Longtime local journalist Bill Radford and his wife, Margaret, live on 5 acres in the Falcon area with chickens, rabbits, dogs, cats, a flock of parakeets, goats and two horses. Contact Bill at billradford3@gmail.com.
Bird Feeders Get Smart
By Bill Radford
When we lived in Colorado Springs, our backyard — with a wealth of trees, including fruit tree and a fish pond — provided an impressive mini refuge for birds.
The population of birds out here on the wind-swept prairie might not be as significant, but we’ve always had a bird feeder in the backyard to attract those birds who do venture by. Now I’m getting a close-up view of our feathered friends, thanks to a Christmas present: a Sharper Image Video Camera Bird Feeder.
Through a Wi-Fi connection, I can watch the birds as they chow down, and with the help of AI and the Bird Lover app, an identification of the birds is provided. I can set the camera on Motion Detector or Bird Spotter mode to alert me when a bird arrives — though I usually turn off those modes because otherwise the alerts can be nonstop. I can even listen to the birds through a speaker at the bottom of the feeder. And if I get around to inserting the memory card, I can record some birds in action. A solar panel keeps the unit charged.
So who’s visiting the feeder in the middle of winter? The house finch, according to the ID feature.
From allaboutbirds.org: “The house finch was originally a bird of the western United States and Mexico. In 1940, a small number of finches were turned loose on Long Island, New York, after failed attempts to sell them as cage birds (‘Hollywood finches’). They quickly started breeding and spread across almost all of the eastern United States and southern Canada within the next 50 years.”
The male house finch, the site says, is known for its “cheerful red head and breast. … Females prefer to mate with the reddest male they can find.” (The ID feature of the bird feeder is not infallible, by the way, as it one time identified one male finch as a red-capped parrot, a species native to Australia.)
According to allaboutbirds.org, the house finch has a particular appetite for small, black oil sunflower seeds: “If house finches discover your feeders, they might bring flocks of 50 or more birds with them.”

The finches certainly have descended on the smart feeder, just as they had kept me busy filling our previous, not-so-smart feeder. We also have an active flock of doves that I haven’t actually seen at the feeder, but they stay busy feeding on the ground near it.
It should come as no surprise that the house finch dominates. It is the most sighted backyard bird in El Paso County in the winter, according to USA Today, which analyzed millions of bird sightings across the country in partnership with Project FeederWatch, a citizen science program. The National Park Service labels the house finch population across North America as “staggering,” with the count varying from 267 million to as much as 1.4 billion.
Still, I’d like to see more diversity at the bird feeder and am eager to see what spring and summer bring. Red-winged blackbirds have been a common visitor in the past, so I expect to see them at some point.
Western kingbirds set up their nest in trees in the front yard for a couple of summers; we’ll see if they return. We no doubt will see some robins. And the mockingbird, perhaps my favorite thanks to its amazing and amusing variety of songs, is a likely return visitor.
The county, it seems, is an exceptional area for bird watchers — and has been a focus of interest for a long time.
Notes Owen A. Knorr, a biology professor at the University of Colorado, in a 1959 “University of Colorado Studies” publication I found online: “El Paso County, Colorado, is one of very few areas in the Rocky Mountain West where thorough, intensive ornithological investigations were carried out at a very early date. In 1914, Charles Aiken and Edward Warren published ‘The Birds of El Paso County, Colorado,’ the results of 43 years of ornithological research in this region.”
And the county, with a diversity of environments from the foothills to the plains, also boasts diversity in bird populations, Knorr wrote: “A number of bird faunas with various geographic affinities meet here, with eastern and western forms mixing with purely boreal and desert forms, so that it is entirely possible to study nesting Rosy Finches in the morning and nesting Roadrunners in the afternoon.”

The Sharper Image Video Camera Bird Feeder allows a close-up view of the house finch.
Explorer Zebulon Montgomery Pike was the first to offer a published bird observation in the area, Knorr wrote. “Pike (1810), in his attempt to scale the peak, which now bears his name, in 1806, mentions seeing a ‘Pheasant’ in the high country forest, an obvious allusion to the bird we now call the Dusky Grouse. This record is the first published on the birds of this area.”
Another, more scientific report came from Thomas Say, who was better known as an entomologist but who historians regard as “entirely competent” in the field of ornithology, Knorr wrote. Say passed through the area in 1820 and his sightings included my new friend, the house finch. His visit, noted Knorr, included “the vicinity of ‘Boiling Spring,’ which is known today as the town of Manitou Springs, and (Say) collected the House Finch and the Arkansas Goldfinch, the first specimens to be taken and upon which the first descriptions were based.”
And he didn’t even need AI to help him.
