Placement

How Many Feeders and How Far Apart

Feeder spacing is usually explained as a way to stop birds fighting. That is half of it. The other half is that crowded feeders are how sick birds infect healthy ones.

Space feeders at least 10 feet (3 m) apart, and 15 to 20 feet (4.5 to 6 m) if you have the room. Two medium feeders at that spacing will feed noticeably more birds than one large feeder holding the same amount of seed.

There are two independent reasons, and they are worth keeping separate in your head because they lead to different decisions. The first is behavioral: a dominant bird can guard what it can see, so feeders in one cluster get monopolized. The second is medical: crowding birds together concentrates droppings, saliva and discarded seed at one point, and that is the mechanism by which feeder-borne diseases spread.

This page covers how many feeders a yard can carry, the spacing numbers, how to break lines of sight, which species need more separation than others, and when the right number of feeders is temporarily zero.

How many feeders your yard can carry#

These are ceilings, not targets. The genuine limit on most properties is not space but maintenance: every feeder you add is another item to empty, scrub, dry and refill on a two week cycle, as set out in how often to clean bird feeders. Four feeders cleaned properly beat eight cleaned occasionally, and it is not close.

Adding variety beats adding quantity. A sunflower tube, a suet cage and a ground tray reach three separate groups of birds. Three sunflower tubes reach one group three times.

Reason one: aggression and monopolizing#

Feeding birds sort themselves into a rough dominance order, and the birds at the top defend food from the birds below them. That is normal, and it costs subordinate birds feeding time.

The practical consequence is that a single feeder is a defensible resource. One common grackle, one jay or one flock of house sparrows can hold a feeder for most of a morning. Two feeders 15 feet (4.5 m) apart cannot be held simultaneously, so the birds that were being chased simply move to the other one.

Line of sight matters more than raw distance. A feeder on the far side of a shrub, a fence or the corner of the house is effectively invisible to a bird guarding the first one, and even 8 feet (2.5 m) with a solid barrier between works better than 20 feet (6 m) in open lawn.

Reason two: disease transmission#

This is the reason that matters most and gets mentioned least.

Feeders bring birds into contact at densities they would never reach naturally, and they do it at a fixed point that birds return to daily. Droppings land on perches and in seed. Birds mouth seed and drop it. Sick individuals arrive precisely because a feeder is easy food when they are too weak to forage.

Three conditions spread this way at North American feeders:

• Salmonellosis, which appears in periodic outbreaks, often in winters when pine siskins irrupt south in large numbers. Details in salmonella outbreaks at feeders.
• House finch eye disease, a mycoplasmal conjunctivitis that leaves birds with swollen, crusted eyes and effectively blind. Covered in house finch eye disease.
• Avian influenza, which is a low risk for typical feeder songbirds but which prompts state guidance to take feeders down in some situations, especially where poultry or waterfowl are nearby. Current thinking is summarized in avian influenza and bird feeders.

Spreading feeders out lowers the contact rate at every one of them. It also spreads the droppings over a wider area of ground instead of building a contaminated patch under a single pole.

The spacing numbers#

Two feeders of the same type at 10 feet (3 m) are still spaced usefully if a shrub sits between them. Two at 20 feet (6 m) across bare lawn are not as separate as the number suggests, because both are visible from either.

Species that need more room than average#

Hummingbirds need the most separation of any feeder bird. A male will spend the day chasing rivals off a nectar feeder he can see, which caps the number of birds that get to drink. Feeders on opposite sides of a house, out of sight of each other, routinely raise the number of hummingbirds using a property several times over. Feeder choice and siting are in hummingbird feeders.

Finches need the least. Goldfinches and siskins feed shoulder to shoulder without much conflict, so two nyjer feeders 10 feet (3 m) apart work fine. The catch is that finch flocks are exactly the birds most affected by eye disease and salmonellosis, so spacing them is a hygiene decision more than a peacekeeping one.

Ground feeders need horizontal space rather than separation from other feeders. Juncos, doves and sparrows spread out to forage, so a wide scatter area or a large low tray serves them better than a second small feeder.

A workable spacing plan#

For a typical quarter acre lot:

1. Station one, near the house: a baffled pole with a sunflower tube and a suet cage on opposite arms, with a low tray offset a few feet, built as described in building a complete feeding station.
2. Station two, 30 feet (9 m) away toward the back: a hopper or a second tube, ideally with a shrub or fence breaking the sightline between the two.
3. A bird bath at about 10 feet (3 m) from station one, not underneath any feeder.
4. Nectar feeders, if you run them, on opposite sides of the house.
5. Everything on a two week cleaning cycle, moved to weekly in warm, humid weather.

In a smaller space, drop station two and gain the separation vertically and by sightline instead, which is the approach in feeding birds in a small yard. Then leave it alone for a season. Traffic redistributes over a few weeks, and the yard that looked busier on day one is rarely the one feeding more birds by February.