If you follow me on Twitter — which you probably do, since that’s the only venue through which I notify anyone of these posts — you’re probably aware that I’m way into looking at birds, and I have a big stupid birdfeeder hanging outside my window towards that goal.
Three out of four residents in the Hester-Tiedrich household agree: Looking At Birds is good
The feeder pole is clamped to our balcony railing, which is a pretty common configuration and you can buy poles and clamps like these at big hardware stores. HOWEVER, most deck railings made of 2×4 planks are apparently designed so that the wide side is parallel to the ground, because I was having a really hard time finding a clamp with a frame larger than three inches or so. Since our railing has the wide side perpendicular to the ground, that meant I had to splurge a little on a compatible deck clamp:
Yes of COURSE I bought it anyway.
So, whatever! I spent like $40 on the mounting system for this cheap feeder. WHATEVER!!
At the beginning of September, I started seeing a downy woodpecker at my feeder. THIS RULES because woodpeckers are rad and some of my favorite birds, but I noticed it was having a hard time accessing the food — woodpeckers are zygodactyl, meaning their toes are separated such that two toes face forward and two toes face backward, kind of like a chameleon. This is great for grabbing onto the trunk of a tree, but not ideal for a hopper-style feeder where the food is at the bottom of a little trough; the woodpecker outside my window kept grabbing onto the ledge of the trough and flipping upside-down underneath it.
“no, it’s fine, this is what I wanted”
I told you all of that so I could tell you this: I bought a woodpecker feeder.
It’s a wooden suet feeder with a tail prop (sort of like this one by Nature’s Way), so graspy birds like woodpeckers can grab onto the vertical surface and use their tails for support. Suet, if you’re not familiar, is animal fat rendered into a hefty brick (nice), and you can get varieties mixed with crushed-up bugs and stuff for use as bird food (NICE).
So I bought this sort of on a whim because I was in a hardware store for an unrelated reason and I “””accidentally””” walked into the birdfeeder aisle. I realized I had nowhere to hang it in view of my window, which meant I would have to buy another $40 in hanging accessories, and then I realized I was standing in a hardware store.
For less than five bucks, I grabbed a big S-hook, a P-clamp and a metal mending bracket that doesn’t start with a letter.
I’m furious because even if it was an L-bracket it wouldn’t have spelled out anything cool.
There’s not much to say about this build, since it took about five minutes to put together: the rubber liner on the P-clamp prevents it from sliding down the pole, the bracket has one hole for fastening and one hole for the S-hook, and the hook is what the feeder itself hangs from. I used a wingnut on the bolt because it meant I could adjust it on the fly without having to bring tools outside, which proved to be a good idea because I’ve already moved the thing a couple times.
EXTREMELY EXCITING
And there it was! Two birdfeeders on one pole, because this household is ruled by anarchy.
You can tell how long I’ve been putting off writing this because in my photos the ground outside our building isn’t covered in half a foot of snow.
It became evident that there was a flaw in this design: because of the way the hanging wire attaches to the feeder, it was parallel to my window. That means I had a really good view of one side and couldn’t see the other side at all.
“wow i love to eat animal fat rendered into a brick, this is a good day for me, a bird”
“hey”
This was fixed by putting another tiny S-hook immediately above the big one, rotating everything downstream of it ninety degrees. And there you have it: a finished thing.
I don’t think this was a particularly mind-blowing or impressive build, but it’s always nice to remember that you don’t have to feel constrained by the limits of the world around you. BUILD A BETTER ONE, WITH MORE BIRDFEEDERS.
who does this guy think he is
Let's Build a Thing! 