Early spring brings European Starlings to the yard. They are tenacious about sticking around to eat as much seed, suet and mealworms as they can get from feeders. Very messy eaters, they sweep a lot of seed out of platform and hopper feeders onto the ground. And once on the ground, most of it is eaten by squirrels. This year I had to temporarily put my hanging hopper feeder away . . . BUT, this past week I had a brainstorm that I think has stopped the dumping.
Get rid of House Sparrows with a DIY Anti House Sparrow Halo: This past winter brought a small flock of House Sparrows to my yard. This spring brought a little group of Eastern Bluebirds. House Sparrows compete with bluebirds for nest cavities. They kill bluebirds (eggs, nestlings and adults) in the nest and then build their own nest on top of them. So these non-native sparrows need to go.
You can find all my attempts to get these sparrows to move on in my “Deterring House Sparrows” post. But read on if you’d like more information on one my experiments: a DIY anti-House Sparrow bird feeder halo. This halo was inspired by the “Magic Halo” that folks at the University of Nebraska devised. If you poke around online, you’ll find lots of people have made their own versions of this device. This is how I made mine.
One thing spring brings to the Mid-Atlantic is wind. Some times things can get a bit crazy. When the wind is blowing in the twenty or so mile per hour range, feeders sway a lot. When wind gusts over thirty miles per hour, bird feeder baffles start kiting around and the feeders move with them. Birds can deal with a certain amount of feeder movement (they are used to moving tree branches after all), but there is a point when a feeders are blowing around violently enough that a bird (or even a person) could get hurt.
I have a strategy I use to keep feeders from blowing whenever winds pick up that works quite well in my yard. I described it in this post: Bird Feeder Baffles in the Wind. But I am now also using a very small feeder for mealworms. For this particular feeder, I needed to use a different strategy.
Posts About Choosing and Locating Bird Feeders
