Winter Bird Care - Getting Your Back Yard Birds Through Wintertime By J Ruppel

Many factors combine to make the winter months tough ones for our feathered friends. Food can be hard to find, as there is less of it, and what there is may be covered by snow and ice. The bushes and plants are mostly dormant, and for those birds that normally feed on insect, these too are are often hibernating or dormant, and certainly not available to eat. All this combines to make it hard for the birds to find food. Compound this with the fact that as warm blooded creatures they need more energy to simply stay warm in the wintertime, and you can easily see that this can be a time of stress.

A great source of high calorie, or high energy food is suet. Suet is raw beef fat, typically taken the animal's kidneys and loins. Because of its high fat content it is very high in energy. It is often combined with some other high energy foods like nuts to make it very attractive to a wide range of birds, such as nuthatches, woodpeckers, wrens, cardinals, bluebirds. On the flip side, it can also attract squirrels and some pest birds as well, such as starlings. One thing many people so is use a caged feeder to discourage the squirrels from poaching the suet. Another thing to try with starlings is a suet feeder that only has a cage opening on the bottom, as they will not usually feed that way but many other birds will.

Suet usually goes through a process called rendering, which gives it the lard like appearance and an almost waxy like texture. It is usually shaped like a small block, similar in size and shape to a simple sandwich. It can be mounted in a feeder that simply hangs it on a tree, in cages that can be hung from tree branches, or there are some hopper type feeders that hold bird seed in the hopper, and have suet cages on the side, which can serve to feed several types of birds at one time.

Another popular approach is to use suet ball, which often have a string so they can simply be hung from tree branches. To keep pests away, one favorite trick is to flavor the suet with pepper. The pepper will discourage mammals like squirrel, but the birds are unaffected by the pepper.

The winter months also make it tough to keep water available to your outdoor wildlife. The cooler temperatures work quickly on devices like bird feeders since they are designed to be shallow, which means they will freeze up fairly fast. One way to deal with this is to buy a heated bird bath. But if you already have a favorite bird bath, another simple solution is to use a bird bath heater. This are simple coils, usually powered off the household current, and will have a thermostat built in so they will keep the water at a reasonable temperature will thawing it nicely for the birds to use.

Just a few simple ideas like this will help keep your local bird population healthy and ready to sing when the spring thaw eventually comes.

Resource: http://www.isnare.com/?aid=322162&ca=Pets

Keep Your Dog Healthy With Vaccinations By Ricardo D Argence

When owning a dog, you need to be sure to keep up to date with the vaccinations for your furry friend.

Vaccinations are important to help keep your pet in the best of heath. The vaccinations for puppies and full grown dogs are a bit different but very important none the less.

Puppies that are at least 6 to 8 weeks of age need to get to DHLPPC vaccinations. These vaccinations are done over a period of time, usually over a three to four week period until they're 16 weeks of age.

Once the puppy is 16 weeks of age, rabies vaccinations and immunizations are then recommended annually. When the shots are done in a series this is also called booster shots.

Puppies need a booster shots to help build their immunity. When puppies are firstborn they get their immunity from their mothers when they nurse. Once they stop nursing the immunity declines and that is where the booster shots come in handy.

The senior dogs are not as susceptible to getting distemper or parvo so your vet may recommend that they get this vaccination every other year. It is still good to take your dog in yearly for a checkup.

You need to be sure to get your dog checked regularly to make sure they're showing no signs of kidney disease or cancer. The earlier you catch things such as these, the better off your dog's chance of survival is.

The combo vaccination called the DHLPPC, covers a number of diseases in one shot.

The D stands for distemper, the H stands for hepatitis or adenovirus-2, L. stands were leptospirosis, the P stands for parainfluenza, the other P stands for parvovirus and the C stands for corona virus. This is a great vaccination to get for your dog is it covers the many illnesses in one injection.

Another type of vaccination that you may get for your dog is Bordetella. It is also known as kennel cough, which is a respiratory infection in dogs.

While it's not a fatal infection it can be hard to get rid of. It can spread fast through boarding and grooming places such as animal shelters or even a vet's office. They can do this vaccination in one of two ways. The first being nasal spray and a second and injection.

If you do the injection then you need to get a booster at one month after the date of the first one.

Unfortunately dogs have to deal with tick problems. Ticks can cause Lyme disease it if you live in an area where there is a lot of woods around then you need to be cautious of the tick problems.

The Lyme vaccine would be a vaccine that you want to get for your dog to protect him or her from Lyme disease.

There is a parasite that lives in the intestines and can be passed from the fecal matter from infected animals. That parasite is called Giardia. Dogs can become infected with this parasite by drinking contaminated water.

Many people don't realize that they can also be infected. The vaccination for Giardia is a good one for dogs that are outdoors a lot.

Resource: http://www.isnare.com/?aid=230752&ca=Pets