Birdfeeder Brigands—Part 1

For many years now we’ve kept a birdfeeder in the side yard, and stocked it with sunflower seeds. It’s attracted a wonderful collection of birds year round, and we’ve wiled away many hours watching the antics of chickadees, titmice, finches, cardinals, juncos, sparrows, woodpeckers, blue jays, nuthatches, wrens, and towhees. In the last year mourning doves have also begun to come. They are shy birds who usually stay out of sight, but once they discovered the abundant cache of free food, they’ve become regulars. (In fact, I’ve had to increase the sunflower seed offering, because the doves can stuff an amazing quantity of seed in their crop and then fly off, to digest the treasure later.)

The majority of people who feed birds are often bedeviled by pests—the principle one being that fat-tailed tree rodent, the squirrel. Urban squirrels are especially pernicious and persistent. Living amongst all those city cats and automobiles, squirrels have adapted to become extremely clever at dodging cars and robbing birdfeeders. I’ve read many a tale of the constant battles between urban bird-feeding humans and squirrels. My bird magazines are chock-full of ads for exotic and expensive “squirrel-proof” feeders. (I don’t believe there is such a thing.) It’s a type of arms race: a continuing battle of wits between the furry invaders and their human foes—one in which we’re confident we have the cognitive advantage, but repeatedly find that we’re facing a foe who is very determined and inventive.

For a couple of decades now, we’ve had no squirrels come near our feeder. It’s not clear to me why, but we have few of them in the woods and the cat does a pretty good job of keeping them confined to the forest (or overhead, bombing him with acorns). A few weeks ago, however, I glanced out and saw what appeared to be a very fat and fluffy dove on the feeder. Wait, it’s a squirrel! I flew out the door and chased him off—hoping that I’d scared him enough that he’d keep to the trees. Hah! Once a squirrel samples that easy a treat, he’ll return, and this guy did the next day.

I sensed we’d entered a new epoch at the feeder. Squirrels will remain contenders and he’d have to be dealt with. I thought briefly about letting him make his periodic visits and sharing the larder with him, but within a couple of days he was hogging the platform. I was envisioning him filling its fat cheeks—emptying the feeder again and again—and carrying the seeds off to his lair and stashing several winters’ supply there.

Counteraction was required. I considered a few alternative anti-squirrel schemes (one of them was not an expensive high-tech feeder that would see me join the arms race). The main vulnerability of the existing setup was having the feeder too close to a tree. Squirrels can leap amazing gaps, so I needed to move the feeder out in the open. Once again, the Internet came to the rescue. After considering numerous low-tech ideas described there, I strung a thin, strong wire between the tree and an outbuilding and suspended the feeder from the middle of the span. Later that day I saw the squirrel on the ground beneath the feeder, longingly looking up and realizing that it was beyond his leaping ability. Egad, foiled again!

More on the assaults of brigands next time…