Your Ultimate Backyard Nature Store ®
The Wild Bird Center of West Caldwell, NJ is your resource for backyard bird watching and feeding. The Wild Bird Center is a specialty retail shop that offers a complete line of products to help you enjoy wild birds and foster a healthy backyard habitat.
Our birdseed and exclusive seed blends are field-tested and proven to attract the widest variety of birds. We offer an extensive selection of feeders, birdbaths, nest boxes, and other bird feeding products second to none. We carry a large selection of books and other gifts for wild bird lovers.
We also carry binoculars and spotting scopes that can help you spot songbirds on the bird feeder, hawks migrating overhead or seabirds along the shore.
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We're about to launch a new e-mail newsletter. Sign up below to be among the first to receive it. We'll continue to send the mailed newsletter (unless you wish to opt out), but the new newsletter will allow us quicker turnaround on special events at the store and special discounts for our "regulars." Sign up below. Of course, we promise never to give our e-mail list to anyone else.
We lost our beloved Nicholas, our Senior Cat and Vice President of Customer Relations, this past May. Nick died suddenly of what appeared to be a heart attack. We are so glad he didn't suffer and even happier to have known him for five-and-a-half years. He was about 11 years old and is sorely missed. Rest in peace, sweet boy.
A week after Nick's death, we took home Abigail, a part tabby, part tortie cat. She was less than a year old and had had a tapeworm so she was very skinny. With the tapeworm gone, Abigail began to grow. She has gotten bigger in overall size and, alas, in girth. Abby loves to eat. Nora did not like her when she first came, but then we got Tortellini, a tortoise shell kitten. Nora hates Tortellini and now tolerates Abigail. Abby likes to nap in a basket on top of the seed bags. That way she can see what's going on in the store without interfering with her beauty rest. Tortellini sometimes squeezes into the basket with her. Both Abby and Tortellini are big fans of toy furry mice which they hide all over the store. So if you run into a mouse in the store, rest assured that "the girls" have everything under control.
Nora continues as our official birdbath tester.
And she still sometimes climbs the rafters although Mommy is less panicky about it than she used to be.
People always comment, "A cat in a bird store?" Well, all our girls love to birdwatch, and they are all indoor cats. Birds provide them with hours of amusement with no harm to our avian friends.
Store and Local News
New Link
Look at the left side of this webpage. You'll see a new item: What Bird? This is a great site that will allow you to enter the information you have about a bird so that you can make an identification. Gather as much information as you can about the bird in question and click on the What Bird? link. In minutes you should be able to identify "your" bird.
New Birding Venue
Self-described swamp stomper Mike Mazur introduced me to the Great Piece Meadow in Fairfield. This huge tract is old farmland and woodland that is part of the Green Acres program. It is a great spot for birding that includes a heron rookery, fields, waterways (mostly colonial Dutch drainage ditches) and woods. The mixed habitat means there are all sorts of birds. We have a list of over 40 species we've seen or heard there including nesting Baltimore orioles, green herons, bobwhites, tree swallows, red-headed woodpeckers, wood thrushes, indigo buntings, bluebirds, bobolinks and even Virginia rails. Join us on a birdwalk and we'll introduce you to this lovely spot.
Visitors To My Yard
I had an interesting visitor to my backyard recently: a coyote. I got a few shots of the little guy. Told Nicholas this was one reason he was an indoor cat.
Birdfeeding (with the exception of mealworms) is over for the season since one or more bears have shown up to raid my feeders. When the bears are not around raccoons and skunks have been a nuisance too. They are mostly nocturnal so I don't have decent photographs of these raiders, but the bear showed up recent at 7 PM and I got this shot.
And down the road from my house I spotted a series of huge holes in a classic long oval shape that indicates that they were made by a pileated woodpecker. I'm going to keep checking this site in hopes of seeing the actual bird!
I caught this Downy Woodpecker on a bad hair day. He loves the Woodpecker Log suet feeder as do the Hairy and Red-Bellied Woodpeckers.
Also seen in Kent, CT, a flock of wild turkeys. Here's one of the beauties.
Down the road from my house turkey and black vultures made a feast of a dead raccoon. The bird on the far right is the black vulture.
There are lots of frogs around my vernal pool. Usually they plop into the water the minute I walk toward the water, but occasionally one cooperates and lets me get a photo.
Here's a red-bellied woodpecker at my suet log (a great feeder, by the way!). This is one time where you can actually see the red belly.
A chestnut-sided warbler began coming to my feeders. An adult male was the first visitor, but I saw a fledging the same day. Now the youngster comes--especially to the tree nuts and the Woodpecker Log feeder. This bird is partial to peanut suet.
No photos, but my nestboxes fledged several black-capped chickadees and a family of house wrens.
flickr.com
You can upload all your digital photos to flickr.com and share them with family and friends. In addition, it allows you to do some fun stuff too. I created this from a photo I took in Central Park.
Another Great Birding Website
Go here to see red-tailed hawks that nest on the Trump Parc in New York City.
And, of course, be sure to check The Cornell Lab of Ornithology to see what's going on there. They have an update on the ivory-billed woodpecker and the Nest Cams where you can see live photos of birds on their nests.