One of the nicest gifts you can give the birds in your yard won’t cost you a dime. It’s a brush pile. While we might like to think that birds can eat safely at our backyard feeders, the birds we feed are in turn are often eaten by predators who come to feeders to find them. Brush piles give birds a quick place to flee when a hawk soars through the feeder area or a neighborhood cat saunters by.
While birds seem to love birdbaths on or near the ground, neighborhood cats see them as an opportunity to hunt. I have two strategies to keep cats out of my birdbaths: 1) Set up a simple “all natural” birdbath defense for low birdbaths and 2) Get birdbaths up away from cat hiding spots. It is working very well.