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Bird Feeder Types

Choosing a feeder is really choosing which birds you get to watch. Every design admits some species and quietly turns the rest away.

Choosing a bird feeder is choosing which birds turn up. A tube with short perches gives you chickadees, finches, titmice and nuthatches. An open tray gives you cardinals, doves and juncos, plus every squirrel on the block. A suet cage gives you woodpeckers and very little else.

If you want one answer and no reading: a tube feeder with metal port collars, filled with black oil sunflower, on a smooth pole with a baffle. That combination works in more North American yards than anything else on the shelf, and most of the guides in this section are refinements of it.

The rest of this page routes you from the birds you want to the design that serves them, then names the two mistakes that cost people the most money.

Start here: pick the bird, then the feeder#

The four feeders that cover an entire yard#

Most well-stocked yards are running the same short list. A tube for the small perching birds, a hopper or platform for the heavy ones, a suet cage for the woodpeckers, and a seasonal nectar feeder. Add a nyjer feeder only if goldfinches are the point, and a squirrel-proof feeder only if the placement fixes have already failed.

Buy them one at a time, a few weeks apart. Each new design tells you something about your yard, and a bird that ignores one feeder for a month often arrives the day a different shape goes up. Building a complete feeding station shows how the pieces fit on a single pole.

Two things most people get wrong#

Buying capacity. A feeder holding several pounds of seed sounds like less refilling. In a quiet yard it means seed sitting for six weeks, going stale and then moldy. Match the size to your traffic so the feeder empties in about a week, which is the whole argument of feeder size and capacity, and keep the rest of the bag in a sealed container as described in storing bird seed.

Buying your way out of a placement problem. Squirrel defeat is geometry first and hardware second. Read how to stop squirrels before spending on a mechanism.

The features that genuinely repay their cost are boring and easy to check in the shop.

More on how those materials age is in feeder materials compared, and the buying sequence itself is laid out in how to choose a bird feeder.

Where to go next#

Once the feeder is chosen, the next two decisions matter more than the feeder did. Fill it correctly using the bird food and seed guides, then site it using feeder placement and setup, which covers the distances from cover, glass and squirrel launch points that decide whether the feeder is found in two days or ignored for two months.

If you already know which bird you are chasing, the attracting section works backward from the species, and the bird profiles tell you what each one eats and which perch it can actually use. If something is going wrong, start with problems and pests. If you are setting up your first feeder this week, the start here walkthrough is the shortest path.

All 16 guides in this section#