Lehigh Valley bird enthusiasts have a new store for all their bird supplies– the Wild Bird Center, 7800 Glenlivet Drive West, Fogelsville.

Lisa Parker, owner of the Wild Bird Center told The Press the store originally opened on Oct. 27, 2015.

Parker said she became a bird enthusiast from working in her backyard and having her father, Ron Defulvio, of Kutztown, give her a gourd years ago to hang in a tree.

“He would hollow them out for me and I would hang them in the trees and the birds would nest in them,” she said. “Then I would watch how nature worked.”

“That one gourd led to one bird feeder which led to another feeder then to different kinds of feeders and seed, and what that would do would increase the variety of birds my husband Rod and I would see,” Parker said. “Then my husband and I started turning our yard into a native plant habitat and that brought another set of birds to our yard.”

Parker and her husband both love nature, and that’s what they wanted their yard to be about.

Parker said they tried to figure out how to take their love for birds and nature and turn it into something they could work on together and sustain them.

That is when they came up with the idea of the store.

“Years ago, there was a Wild Bird Center in Village West and we were talking about it and thought it could be something we could do,” Parker said. “So, we contacted the headquarters and started the process of finding a location.”

“As we went through the different locations with the Wild Bird Center representative, this [Fogelsville] had the most spark and we found ourselves in the middle of the bird community,” Parker said. “Looking at the parking lot and the traffic flow, we knew this would be a location we would flourish in.

“It took two years to get the store opened.”

The store, which has four part-time employees, offers bird enthusiasts different types of bird feeders, houses, poles for birdhouses and feeders, seed, suet for birds, birdbaths, and live mealworms for birds.

The store also sells wind chimes, books, field guides for identifying birds, informative talks on backyard birding and bird identification and art from a local artist.

“Our real goal is to promote nature, and backyard bird feeding is a component of that,” Parker said. “We are community oriented and very friendly and have a lot of connections to people, organizations and agencies throughout the Lehigh Valley.”

The Parkers, who live in Lower Macungie. are the parents of four children, Aaron and Devan, who both live in California, Carly, a student at Temple University and Jesse, a junior at Salisbury High School.

The store is open 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Saturday and noon to 5 p.m. Sunday.

For more information about the Wild Bird Center or informative talks at the store, call 610-841-5797 or go to wildbird.com/lehighvalley.