* In the set-up pictured, located right outside our shop, the On-Guard cage protects the No-Mess blend, while the non-caged feeder is filled with safflower seed, a seed that blackbirds don't like, yet cardinals love. On-Guard for Tube Feeders, Perfect When Paired with a Safflower Feeder*īecause No-Mess Blend and other blends containing shell-free seeds are easier for starlings to eat, guards to protect the tube feeders in which they are served are beneficial. Bring your feeder in to let us match up the guard size needed. Small birds fly right in, while large woodpeckers can stretch their long necks and beaks to reach the food. These cage style guards (not pictured) are sold separately to fit over various feeder styles. On-Guard Protector for Peanut Feeders , Cylinder Feeders, and more This feeder holds two suet cakes and will provide woodpeckers, titmice, bluebirds, Carolina wrens, nuthatches and other smaller birds with a meal while excluding starlings, blackbirds, and squirrels. Suet Feeder with Built-In Guard (pictured) These cages will also stop squirrels and quickly pay for themselves in terms of food saved. These birds are simply too large to fit through the openings of the cages that surround the feeders below, yet smaller birds fly right through the openings in much the same way as they would fly through a fence or navigate in the dense branches of a bush.Įven the larger woodpeckers can still feed thanks to their long necks, prying beaks, and agile tongues, which can stretch to obtain food. The most effective way to avoid losing all of your bird food to blackbirds is to physically prevent them from gaining access to the food. It may take 2 or more of the following solutions to exclude the birds you don't want while feeding all the different species you do enjoy: Note - some of these products are available online, but others only in-store, so call us at 21 if you would prefer curbside pickup or shipping for those items. There are several options for minimizing issues with blackbirds, and often a combination of techniques will be used to discourage them without stopping our favorite backyard birds. They are less likely to bother suet, unless it is of poor quality (i.e., filled with seeds or grains), but will devour most common seeds readily. The other blackbirds are more traditional seed eaters. If those aren't available, they will even force themselves to eat hard shelled seeds. Fortunately, we do have a few tricks to eliminate Starlings from some feeders, and to slow them down at others, so your other birds can get their share of food, too. Their beaks are not designed for cracking hard seed shells, so they go first for the softer suet cakes, peanut pieces, and other foods without shells. Starlings' preferred diet consists primarily of insects and berries, but if these are hard to find, they turn to our feeders instead. *While not technically correct, all three species are commonly lumped under the term "Blackbird," and for simplicity we will use the term throughout the article unless specific clarification needs to be made. Red-winged blackbirds and cowbirds are other native blackbirds who may visit your feeders. Grackles, who are black with a purple-blue sheen to their heads, are our most common blackbirds. Their beaks are dark in winter (shown here) and yellow in summer. Starlings are a non-native species and are not related to our native blackbirds. In order to stop them, it's important to know a bit about them and to learn to distinguish between them. These species can inundate many a backyard feeder.
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