Feeding Birds Without Feeding Squirrels

The honest framing

The Feeder Is Not the Cause

A bird feeder does not create a squirrel problem. There were squirrels in the trees before you hung it up and there will be after you take it down.

What a feeder does is concentrate them, reliably, at a fixed point, several times a day. If that point is four metres from your house you have built a reason for animals to spend their time examining your roofline, and a soffit gap that might otherwise have gone unnoticed for years gets found.

So this is not about denying them food. It is about where the queue forms.

Photographs on this page are for illustration purposes only.

Siting

The Numbers That Matter

Squirrels jump further than people expect: something like four metres horizontally from a height, and around two metres straight up from the ground. They also run along fence tops, wires and branches without touching the ground at all.

Practical consequences for where a feeder goes:

• Well away from the house — the far end of the garden rather than outside the kitchen window, if the roofline is the thing you are protecting.
• At least three to four metres of clear air from anything they can launch off: branches, fence, shed roof, wall top, washing line post.
• Not under an overhanging branch, which is a free drop onto the feeder.
• On a smooth metal pole, not a wooden post or a tree trunk. Wood is a ladder.

A feeder in the middle of a lawn on a metal pole is a genuinely difficult target. The same feeder hanging off a fence is not a target at all, it is a dispenser.

The hardware

What Actually Defeats Them

Baffles. A wide dome or cone on the pole below the feeder, at least 40cm across and mounted above jumping height from the ground. This is the single most effective item and the one most people skip. A baffle that is too small or too low is decorative.

Caged feeders. An outer cage with a mesh spacing that admits tits and finches and excludes squirrels — and, as a side effect, excludes larger birds. Effective, and honest about the trade-off.

Weight-activated feeders. A mechanism that closes the ports under a squirrel's weight. The good ones work well; the cheap ones jam, and any of them can be defeated by an animal that learns to feed from underneath.

What does not work: greased poles, which wear off and are unpleasant for birds' feathers; "squirrel-proof" plastic domes, which get chewed; and hanging the feeder from a branch, however thin the wire.

The seed itself

Spill Is Half the Problem

Most of what a squirrel gets from a feeder is on the ground under it. So a seed tray or catch dish under the feeder does more than it looks like it should, and sweeping up underneath matters.

On the mix: peanuts and sunflower hearts are the two things squirrels most want, and whole peanuts in a mesh feeder are effectively a squirrel dispenser. Nyjer seed for finches is of much less interest to them. Chilli-treated seed is the one repellent product on this site with a genuine basis — capsaicin deters mammals and birds are indifferent to it — and it works at the feeder because that is the moment of eating. It does not deter anything from your roof.

And do not feed squirrels deliberately somewhere else in the garden as a diversion. It raises the local population and it teaches them that your garden is where food is. Diversionary feeding is a conservation technique, not a house-protection one.

The bit that matters

Feeders Are Not a Substitute for Proofing

If you already have squirrels in the roof, moving the feeder will not get them out, and if the roofline is open then a perfect feeder setup will not keep the next one out either.

The order is: get the loft empty, close the roofline properly, and then site your feeders sensibly so you are not rebuilding the pressure you just removed. Done in that order you can feed birds all you like. There is no conflict between enjoying your garden and having a closed roof.

Short answers

Squirrel Questions

Going further

Squirrel Guides