Bird feeders and a bird table in the garden have attracted lots of birds over the years and given my family so much pleasure watching them flying in and feeding.
This summer has been a game changer though with the addition of a new bird feeder, the Finches Friend Cleaner Feeder 2, which was sent to me to review (and no I haven’t been paid to do so.)
I’d met Andrew Wood back in February at the Garden Press event held in London. I was examining the stylish range of feeders designed by his father Dick.
Chatting about how the inspiration for the feeders came about , he had me at the line “Feet, food and faeces shouldn’t mix”. Apparently the criteria should be that clean dry food should be available from a perch and that the birds shouldn’t be able to walk or defecate in the food due to the transmission of fatal diseases such Trichonomosis and Passerine Salmonellosis.
I must have looked slightly guilty at that stage as I thought about the bird poo I had seen and cleaned off my old bird table over the years. I felt even worse as I learnt that those diseases have reduced the greenfinch population by a whopping 70 per cent since 2005. 30 per cent of chaffinches have also gone in the same time span. I find those statistics frightening.
I was asked if I would write an honest review of the Cleaner Feeder 2, which duly arrived and was put together and hung up by my husband and three year old grandson.
The process took only minutes, and my husband liked how easy it was to assemble and hang on the tree in our garden. Our grandson loved pouring the bird feed in, and I was surprised at how much the feeder held.
So far so good. We eagerly waited for the finches and other birds to come. We watched through windows, our grandchildren loved sitting on the kitchen worktops using binoculars, spied on the feeder from the greenhouse, but it took quite a few weeks until we saw our first birds.
I kept thinking of the fantastic Kit Kat advert from the 1980s where a photographer waits for hours at the zoo to film a couple of pandas who refuse to come out of their pen. Nothing happens until he sits with his back to them eating the chocolate bar, in a flash the pandas appear on skates, dancing their way around with abandon, but as soon as he finished the chocolate, they disappear back in the one before he goes back to his cameras.
Slowly though, the birds began to appear - blue finches, green finches, blue tits , V pied wagtails, a robin or too. Now, nearly in late August, it’s like Heathrow Airport here. They’re flying in continuously, darting in and out so quickly, and as soon as they perceive a human about, they fly off. Until now that is. I’ve found that if I get there and sit oh so still, they will occasionally tolerate me being there at a distance...
So, unlike the poor photographer in the Kit Kat advert, I have actually captured videos of the birds …..
It is very addictive watching them as they busily fly in to get their food, twisting and turning their bodies as the feeder sways. If too many are on the feeder, the others wait and watch for their turn on neighbouring bushes and branches.
Aesthetically pleasing, with clean design lines, it’s durable, solid but lightweight, and still looks out of the box brand new. It also ensures that rain can’t get into the feed so the food can’t get wet, there’s no wastage of food and no mould. Cleaning the feeder is quick and easy, which makes a weekly clean is not a chore.
When it comes to price, this model with two chambers of food retails at £74.99. That might seem a little pricier than others, but in my opinion, you get what you pay for. That’s all very well you might say, you haven’t paid for this bird feeder, That is true, but now this feeder has been used for three months, there are so many benefits, I would happily buy another. However, until I met Dick and Andrew Wood , I didn’t understand the full extent of how bird feeder hygiene impacts on the health of wild birds. Paying a little more for a feeder which helps to stop deadly diseases being transmitted is a small price to pay..
