Just declare your "bird feeder" to be a "bird and/or squirrel feeder." Problem solved.
Birds lack a receptor for capsaicin. There's a red pepper concentrate with the brand name "Squirrel Away." Mix that into your bird seed.
The squirrel will bring friends and eventually one or more of them will find a way to live in somebody's attic. You need to at least move the feeder a bit away from the fence.
Also, rats will come if you made the seed too easy.
one or more of them will find a way to live in somebody's attic.
That reminds me, I need to get that squirrel out of my attic. (I've been feeling rather laissez-faire about its presence there.) Maybe I can lure it out using a bird feeder?
Apparently, they only smell for a couple of days if they die up there.
And being furry, the probably make pretty good insulation. Another point in the "laissez-faire" column.
Unless thinking that was great makes me a hypocrite about animal welfare, in which case that was so horrible.
I enjoy setting up obstacles between the feeder adnd the squirrel and watching them use their intelligence and dexterity to try to overcome them. This is actually more fun than just watching birds.
This is actually more fun than just watching birds.
The soft bigotry of low expectations.
10: I didn't see any evidence the squirrel was harmed by the experience. I wonder if he tried it twice, because he needed two times to learn the lesson, or if it was because he enjoyed the ride.
It all comes down to dinosaurs versus mammals. Which side are you on Stanley?
My dad's bird feeding experiment ended because the squirrels, grackles, and crows chased away all the birds he found interesting. Also, Stanley has a grey squirrel and my dad had red squirrels. The red squirrel is the asshole of the squirrel kingdom.
13: Or because the squirrel was starving.
Squirrels are OK unless they monopolize the feeder and eat all the seeds too fast.
We have a problem with interbird hierarchy. The house finches seem to be aggressive and are currently the only birds that show up at the feeder, after an initial period of having chickadees and cardinals. So in the absence of squirrels, something else may take the role of "thing you wish would go away".
This is actually more fun than just watching birds.
You don't have to be so passive, though. You can chase the birds, attempt to educate them about their proper place in God's great cladistic scheme, poison them. Be the fun you want to see in the world.
1) About them cowbirds: Here's some images for you.
2) MAE. "Squirrels in the attic" sounds like an mental problem, or maybe a pop group.
Also, Stanley has a grey squirrel and my dad had red squirrels. The red squirrel is the asshole of the squirrel kingdom.
What? Red squirrels are small and dainty. Also the grey squirrel is the invasive species wiping them out (in Britain).
One of my neighbors had a bird feeding habit that resulted in a resident population of pigeons, which is way worse than squirrels. Squirrels rarely take the effort to shit on a car.
20: I'm speaking of the American red squirrel but I may be wrong about the name. Anyway, if you go west, you get a bigger squirrel with a different coloration.
Stanley, you are a terrible person. You have violated the ancient compact between man and bird.
Wikipedia says the American red squirrel is smaller than the eastern gray squirrel. Apparently, I was looking at a fox squirrel.
20.last: What, so our domestic backyard wildlife feeding agenda should concern itself with foreign entanglements?
Whoa, I'd never heard of the fox squirrel. They do look like assholes.
We have fox squirrels here in NE Ohio. Its the first time I've lived in a region that wasn't dominated by the north american gray squirrel. The red squirrel really is hard to find these days.
I assume the larger, more aggressive squirrels like the fox and the grey are pushing out the red squirrels because we have created a very squirrel friendly environment. Squirrels can afford to put energy into being big and aggressive because there are a lot of calories out there to be had. The smaller squirrels were meant for a less abundant environment.
I like the fox squirrels. They have a more upright posture than grays, almost like primates.
I think the fox squirrel is my go-to image of a squirrel.
I really like the feeders that are the four ears of corn on a wheel.
The red squirrels are specialized for conifers. So you're right, they don't benefit from the abundance of bird feeders and the sort of trees associated with human environments.
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Oh, look. Bruce covered "The Weight" last night. My bro and his gf were there right up front, as usual, fuckos.
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NOBODY'S TOLD ME THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A RED SQUIRREL A BLACK ONE OR A BROWN ONE.
I have to say that you've made a schoolboy error with your birdfeeder placement. Having it within reaching distance of a fence is just asking for thieving squirrels.
