Photograph by Ernest Harold Baynes 
A BLUEJAY FEEDING ON SUET 
“Perhaps the simplest scheme of feeding, the least troublesome, and the most attractive to 
numbers of birds, is the tying of a piece of suet to a convenient limb, or perhaps to the 
balustrade of one’s piazza, preferably in a protected spot and one that can at the same time 
be easily watched from some window” (see page 170). 
about the flower garden or in lines among 
the rows of vegetables; wild sarsaparilla 
and pokeberry along the boundary walls; 
while if you have a corner somewhere in 
the fields that can be planted with buck- 
wheat and Japanese millet, it will prove 
a great attraction, particularly in winter. 
FOOD-HOUSES AND SHELTERS 
In bad weather, however, particularly 
in the North, where we are so apt to be 
covered up with snow, more artificial 
means of feeding should be resorted to, 
and food stations, food-houses, and food 
shelters of various sorts should be estab- 
lished in proper places. If quail or grouse 
are to be fed, inconspicuous bough shel- 
ters may be built in protected places 
among the fields or woods most fre- 
quented by them, while about the house 
or among the neighboring plantations all 
sorts of devices may be resorted to. 
A European bird lover has invented a 
food-house, an adaptation of which, called 
the Audubon food-house, has been much 
used on this side of the water, and is most 
satisfactory (see page 165). It consists 
of a square hip roof, with vertical glass 
sides suspended beneath and open at the 
bottom, the whole supported on a central 
rustic cedar post, encircled with food 
trays beneath the roof. The glass sides 
protect the food trays from the weather 
and at the same time admit light and al- 
low of easy observation. These, when 
placed among the shrubbery about one’s 
house, prove most attractive. 
The same bird lover has invented also 
a food bell that supplies grain, etc., auto- 
matically from a receptacle above, and 
which may be suspended from a tree or 
piazza roof, or any other convenient 
place (see page 164). 
Window boxes are a_never-ceasing 
source of enjoyment. Mr. Ernest Harold 
Baynes built the first I ever saw at his 
home in Meriden, N. H., a particularly 
attractive one, which has helped him to 
become intimate with an astonishing va- 
riety of birds (see page 173). 
Food shelves may be put up in all 
sorts of protected places—about shouses, 
against tree trunks, etc.; and a food car, 
a sort of moving free-lunch counter, 
which may be run conveniently on a wire 
from window to neighboring tree, is actu- 
ally manufactured by one enterprising 
gentleman; and the same man builds also 
169 
