How to Solve Late Summer Problems

While late summer continues to be a wonderful time to feed the birds, unwanted feeder visitors can be troublesome. With the proper feeders, food and accessories, you can enjoy your birds and limit these possible problems.

Nectar and Jelly Feeding Solutions

Most of our WBU Nectar Feeders feature a built-in ant moat and is designed to work with our Nectar Guard® tips, preventing bees, wasps and ants from becoming an issue.  We also carry ant moats to place above or below a nectar or jelly feeder to keep ants away.  

Aggressive male hummingbirds can bully others from visiting a feeder. By hanging multiple hummingbird feeders around your yard, you make it difficult for a territorial male to defend the area, allowing other birds to visit the feeders.

Black Bird Solutions

1. Change the Food: Offer safflower and Simply Suet, and keep aggressive black birds from eating all your bird food, crowding your feeders and chasing away the birds you want to see. Safflower is a small, white seed that is high in protein and fat. Most song birds eat safflower, however, starlings, grackles, and other black birds find this small seed difficult to open and eat as their bills are not designed to open small seeds.  Simply suet is plain rendered beef suet.  There are no specialty ingredients in this suet like peanuts, mealworms, tree nuts, or fruit- just plain suet.  Most black birds prefer suet with "fun" ingredients added to it. 

2. Cage the Feeder: Another way to keep black birds from eating all your bird food is to cage the feeder you are using.  We carry a number of On-Guard cages that can eliminate certain sized birds entirely from feeding at your feeders. 

3. Change the Feeder:  While less ideas, sometimes changing the feeder you are using can help eliminate certain birds.  Using a feeder with an adjustable dome can eliminate larger birds from eating at that feeder.  The same would apply to an upside down suet feeder, which allows only birds capable of clinging upside down to eat at the feeder. WBU Joliet also carries a number of squirrel proof feeders with adjustable weights that can help keep a whole flock of black birds from eating all the bird food, but instead only allow one to feed at a time.  

Squirrel Solutions

There are many ways to keep squirrels away from your existing set up.  Sometimes one of the approaches below is all that is needed to keep squirrels away. Other times a couple or more approaches are needed to totally eliminate them.  Be reminded that squirrels are capable or jumping 5 ft across and 10ft vertically.  So it's important to keep that in mind when placing feeders and planning squirrel solutions.

1. Use a Baffle: By correctly placing a baffle above or below your bird feeding setup or feeder, you can prevent squirrels from eating your bird food.  We carry a number of baffles to place on our Advanced Pole Systems (APS) and shepherd hooks - they prevent squirrels from climbing up the pole to reach the food.  We also carry a number of dome baffles that hang above your feeder- preventing squirrels from reaching the food from above.  

2. . Cage the Feeder: Put an On-Guard™ cage on your feeders. This will allow smaller birds to eat but prevent squirrels from reaching the food in the feeder. We carry cages for seed tubes, suet, cylinder feeders, and more! 

3. Change your Food: Certain foods can be unappealing to squirrels and sometimes switching your food offerings can help eliminate them from eating all your bird food.  Safflower (like with black birds) is less appealing.  But our Hot Pepper food products are incredible at keeping most squirrels at bay.  This food is not designed to hurt the animals, but instead unappealing. All mammals have a brain receptor that senses hot, this is what makes our hot pepper foods so effective.  Our hot pepper foods come in different forms from loose seed, seed cylinders, suet cakes, suet cylinders, bark butter products, and more!

4.Use a Squirrel Proof Feeder

Our line of Squirrel Proof feeders are really effective at keeping squirrels out of your bird food.  They are effective because when a squirrel goes on the feeder, their weight closes access to the feeding ports.  The Fundamental squirrel proof feeder has pre-set weight settings for you to choose your desired weight limit.  While our Brome products like the WBU Eliminator have adjustable weight settings.  

Squirrel Solutions Video!