Make Your Feeder Squirrel-Proof by Raising it up
Did you know the average gray squirrel can jump 3 to 4 feet straight up and can leap horizontally a whopping 10 to 12 feet? This may seem like it makes it impossible to position your feeder out of the squirrel’s reach, but here’s one trick: put your bird feeder on an upper story of your house.I personally tend to not trust suction cups, so I got two hooks and suspended the bird feeder between the two hooks using wire. This way if one hook falls off, you have a backup supporting your feeder. Make sure you keep an eye on your suction cups. If you see one of the cups start to come unstuck, it’s time to take the hooks inside, soak them in hot water for a couple of minutes, dry them off, clean the window with non-greasy window cleaner, and put the hooks back on. A very small amount of vegetable oil rubbed around the suction cup will increase its suction power.
Another problem I found with these is the hook tends to rotate toward the window, which means your bird feeder often taps the glass. To get around this, I prevented the hooks from turning by getting smaller suction cups that have a single small metal hook (like the kind you would use to hang a light-catcher on a sliding glass door) and putting one of these on each side of my hook contraption. I ran a wire from each small hook to the bigger hook which held it in place.
An easier way to get a bird feeder up high is to purchase a feeder that fits right into your window.
Duncraft makes a very nice version. These feeders can be filled from inside your home without opening the window.
Whatever method you use, make sure the squirrel can’t climb onto your roof. Often trimming some tree branches can take care of this. Here’s a picture taken before we had the trees trimmed around our home. After the trimming, we didn’t have a single squirrel get onto our bird feeder.
