Bird feeder issues 🐦

I have a bird feeder in my garden. It's a metal pole with sticky-out bits to hang stuff. I have a tube full of seeds and a container for suet balls. I've tried hanging other things on there too, but birds are picky.

The fat in the suet balls is animal fat, and I'm vegetarian so I'd prefer a alternative. I haven't found one.

The birds like some suet balls but not others. I think they like more expensive ones, but I can't tell which are expensive because they have better ingredients, and which are just ripping me off.

Sometimes the birds just don't bother. Maybe at this time of year there's plenty of other food around? Then yesterday there were about eight blue tits trying to get on there at once.

I had to make the feeder squirrel-proof. There's a hemisphere of plastic that stops them climbing the pole. Sometimes they have a go any way, which is fun. You can see that they know there's food up there, and they try to figure out how to get up. Then they give up thinking and just climb the pole, but they can't get past the plastic baffle. They stop, and slide back down.

I had to make it crow-proof. Sometimes the seed tube would be on the ground with the seeds spilled. One day crow was seen walking away. He couldn't get to the holes in the feeding tube because he's too big, but he could unhook it and eat the spilled seeds off the ground. Now it's tied on with wire.

I read that British birds are evolving longer beaks and this may be due to number of bird feeders compared to other countries.

University of Sheffield website

Could be true. Everyone round here has some sort of bird feeder.

And finally, my ten-year-old self would be very pleased that I literally have tits on my fat balls.

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