You know who else put birdfeeders right next to a fence? Hitler.
Aretha Franklin's version of 'The Weight," with Duane Allman on guitar.
Who will deny the squirrels their Lebensraum?
Various hungry people in the hills?
17: The house finches seem to be aggressive and are currently the only birds that show up at the feeder, after an initial period of having chickadees and cardinals
15: My dad's bird feeding experiment ended because the squirrels, grackles, and crows chased away all the birds he found interesting.
Some of this is time-of-year dependent, and as a result a lot of people only do feeders fall to spring. Chickadees and tufted titmice form small, roving, mixed flocks in winter which frequent feeders, while in the summer they go off on their own and you will generally only get those whose summer territory encompasses your feeder. Not sure exactly what the deal with cardinals is, but my observation is that there are a lot fewer around feeders in the summer. Grackles increase in the summer in the northeast US (they are short-range migrants so many move south). My father uses the "arrival" of grackles as his signal to stop stocking his feeders.
8: Fleur bought one of those! We haven't had it out in a long time, though. It supplies good entertainment for a while, but it can be defeated by a determined squirrel.
32: Right. Not putting the feeder next to the fence is Feeder 101. Finding out how far it needs to be from the fence (or branches, or what-have-you) left as an exercise for Stanley. Beyond that, it is not evident to me whether that variety of feeder is squirrel-proof without some form of baffle on the pole. Or you could just feed them. But they do eat a lot.
39: so you're saying if Stanley got one he would be contributing to the eventual emergence of a race of unstoppably supersquirrels?
41: Actually the whole backyard feeder movement is.
In some distant future, on the squirrel analog of Unfogged, "back in suburbia" will be a catch phase during nature/nurture debates.
If moving the feeder is too much work, you can top it with razor wire.
If you have enough room, the best way to get rid of squirrels is to move the feeder away from the fence and secure a baffle beneath the feeder so squirrels can't scale the pole.
The website where I buy all my bird supplies sells a feeder with a weighted spring that prevents squirrels from standing on the platform. It's not as attractive as your feeder, though.
Is it legal to shoot squirrels with paintball guns?
27: We have fox squirrels here in NE Ohio
I think that is a relatively recent development (or at least they used to be vastly outnumbered by the gray squirrels). Although you are also a somewhat further west than my hometown. Here on my side of P'burgh it is almost entirely grey squirrels with the occasional red.
I've never seen anything but a grey squirrel in Pittsburgh, but I've never really looked very closely.
Is it safe to eat urban squirrels? I bet squirrel tastes like rabbit.
My new reason to hate squirrels* (or chipmunks, have not figured out which yet) is that they have figured out that newly planted peas are this tasty, nutritious thing in the ground. Last fall and this spring I have rows where every seed has been dug up. So am now starting peas inside until the seed is "used up". Annoying for something which absent clever rodents grows so easily.
52.1: Why not? Because the neighbors would beat you up?
54: Because they are at least partially fed on garbage.
38, I was hoping to get goldfinches as well as house finches. If no goldfinches appear the feeder will quickly become the height of tedium. Well, right now the house finches include a couple fledgelings which is interesting.
Goldfinches eat thistle (nyger) seeds, which the other birds have no interest in because it's so tiny. I recommend getting a sock thistle feeder and the guys at the bird store recommend putting a yellow balloon on it because goldfinches are attracted to yellow.
Also, I've had trouble attracting goldfinches and was told that you need to make sure that the thistle seed is fresh because a lot of large companies like Walmart will sell you old seed and the goldfinches are picky. Thistle seed is crazy expensive compared to the other mixes, so large companies take shortcuts to make it cheaper.
Liz beat me to 57. That is how I get goldfinches, although my house finches do also east the nyger.
I haven't had much luck with getting a huge variety of birds at my feeders, but I was lucky enough one year to attract Lazuli Buntings and Black-headed Grosbeaks during migration. I looked out the window one morning and I thought my glasses prescription needed to be updated because I was seeing a blue bird. Surprise!
My favorite, though, is when my garden is flourishing and the birds hunt insects in the garden.
Our variety is pretty mundane as well. Sometimes get Rose-breasted Grosbeaks. Or Towhees (on the ground).
