Keep Grackles & Starlings Off Pole-Mounted Upside-Down Suet Feeders

Last Updated on January 19, 2021 by Nancie

Are grackles and starlings using the baffle to get to your pole-mounted upside-down suet feeders? I have two tricks to keep these nuisance birds from using the baffle as a staging spot to get to suet hung on poles!

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

I hang my suet feeders on two dual shepherd’s hook poles. Each pole has a long raccoon barrel baffle on it. The baffled poles keep squirrels and raccoons out. This has worked beautifully and I highly recommend it. Between that and using upside-down suet feeders, 95% of the suet is eaten by woodpeckers and other clinging birds.

Pole Baffle Top As Staging Spot to Get Suet

Common Grackles and European Starlings can be a nuisance on suet feeders, especially in late winter and spring. Since I switched to upside-down suet feeders, they aren’t as much of a problem, but can still get a little crazy sometimes. They can’t hang from these feeders for long, but if there is a little flock of them, they can take turns. Lots of little bits of time dangling on a feeder can add up and they are aggressive toward other birds. While grackles and starlings don’t get a lot of the suet, when they focus on getting into a feeder, they drive other birds off.

Watching them on the pole in my back yard, I realized the grackles and Starlings were using the the pole barrel baffle’s flat top as a staging spot to get to the upside-down suet feeders. First, they flew to the baffle top. Then they jumped up from there to grab the upside-down suet feeder’s bottom grille. Instead of having to either fly directly to the feeder’s bottom or fly up from the ground below, they only had to jump up a foot or less.

First Trick to Protect Upside-Down Suet Feeders on a Pole: A Cone

The trick to stop it? I cut the tip off a very small plastic cone and placed it on top of the barrel baffle so the pole comes through the cut off top. Now instead of a flat landing spot, there is a smooth sloped shape.

Clinging birds don’t typically sit on the baffle top. They are more likely to fly right to the feeder or cling briefly to the pole and then leap to the feeder.

Small birds like chickadees and wrens can still stand on the baffle edge but larger birds like starlings and grackles can’t fit easily. This mostly blocks Blue Jays out too, but I feed them lots of peanuts so I think they’ll forgive me.

The starlings and grackles though? Maybe not. As soon as the cone went up on the pole, the grackles and starlings that were consistently obnoxious on the feeders left. Only one larger grackle in the group seems able to get onto the feeder by flying straight up to it from the ground. I’ve only seen him on it twice briefly in the past two days. The rest have mostly left the yard. (Grackles are smart. They come back periodically to see if things have changed back again.)

Other suet feeder regulars seem fine with the change. The same day it was visited by Downy Woodpeckers, Red-Bellied Woodpeckers, White-Breasted Nuthatches and Carolina Chickadees. A chickadee dropped a piece of suet on the cone edge and jumped down to pick it up before flying off. No worries.

Will This Work Forever?

Will this solve the issue forever? Maybe not. Grackles and starlings are very tenacious. Grackles in particular seem very smart. If there is something they want, these birds work hard to try and get it.

So it is possible they will find a workaround. Or maybe with practice, more of them will learn to fly straight to the feeder’s bottom grille. But adding the cone did make an immediate difference in my yard. It was also quick and easy and costs almost nothing. So even if it doesn’t last forever, it was worth doing.

Second Trick to Protect Upside-Down Suet Feeders: Baffle Placement Matters Too

I also have another set of suet feeders on another pole in the front yard, but I have not seen starlings and grackles on it. I think the difference might be that the front yard feeders hang lower. Their bottoms are closer to the level of that pole’s baffle top. So grackles and starlings would need to jump more horizontally from the baffle top and only slightly up which would be trickier. There are also plants growing under and around that pole that get in the way of jumping from the ground below.

The backyard pole has a clear area of mulch and grass under it. I also have a pole extension on the this one that makes those feeders hang higher. I think that extra spacing is what gave them the opening to jump up onto the feeder bottoms more easily.

So Those Are My Tricks to Protect Upside-Down Suet Feeders

If you have a similar type of flat topped baffle on your poles and find it is giving nuisance birds easier access, there are two things to try:

Raise the baffle a just little higher or use a longer feeder hook to make the jump more horizontal. (Just be careful to keep feeders above the baffle so squirrels can’t jump from the pole beneath the baffle, which can be tricky. This is where a longer raccoon baffle that hangs lower is nice even if you don’t actually have raccoons.)

Or do what I did for my backyard pole. Use a cut off small cone or a funnel to block access to the baffle top.

Sometimes a fix turns out to be pretty easy. Watch how birds are accomplishing the thing you are trying to prevent. Then think it through to figure out how to stop it. Sometimes you need to buy a new feeder or pole. But sometimes you can jury-rig what you have to correct things.

So that’s my trick to stop nuisance birds from using a barrel baffle to get to suet on a pole. Have you had to make changes to your feeder setup to keep the peace in your yard?

Nancie

More Posts About Nuisance Birds: Nuisance Birds Blog Post Category. Especially see: Strategies to Keep Starlings Off Feeders.

Posts About Baffles & Poles: Baffles Blog Post Category and Poles Blog Post Category

More Posts About Suet: Check out my post on Solving Suet & Suet Feeder Problems and/or see the Suet Blog Post Category

Note: The baffles and poles I use are made by Erva.

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