The Bird Feeder's Handbook

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

If you're sure about your hanging spot, and you don't mind mowing around it or seeing it all year long, mount the pole permanently in the ground using concrete. Alternatively, you can put a socket into the ground and lift the pole out when the feeder isn't in use. Pole stands are considerably simpler, but sometimes topple over.

Siting the Feeder

Place your feeder about 10 feet away from a natural shelter (a hedge or shrub) to provide protection against predators and bad weather while they are waiting at the feeder. Brush piles—loose heaps of brush and branches—near the feeder also provide excellent shelter.

Birds will generally spot a feeder within a few days. If there's no action three or four days after putting one up, reconsider its location. Is the feeder too exposed? Is it too hidden from sight? Once they've learned to come to the feeder, keep moving it a few feet closer to your house—a little bit every night—until it's where you want it...perhaps by the window of your favorite room.

Excerpt taken from The Birdfeeder's Handbook , available for $12.45 postpaid from Lyons & Burford (31 W. 21st St., NY, NY 10010; 212/620-9580). You can also refer to Sheila Buff's "What to Feed the Birds" on page 66 of Mother's issue #130.

Build Mother's All-Habit Platform Bird feeder
by John Vivian

This feeder offers multiple habitats to attract most species of perching and climbing song birds, and kicks off enough seed to attract plenty of ground-feeders. It has a platform ample enough for a pound or two of seed and a water bowl, a tree limb drilled with suet pits for perching and climbing birds, dowels to hold fruit and suet/seed molds, and hooks for hanging bags. Hang from a tree limb or affix to a pipe held in a concrete collar buried well below soil line.

Materials
•Two 5/8” x 5½” x 6"
(actual measure) red cedar boards
•One 4" lagbolt and 2" flat washer
•40 1", #6 flat-head brass or zinc-plated woodscrews
•3/8" dowel, eyehooks
•A branched tree limb or piece of driftwood

For post-mount: 10' of 2" galvanized thread-end pipe, junction, rail flange, concrete mix

To hang: 4 eye screws, 12'+/- gal. twist-link chain, "S" hooks, hanging hardware.

Cut one 5½ wide cedar board into three even 2'-long baseboards. Split the other down the middle and divide into three 2¾” x 16¾" fastening cleats. Butt the three baseboards together along their long sides and place one cleat in the center and the other two even with the cut ends. Fasten with six 1" screws—two screws per baseboard. Drill pilot holes and ¼” countersinks for all screws. Cutting at opposing, flat 45° angles to give mitered corners, trim lengths of the split board to fit ends and edges of the platform and hot-glue tack them to the platform low enough to cover the bottom cleats and give a good lip along the top. Fasten every three inches. (Along the cut ends of the baseboards, sink screws into cross-grain of the underlying cleat, not into the poor-holding end-grain.)

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print