Editorial Policy

The standards every guide on this site is held to, written down so you can hold us to them.

Accuracy#

Every factual claim on this site should be one of three things: a well-established finding in ornithology, a widely reproduced piece of practical experience among people who feed birds, or an explicitly flagged uncertainty. We would rather write "the evidence here is thin" than manufacture confidence.

We do not cite studies we cannot name, and we do not attach numbers to claims that do not warrant them. When a figure matters (nectar ratios, bleach dilutions, baffle heights, port diameters) we give it precisely and consistently across every page that mentions it. When a figure is genuinely a range that depends on your yard, we say that instead of picking a number to sound authoritative.

Sources#

Our standing references are the organizations that actually study feeder birds at scale:

  • Cornell Lab of Ornithology and its All About Birds species accounts
  • Project FeederWatch, run jointly by the Cornell Lab and Birds Canada
  • The National Audubon Society
  • The USGS National Wildlife Health Center, for disease guidance
  • NestWatch, for nest box dimensions and siting
  • The American Bird Conservancy, for collision and predation research
  • USDA APHIS, for avian influenza guidance

Each guide lists the relevant ones at the bottom, linked, so you can verify anything that matters to you.

Bird welfare comes before convenience#

Where a reader's convenience and a bird's welfare conflict, the bird wins and we say so plainly. That principle drives several positions on this site that differ from popular advice:

  • We do not recommend greasing or oiling poles to stop squirrels, because oil on feathers destroys their insulation and waterproofing.
  • We treat window strikes as a serious cause of death rather than an occasional nuisance, and our placement advice is written around that.
  • We tell people to take feeders down when local guidance says to, whether the reason is bears or a disease outbreak, even though "stop feeding birds" is not what a bird feeding site wants to say.
  • We are cautious about hot pepper seed products, and explain the argument on both sides rather than presenting them as a clean solution.

Advertising and independence#

ProBirdFeeder is funded by display advertising. The following rules are absolute:

  1. No advertiser sees or influences content. Nobody buys a mention, a position, or a revision.
  2. We do not publish sponsored posts or paid guest articles.
  3. We do not review or rank products. Because we have no product revenue to protect, we have nothing to gain from steering you toward an expensive purchase. Several guides on this site actively argue that the cheaper option is the better one.
  4. Ads are labeled where they appear and are kept out of the flow of instructions in a way that would make a numbered step hard to follow.

Review and updates#

Every guide carries a "last updated" date, which reflects the last time the page was actually reviewed against current sources, not a script bumping a timestamp. Pages covering fast-moving subjects (disease outbreaks, avian influenza guidance, regional regulations) are reviewed more often than pages about, say, how a hopper feeder works.

Corrections#

If you spot an error, send it to us with the page URL. Substantive corrections are made promptly and the update date is changed. We do not quietly delete pages that turn out to be wrong; we fix them.

AI disclosure#

Drafting and research on this site are assisted by AI tooling, which is then edited, fact checked against the sources above, and structured by the editorial team before publication. We mention this because you deserve to know how anything you read was made. It does not change the standard the work is held to: everything published here is checked against the same sources and the same welfare principles, and errors are ours to fix.