About ProBirdFeeder
ProBirdFeeder is an independent reference site about feeding wild birds in North America. It is written to be useful first and findable second.
Most bird feeding advice online is either a shopping list wearing a guide's clothes, or a thousand words of pleasant vagueness that never tells you how far from the shrub to hang the thing. ProBirdFeeder exists to be the other option: specific numbers, honest tradeoffs, and a clear statement when the real answer is "nobody knows for certain".
What we publish#
The site is organized into fifteen topic clusters covering the whole subject: feeder designs, foods and seed, profiles of the birds themselves, bird identification, targeted attraction guides, placement, problems and pests, cleaning and bird health, seasonal timing, habitat beyond the feeder, DIY projects, side-by-side comparisons, criteria-based buying guides, regional guides and a short set of calculators.
Each cluster has a hub page that links to everything beneath it, and every guide links out to the related ones. You can read a single page and leave, or work through an entire subject.
Who writes it#
Guides are researched, written and reviewed by the ProBirdFeeder editorial team. We do not invent expert personas or attach stock-photo bylines to pages. Where a claim rests on published ornithology or on the long-running citizen science projects that study feeder birds, we say so and link to the organization, so you can check us.
The standing references behind most of what we publish are the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Project FeederWatch, the National Audubon Society, the USGS National Wildlife Health Center and Birds Canada. Every guide lists the ones relevant to it in a "Sources and further reading" section at the bottom.
What we will not do#
- We do not review products we have not used. There are no ranked "best feeder" lists on this site, because we do not run a testing lab and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Our buying guides teach you the selection criteria instead: port geometry, baffle sizing, materials, cleanability. Those criteria outlast any particular model.
- We do not invent statistics. No fabricated study citations, no suspiciously precise percentages, no imaginary surveys.
- We do not recommend anything that risks harming a bird. That rules out several popular internet tricks, greased poles among them, and we explain why each time it comes up.
How the site pays for itself#
ProBirdFeeder is free to read and is funded by advertising displayed on the pages. Ads are served by third parties and are labeled where they appear. Advertising has no influence over what we publish or what we recommend, and no advertiser sees a guide before it goes live. See the privacy policy for what advertising means for your data, and the editorial policy for how we keep the two separated.
Corrections#
Our full corrections and updates policy sets out what counts as a correction, how to report one and what happens next, and how we research and fact check explains the source hierarchy behind every figure on this site. Bird feeding advice ages. Ranges shift, disease guidance changes, and consensus moves. If you find something on this site that is wrong or out of date, tell us and we will fix it and note the update date on the page. Every guide shows when it was last reviewed.
Where to start#
If you are setting up your first feeder, read the 20 minute setup. If something is already going wrong, problems and pests is probably where you want to be. If you are trying to put a name to a bird at the window, start with the bird profiles.