About Bird Feeder Web

The short answer

• Bird Feeder Web covers backyard bird feeding in North America: feeders, food, the birds that use them, and the problems that come with both.
• We sell nothing, recommend no brands, and carry no affiliate links, which is what lets a recommendation be 'buy nothing and move the pole'.
• Everything quantitative is either sourced to a published reference or labeled as our own working estimate, with the derivation published.
• The site is funded by advertising, which has no influence on any recommendation or rating.

What this site covers#

Bird Feeder Web is a reference for people who feed wild birds in North American gardens and yards. It covers four things in depth:

• Feeders, as designs rather than products: what each one is for, which birds can use it, and how each one fails. Start at feeder types.
• Food, seed by seed, with the nutrition and the economics worked out rather than asserted. Start at bird food.
• The birds themselves, written for the specific question a feeder owner has, which is what to put out and where. Start at feeder birds.
• Everything that goes wrong: squirrels, disease, window strikes, empty feeders, moldy seed. Start at problems.

Around those sit the seasonal guides, the comparisons, six calculators, and the data tables that most of the analysis on the site is built from.

What we are not#

We do not sell feeders, seed, poles or anything else. We do not carry affiliate links, we do not run sponsored content, and we do not accept products for review. No page on this site names a brand or a model.

That is a deliberate constraint rather than a virtue signal, and it has a practical consequence: it means the honest answer to "which squirrel-proof feeder should I buy" can be "none of them, move your pole four feet", which is the correct answer more often than the product-review industry can afford to admit.

The site is funded by advertising. Advertising is sold on the site as a whole and has no relationship to any rating, recommendation or ranking on any page. Nobody who advertises here has any input into what is written.

Where our information comes from#

Three sources, in this order of authority:

1. Peer-reviewed research and wildlife agency guidance. Cornell Lab of Ornithology and its Project FeederWatch program, the National Audubon Society, the USGS National Wildlife Health Center, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, Birds Canada, state and provincial wildlife agencies, and university extension services.
2. Standard reference data, mainly food composition values used in our nutrition and cost analysis.
3. Our own analysis and working estimates, used where the literature is silent on a practical question (cost per pound actually eaten, cleaning intervals adjusted for heat and damp, baffle geometry) and always labeled on the page as our figures rather than measurements.

Every page carries its sources at the bottom. Every number that is our estimate rather than a published measurement says so, and the derivation is on the methodology page.

What we publish openly#

The dataset behind the preference chart, the cost analysis and the calculators is published as a single JSON file at /datasets/bird-food-matrix.json under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. You can check our arithmetic, disagree with our scores, or build something else on top of it.

Getting things wrong#

We will, and when we do we fix it publicly rather than quietly. Errors are logged with a date and a description on the corrections page. If you have found one, or you have observations from your own feeders that contradict something here, please get in touch. Several ratings in our dataset have been revised on exactly that basis.

Our full working rules on sourcing, updating, corrections and independence are set out in the editorial standards.