Which kind of towhees, California Towhees? Those used to drive me crazy when I lived in the Bay area because of their constant chipping. Now I really miss them. I saw one in Golden Gate Park a few months ago during a business trip and I must have looked crazy to the locals because I was SO EXCITED to see this extremely common bird.
We get a lot of Spotted Towhees in forests in Utah. They're so neat looking with their red eyes. I saw this one a few weeks ago.
Chaco has tons of Canyon Towhees. In the summer they're everywhere and the visitors frequently ask about them. That's the only reason I know the word "towhee."
Apparently, some of what I call "sparrows" are apparently towhees. Now I'm going to try to repress that knowlege for reasons similar to those Sherlock Holmes gives for not wanting to remember whether the Earth goes around the sun or the sun around the Earth.
Canyon Towhees are cute. I saw them in Patagonia, AZ along with Green-tailed Towhees.
I'm confused now because the Wikipedia photo of the fox squirrel looks exactly like the squirrels I grew up with, but so does the photo of the gray squirrel.
Also common at Chaco: Antelope Ground Squirrels. Visitors usually mistake them for chipmunks.
62: Eastern Towhee. Which I learned as Rufous-sided when Spotted Towhees were considered as a subspecies. So, very similar but the coloration is more "solid". Not that uncommon in the woods here, but I like it when they get lured out to my garden/feeder. A bit the same with flickers of which there are a fair number in various fields, but only somewhat occasionally do they venture over to my yard. Also Pileated Woodpeckers. A minor tussle with my wife is my attempts to leave decaying stumps and logs around here and there to lure those bad boys out of the local woods.
reasons similar to those Sherlock Holmes gives for not wanting to remember whether the Earth goes around the sun or the sun around the Earth
I suspect that someone was listening to the same Fresh Air interview that I was just listening to.
66: Do a Google Image search on the two and compare. main difference is the general color of the underparts--whitish vs. russet. (There is a lot of variation within the species, however.)
69: So I guess ratings are on the way up?
There's a great sement in the David Attenborough The Life of Birds series about how dramatically humans have reshaped bird behavior through backyard-type feeding. (There's also a nice bit back at around the 16:00 mark about how birds have adapted feeding and roosting to urban and industrial environments.)
69: I've never listened to Fresh Air. A few weeks ago, I did watch the BBC's new Sherlock Holmes.
70: Also, while eastern grey squirrels vary considerably on size and proportions, the fox squirrels (whic we have here in IL too) tend to be significantly bigger.
68: Nice. There seems to be a lot of variation in their coloring according to the All About Birds entry on Eastern Towhees.
Pileated Woodpeckers are so impressive. We get a lot of Hairy and Downy Woodpeckers, but they're so hard to get a good picture of because of their size.
I get flickers occasionally in the yard, but they're much more common in the less populated areas. I saw a female Northern Flicker try and scoop out the last remnants of seed from a feeder last year.
73: Oh. Well, writer/producer Steven Moffat and David Bianculli were just talking about that very part of the show.
My beehives have become a bluejay feeder. It doesn't appear to be a problem.
My barn hive overwintered successfully! Which means it was going so strong, it swarmed last week. I've now seen three swarms leave their hives, which is this amazing sight (bees just pour out of the hive and launch themselves into a whirlwind of bees that coalesce into a basketball size clump, and fifteen minutes later, there's no evidence it ever happened except for the clump of bees. I wish my sweetie had been home to see if. If I hadn't happened to see it, I'd have never known the difference.
Anyway, the library hive is going to look fantastic when my friend is done with it, and I'll find a way to put up pictures then. Also, I have come up with a novel and fascinating way to create a split from my barn hive to become the new library hive. But I'll only tell you about it if you beg.
Have you read Practical Handbook of Bee Culture, with some Observations upon the Segregation of the Queen?
Just joking. It's the book that Sherlock Holmes wrote in his retirement.
I didn't know Mr. Holmes was a beekeeper. My ignorance is vast.
78: I beg! Seriously, that sounds awesome.
Sooner strangle an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires to merge subthreads.
78: I beg too. I'm fascinated with bee stories. Do you follow Birdchick's description of raising bees on Neil Gaiman's property? I've enjoyed the stories about how the bees survive the winters and purchasing queen bees the best.
