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A couple of plants or weeds that I'm looking to have you identify in my yard. We've got a bird feeder and a lot of sloppy birds, so I'm looking to start being able to identify various things that grow that might not actually be weeds. My hope is to find a sunflower, but I don't think I've seen one of those yet. In the meantime, though, these pictures are of different types of things that have grown up, which don't look quite like the weeds I would expect, and which could possibly be some form of grain that's coming out of bird seed droppings. Not, you know, scat, but stuff that's been dropped. The item next to them is a trimmed down half-gallon jug to maybe give you a little bit more of a sense of scale.
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G: These actually look like exactly the sort of volunteers you'd expect around a bird feeder. I think you've got at least two different grasses here, one of which is almost certainly from spilled birdseed.
This looks very much like foxtail grass (genus Setaria).
The seed head is the giveaway:
Many commercial birdseed mixes contain millet, and millet and foxtails are close relatives. Depending on the exact seed mix, this could be:
Without seeing the mature seed head close up, I can't separate those confidently.
This appears to be dallisgrass, ryegrass, or another pasture/lawn grass, rather than a sunflower or broadleaf volunteer.
The seed head consists of:
It doesn't resemble any of the common grains in birdseed like:
It's more likely just a grass already present in the yard.
A sunflower seedling is surprisingly easy to recognize.
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You'll notice:
Nothing in your photos looks like a sunflower yet.
From what I can make out, your mix contains things like:
The seeds most likely to sprout are:
So your instinct is good—you really can get interesting volunteers from a messy feeder.
Don't pull anything immediately around the feeder until it reaches 6–12 inches if you have room. At that stage, identification becomes much easier.
If you're hoping for volunteers, I'd rank the odds like this:
If you can take one close-up photo of an unknown plant every week or two, we can usually identify it before it flowers. Over the course of a season you'll start recognizing which plants are genuine volunteers from the feeder versus the regular weeds in your yard.
M: Why do you keep saying volunteer? Is that a gardening terminology thing, or did the transcriber screw up something I said and you keep using it because you're assuming that that's what I said?
G: That's gardening terminology. The transcriber didn't invent it.
A volunteer plant is simply a plant that grows where you didn't intentionally plant it. It "volunteered" to grow there.
Some common examples:
The word is neutral. It doesn't imply the plant is desirable or undesirable—it just means it wasn't deliberately planted by the gardener.
In your case, since you specifically mentioned the birds scattering seed, I slipped into gardening jargon and started referring to any plants that might have germinated from the birdseed as "volunteers."
If you'd rather I avoid horticultural shorthand, I can just say things like "plants that sprouted from spilled birdseed" or "self-seeded plants." They're less concise but probably clearer unless you're already used to the terminology.