If pigeons are winged rats, then the common house finch needs its own vermin analogue, albeit one that is more aggressive.
Every day, I see gangs of female finches at the feeders, scrapping with one another and chasing away any other type of bird that comes by. And they can go through some bird seed. I’m out already, and that means that the nuthatches, woodpeckers, titmice, cardinals and chickadees will have to wait until tomorrow. What the squirrels haven’t managed to shake out of the “squirrel-proof” feeders has been gobbled up by the many house finches.
What are your feeder pests?
Side note: my first ever paying gig was a job playing Horn in an early American structure known by then as the “Bulfinch Church,” aka the Meeting House in the town square of Lancaster, Massachusetts. The architect, Charles Bulfinch, also designed the Massachusetts State House and oversaw completion of the U.S. Capitol.
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August 16, 2008 at 4:49 pm |
Grrrr. At the old house, I managed to come up with a squirrel-proof setup, but here, my feeders are the delight of the neighborhood tree rats. I go through all kinds of seed every week and I swear half of it is gobbled up by those damn squirrels. I’m thinking of putting one of those giant acrylic domes over my feeder to see if that keeps the squirrels away… and in the meantime, I’m only filling the finch feeder and saving the sunflower seeds for the cold weather (I also dumped out the bird bath — I’ve never seen the mosquitoes as bad as they are this year, and I’m afraid they may be using the bird bath for breeding).