If you’re looking to bird watch in your backyard, you’re going to have to know when and where to look, since you will find certain birds at certain times throughout the day.
While many factors determine when birds are active, birds seem to mostly be active during three times throughout the day – 8AM to 11AM, 2PM to 4PM and 30 minutes before sunset.
These are the times when birds seem to be most active and are looking for food. However, other factors like temperature and weather can change bird habits.
To find out more about what times throughout the day are birds most active in the garden, read on.
This article will expand on when to expect your garden birds to be active and provide some hints for detecting your birds.
Read on for more information.
When to Expect Your Garden Birds to be Active
Much like humans, birds have a circadian rhythm that dictates much of their activities, such as when they:
- rise
- sleep
- eat
Consequently, establishing contact with your birds’ circadian rhythm can identify when they will be most active in your garden.
Taking their circadian rhythm into consideration, birds are generally active in the early morning and early afternoon, making most garden birds active from 8:00 A.M. to 11:00 A.M. and 2:00 P.M. to 4:00 P.M.
During these timelines, the birds may be looking for food. Birds often come out one last time in the day.
About 30 minutes before sunset, many birds regroup, looking for food, energy or trailing mosquitoes and other night bugs that are optimizing their evening operates roughly around the same time.
While you should be able to find at least one bird at all times of the day, this is when most birds will likely be more active and retrieving food.
Factors That Affect Bird Activity
Although you can anticipate a lot of garden birds will be active in the early mornings and early afternoons, many elements will influence the birds’ behaviours.
On the other hand, the following are the things will cause birds to shift behaviours.
- bird type
- weather
- time of year
- outside intimidation
Bird Type
Some birds tend to wake earlier than others.
Birds like cardinals, chickadees, and hummingbirds are notoriously some of the earliest risers. You are likely to see these birds between 8:00 A.M – 9:00 A.M.
Flying solo birds are usually at a much less predictable time. For example, woodpeckers are most often seen around 10:00 A.M. – 11:00 A.M., but may change day to day.
Similarly, robins are different from most garden birds as they are active during the day.
After robin eggs hatch you can expect to see female robins looking for worms constantly during the day.
Owls are another wrench in predicting bird activity.
Feeling lucky? Owls rarely visit a garden, but do occasionally. They are regularly more active during the first two hours at night.
Weather
The weather has an impact on whether a bird gets up and goes out.
The times mentioned above are mostly for fair weather, where the weather doesn’t inhibit birds from waking up and going out (i.e. in the office they are “comfortable” with you up and out).
Rainy or inclement weather, extreme cold, or extreme heat can induce birds to alter their behavior when it rains, the birds could start waking up at mid-day to hunt for worms after the rain.
However, in a storm and if the poor weather has been going on for a time you might see birds looking for food at random times.
Time of Year
Different seasons of the year also do different things to the habits of birds.
This is a somewhat simple reason, season typically controls temperature and birds do not like extreme heat or cold.
The birds will react to temperature by becoming active at different times throughout the day.
In the summer, for instance, birds are more likely to be active early in the morning than they are in the winter.
In the summer there is typically great food sources for birds early in the morning and before it gets too hot, however, birds will get too cold if they get up at the same hour in the winter.
In many cases the time of year will not uniformly change the time birds are active, however, they may change by 30 minutes or so.
Intimidation
Naturally, if there’s something in your yard that birds perceive as dangerous, they won’t venture out or be active.
Bird activity can be delayed by a dog, or even by you working in the yard.
3 Tips for Spotting Your Birds
If you’re looking to become more aware of what your garden birds are up to, we suggest getting to know your birds, checking on the group feeders, and trying different flavour feeds.
This way, you will be able to get a sense for when your birds are feeding and attract more birds.
1 – Know Your Birds
As noted earlier, bird species change at the time when your garden will be feeding birds.
For this reason, we recommend getting to know the birds. This means, watch them and learn what species they belong to.
This will enable you to better predict when the birds will eat.
Even after you have done your preliminary research, keep watching the birds. Their habits can change depending on what other birds are in the area.
In other words, make the birds a full-fledged hobby instead of just those requiring some homework around your garden’s feeding schedule in relation to the birds’ activity levels.
2 – Scout for Group Feeders
One of the most enjoyable groups of birds is those that enjoy eating in groups.
There are three well-known gourmets that do not seem to eat a meal alone or do not bait and switch away from one another: cardinals, chickadees, and hummingbirds.
If you are lucky enough to attract these groups, you will have points throughout the day where your garden will emote.
When the birdfeeder is active with these kinds of birds, observing them becomes far more exciting since they often eat at the same time of day, which you’ll learn by repetition.
The drawback with scouting for groups of birds is once they finish eating, they will all fly away together, just one or two birds at a time would likely come in to eat, but it doesn’t feel like a cafeteria.
While attracting solo flyers can be entertaining, if a group flies off when they finish eating, or else solo birds don’t much care for the feeder.
When the group returns for feeding after about 10-20 minutes you will once again feel lucky.
3 – Set Up Different Feeders
If you want a feeder that is as active as possible, put out different feeders to attract as many types of birds as possible.
Then: You can get a decent chance that at least one of them will be active. This is especially a good idea if you want both social feeders, as well as birds that like to fly solo.
Final Thoughts
If you’d like to observe your garden birds, the best time to watch is between 8:00 A.M. and 11:00 A.M. (the early mornings), 2:00 P.M. and 4:00 P.M. (the afternoon), and then around 30 minutes before sunset.
Birds tend to be most active during that time of day because birds are usually feeding, drinking, and socializing at that time.
However, the time of day varies with a lot of factors including the species of bird, the weather, and the time of year. We’d recommend getting to know your birds.
This will allow you to observe their habits and timing to see if there is a pattern and to reliably predict when they may be most active.