Every garden needs birds. As well as being a pleasure to watch, they like to gobble up greenfly and caterpillars from your plants after a snack at the birdtable. Also, as the farming countryside becomes more and more hostile to wildlife, domestic gardens are becoming an increasingly important habitat for wild birds.

This box has a tiny round hole (about 1"), and has been used by blue tits every year since I put it up. The one behind is for robins, and is being used for the first time this year. North is to the right. It's important to have your bird boxes out of the reach of cats and squirrels, and out of direct sunlight. I clean them out every year by taking out the nesting material and pouring in some boiling water to kill the parasites. They're easy to make out of sawn (untreated) wood. There are also sparrows nesting in the eaves above the window to the left, and my neighbours enjoy watching the birds as well!

Squirrels do an amazing amount of damage in the garden, including digging up bulbs, breaking down shrubs to get at buds and fruits, stripping tree bark, raiding blackbird nests and being generally agressive to other wildlife.

This is the latest in a long series of bird feeding arangements which attempt to be squirrel-proof. The main baffle is a circular disc of 1/8" aluminium about 30" in diameter recycled from an obsolete interpretation board. The squirrels haven't yet worked out how to swing round the overhang onto the table or the chain, and they haven't yet chewed through the disc!

I keep the nut container filled throughout the year and it is used by sparrows and tits. The hexagonal bird table is only fitted to the chain in the winter months. The seed I put on it is eaten by sparrows, blue tits, great tits, robins and one or two blackbirds. They create a shower of seed through the day, which falls to the ground and is there consumed by blackbirds and wood pigeons.

Bird feederSquirrels can jump vertically up about 5' and sideways about 7', so the feeder has to be this far off the ground and away from trees and shrubs.

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