By Susan Tomlinson

Now that you’ve picked out your seed, you’re ready for the next big question: how to offer it up to the birds. Despite the array of options, this is a pretty easy task. A few simple feeders, filled with the right food, are really all you need to have a bustling, species-rich backyard.

There are all kinds of feeders available, each with their own purposes and strengths. The styles range from hanging tube, to hoppers (the ones shaped like tiny houses), to net socks, to platforms—the possibilities are seemingly endless. As with the feed itself, though, you can stick with some basics and satisfy nearly all the needs of your backyard visitors.

By Susan Tomlinson

What to do when you see a train wreck about to happen? Keep your mouth shut and let people make their own mistakes, or butt in and look like a pushy, insufferably superior know-it-all?

Just the other day, I was standing in the bird seed aisle of a local store when this same sort of advice pickle came up. I’m busy loading up my cart with a couple of bags of seed, when a couple of women arrive—all a-bustle—and start picking out a bird feeder and the seed to go in it. It was clearly their first feeder. I knew this because I was eavesdropping like any nosey parker worth her salt should. I’m not going to go into all the details here, but it was immediately apparent that they were headed down the Path of Regret.

By Susan Tomlinson

It’s official. The grades are in at my day job and I now have three full weeks of R&R—sort of. It’s true that I’ll actually spend much of that time getting ready for the spring semester, but I still plan on doing something fun and rejuvenating when I’m not working—I need to in order to flush out the inevitable end-of-term mental flotsam and jetsam that accumulates. And for me, rejuvenating always means building something. This time around, I plan to make a potting bench from some recycled cedar. But you might say that potting plants is merely the “day job” for this bench, since I am designing it for more than one task. The other task has to do with birds.