you have some tough dirt on the inside, you can get a bottle cleaner and use a mixture of mild soap and water to scrub it clean. Make sure all soap is rinsed off and the feeder is dry before adding seeds. If you have a wooden feeder make sure the wood is completely dry to prevent the seeds becoming moldy. Now that those feeders are clean, you can put a variety of seeds in them to help attract birds to your yard. Some seeds you may want to try are Black Oil Sun Flower (BOSS), Safflower and Thistle. Most birds will eat these three seeds from the small Chickadee to the larger Jay or Cardinal. Be forewarned that the BOSS will germinate! You can prevent this by buying the more expensive sunflower hearts, though more expensive there isn’t any waste. Now if you want to attract Hummingbirds to your yard, the feeder I recommend is the HummZinger Mini by Aspects for its ease of cleaning. The mixture for the Hummingbirds consists of a 4-1 water to sugar mixture, boil the water and sugar until the sugar is dissolved, fill feeders and put the extra mixture in the fridge. This mixture should last at least two weeks. It’s important to not let the mixture get cloudy in the feeder as this is a sign of bacteria and it could make the Hummingbirds sick. It is also important when feeding birds to have a fresh water supply nearby. This water supply will be used for bathing and drinking and needs to be cleaned regularly. I do a general spray down and refill of the water every couple of days. If too much green algae builds up on the bath I wait until dark to clean it, I simply follow the 10-1 mixture of water to bleach in the bath as well. I cover it just to be safe and leave for several hours. I then spray it out thoroughly, making sure to spray the ground around the feeder as well to help dilute the bleach water that may get into the ground water. One simple way to help prevent buildup of algae is to put a few pennies into the bird bath. They will not hurt the birds and they help keep the algae from growing in the birdbath. So as you can see it’s easy to keep those feeders and bird baths clean by following the simple steps provided above. If you follow them you are doing your part to help keep the birds healthy and happy. Happy Birding. Special thanks to Casey and Tim for providing their great pictures to this article. Written by Duckwatcher