I didn't know Mr. Holmes was a beekeeper.
I'm not sure he kept any, but he was an avid donor to the Beekeeping Society of London, as noted in this famous exchange:
JW: "You're donating money to a beekeeping organization?"
SH: "It's eleemosynary, my dear Watson."
Admit it; you did a fist pump in the mirror after that one.
My experience was that whatever I did to discourage squirrels, they found a way around it. However, they were just as cute as the birds they chased away, and the birds came right back after they left.
However, if I went out of town and didn't fill the feeder for a couple of days, the squirrels often destroyed the feeder. Even metal ones.
Thistle seed worked well for goldfinches in New Jersey. It amazed me that it only took them 2 days to find it when I put it up. The separate feeder was not interesting to the squirrels at all and remained after they had pulverized everything else I had put up.
A few observations about bird-feeders and squirrels.
Many of your truly avid birders or even environmentalists will say not to have bird feeders. We have them anyway.
If a squirrel can get physical access to the feeder, it will out-eat any number of birds. When we first started hanging bird feeders, we noticed after a few days that the seed was disappearing rapidly, and remarked "we must be getting a lot of birds while we are at work." We were wrong about this.
Ultimately (eliding many home squirrel defense projects, including barriers, fun-house obstacles, springs, hot peppers, and ... I really can't go on, the memories are too painful and/or hilarious), we ended up with the following:
A large tube feeder hung from an oak tree branch 25 feet above ground, 10 feet out from the trunk, and 6 feet off the ground.
Every now and then (once a year or so) a squirrel will leap from high up on the oak trunk and graze the feeder, but they never manage to repeat the achievement. Once a squirrel attempted to slide down the nearly 20 foot long wire and fell off about 3/4ths of the way down. It never tried again.
Keep in mind that squirrels don't live very long, a couple of years at the most, so if one cohort learns a trick, the next may not. "Teenage squirrels" learn from their parents but the parents aren't always around any more when the teenagers are learning.
However, birds are very sloppy eaters and so as they root around in the seeds many fall uneaten to the ground. Squirrels, chipmunks and ground-feeding birds all feast there. Foxes, cats and coyotes feed on the feasters and sometimes each other. Nature's balance is preserved, or at least not perturbed too much. (Coyotes are the current top predator in our neighborhood.)
You're new, right? Can I suggest DLeib or something other than DaveL? We had a DaveL here for quite a long time, and given that he lived in Hawaii, which is short on foxes and coyotes, your comment had me seriously puzzled until I realized it wasn't him.
Admit it; you did a fist pump in the mirror after that one.
Fully merited.
@90: I'm DaveL on various blogs. I've never lived in Hawai'i though I've visited it. (Free of squirrels as far as I can tell.) I've seen other DaveLs here and there (though honestly not here, on those somewhat rare occasions when I post here), but that's the problem with having a very common name (at least when I was born -- most T. Rex's were named Dave: fact).
There was some other blog where I saw a very trollish DaveL and I used another name there. I forget which one though.
And the "Leib" part is a guess; an incorrect one at that.
In any case, periodic puzzlement is good for you.
If you want more interesting birds :
- (spring, summer) a feeder with a cup of cheap grape jelly and some orange slices will bring orioles all through their breeding season. Beautiful, active, funny, and vocal birds.
- (mostly winter) blocks of beef fat (suet) from the butcher or the commercially prepared suet/seed blocks in a wire mesh feeder will bring woodpeckers and nuthaches.
- blue jays are very fond of a seed mix that contains peanuts and large striped sunflower seeds.
- cardinals and other large finches prefer the small black sunflower seeds
Most grocery-store "birdseed" is close to worthless -- a blend of millets, which will bring sparrows and (in winter) juncoes and the occasional chickadee, and not much else. Worse, it now turns out that one of the major national suppliers, Scotts/Miracle-Gro, for years treated their products with insecticides, to the detriment of the birds that consumed them. Moral : find the specialty wild bird feeding store in your area, and buy from them.
Finally: a poem by Mona Van Duyn.
By the way, if you were thinking of thwarting the squirrels with an elaborate assault course, don't bother. Also, don't drink Carling Black Label. It's horrible, even if they did make great ads when I was a kid.
