With only days remaining until Christmas, I thought you might appreciate a gift idea for someone that feeds birds.  This gift is not attractive; however, it is practical, inexpensive, and will benefit both backyard wildlife enthusiasts and the birds.  The gift I am referring to is a trash bag stand.  Now before you dismiss this suggestion, let me explain.

       One of the tasks that nobody that feeds birds enjoys is cleaning up discarded seed hulls and rotting seeds beneath seed feeders.  In an earlier blog (check archive), I wrote about a couple of handy tools that make this job easier.  I would like to add another tool to this list of valuable devices.  This tool is a collapsible trash bag stand.

       The device is little more than a metal frame.  To use it, all you have to do is place a trash bag in the center of the frame and stretch the opening of the bag around the top of the frame.  Once the bag is in place, the frame and bag will stand up on their own.

       The reason it is so helpful because you can easily deposit the seeds, hulls, and the directly into the bag for disposal in your trash.  Trying to place the waste collected in a dustpan, wheelbarrow, or shovel into a bag that you have to hold open with one hand while disposing of the waste in the bag with the other in no easy task.  As far as I am concerned, this is the most difficult step in the whole process.  However, when you use a trash bag stand, it is far easier and quicker to deposit the waste through the wide opening of a bag stretched open in a trash bag stand.  When you have accomplished the task, simply remove the bag from the stand, tie off the top and you are ready to dispose of it and its contents in the trash.

       The birds benefit because you dramatically reduce the chance they will contact any of the variety of diseases that flourish in damp, rotting seeds and their hulls.

       Trash bag stands come is a variety of sizes ranging from 30-35 gallon models to those that hold 13-gallon bags.  The bags are collapsible and cost as little as $11 to $25.

       Since it makes the whole process of keeping a bird feeding areas clean, perhaps we would be more apt to clean our bird feeding areas more often.  Now that is not a bad thing.