Peanut feeder not been touched 🤷‍♀️

There is a lot of natural food at the moment but the biggest cause in our garden is the Sparrow Hawk who circles round frequently!

I have never seen a a sparrowhawk, but I do have magpies around occasionally however it doesn’t stop the birds feeding from the bird table and the other feeder 🤷‍♀️

We have acquired a very cheeky squirrel who empties the two bird feeders in under 20 minutes so they are currently empty until he forgets - which he won’t, of course. Short of barbed wire I cannot see a way of deterring this impudent and acrobatic thief so it’s as well that there is plenty of other food for my goldfinches and blue tits. My expensive sunflower hearts are definitely not for squirrels.

It can take a while but it could also be that young birds can't deal with peanuts yet.

I always take my peanut feeder in in the Spring. I heard that baby birds can choke on peanuts

I'm sure you'll get plenty later in the year when food is not so available

I have a peanut feeder, a seed feeder and a fatball feeder. The birds are eating everything, though the peanuts seem to be the last to go at the moment.

Until two weeks ago, my seed feeders were visited very frequently by small birds. I had a lot of nesting birds feeding their young. I was having to refill the feeders every day. Now they are remaining full for longer. I am assuming the chicks have now fledged and the nests deserted.

Magpies and sparrowhawks are also about so having taken the risk to fly back and forth from nest cover to feeders to get enough food for their young they have now departed for better cover.

I don’t put nuts, even crushed ones, out in the spring and summer until I know birds are old enough not to choke on them.

Note too that nuts go off quickly in hot, humid weather. You should only offer what can be eaten in a couple of days. If the nuts haven’t been touched then it may well be that the birds can detect signs of mould that isn’t yet detectable to the human eye or nose.

It's worth considering where you buy the nuts, how they are packaged and where they have been stored because they may already have been deteriorating before you bought them. Any foodstuff that has been sitting encased in plastic in hot weather will go off quickly.

The other thing to remember is that birds need an ample supply of water nearby to help them digest nuts. That can be a problem in hot weather where water sources dry out more quickly or become foul if the source is also used by the birds for bathing. Are you providing a good and regular supply of fresh clean water nearby?

I buy chopped peanuts and feed them on the ground. They are tiny pieces which wouldn’t choke a baby bird, but would provide the nutrients which peanuts do. I haven’t put out whole peanuts in a feeder for a long time because I found they weren’t popular and quickly went mouldy. I now use the peanut feeder for suet pellets, which are very popular.

GrannySomerset

We have acquired a very cheeky squirrel who empties the two bird feeders in under 20 minutes so they are currently empty until he forgets - which he won’t, of course. Short of barbed wire I cannot see a way of deterring this impudent and acrobatic thief so it’s as well that there is plenty of other food for my goldfinches and blue tits. My expensive sunflower hearts are definitely not for squirrels.

To defeat a squirrel hang the feeder with a 2ft long thin garden wire, he won’t be able to grip it and fall off.

Cyril the Squirrel has probably gone to get his chainsaw. There's no such thing as a squirrel-proof peanut feeder. Ha!

Having peered closely at your photo I'm wondering if the holes in the mesh are a bit too small for the birds to wiggle out whole nuts. I've seen bluetits sit pecking bits off peanuts in a feeder but not other birds. Most like to snatch and go.

Maybe you'd have more success with the type of feeder where the food trickles down into a little cup by the perch, though they're probably more suited to sunflower hearts.

I've found the Squirrel Buster feeders are great for foiling squirrels and heavy birds like pigeons.

I gave up putting peanuts out for the birds. We have a good variety of birds, but they never touched the peanuts. I even bought some from other suppliers, but the same applied.

I put out no-grow seed mix in mesh feeders, suet pellets in another and sunflower seeds in a ‘small bird’ feeder. At lunchtime the birds line up on the tv aerial and roof ridge making a right old racket!

I am fed up digging out seedlings from our ‘no grow’ mix

The birds eat the mealworms and can empty two largish feeders of seed in a day here but ignored any fat balls, even though they were good quality ones, so we don't bother with fat balls now.

The same with peanuts and more expensive bird seed mix eg for blue tits etc.
They seem to really like the Tesco seed.

I do have a supply of freshwater nearby for the birds. I also have a small wildlife pond in my garden
Up until a few days ago, I was soaking the mealworms because I knew that if they were dried and hard they could choke the baby birds but now I am just mixing dry mealworms with suet pellets and putting that on the bird table mind you whatever birds come blackbirds,blue tits,sparrows they take the mealworms and leave the pellets. I will not be buying any more pellets, they will go eventually when the meal worms are gone
I did buy two of those peanut feeders and it happened the same last year that they weren’t really touching the peanuts so I took one out to work. I work in a care home and we have a lovely patio area and the peanuts out there go really quickly,care home is in the middle of nowhere and we do get a great variety of birds, I don’t get so much

The birds are eating a lot of, presumably, ants at the moment, they are throwing soil all over the paths and also going in the greenhouse (nothing growing in there this year) and throwing the soil everywhere!

The more ants they eat the better.

I have taken down hearts feeder, hoping that the blue tits will go for the peanuts.
I see thi morning still a lot of suet pellets on the table, they will go during the course of the day but I won’t be buying them again.
I’m going to try using seed which I haven’t used for years so are there any recommendations?…

For some reason we're getting 23 [yes 23!!!] jackdaws in the garden and they just love the peanuts. I'm rapidly running out. The squirrels seem to avoid them now. It's not fair on the little birds but I do like jackdaws

We have acquired a very cheeky squirrel who empties the two bird feeders in under 20 minutes so they are currently empty until he forgets

It depends on where your feeders are hanging.

We put a squirrel baffle on the pole holding the feeders to stop the squirrel climbing up the pole, and moved the feeders away from anything they could jump from.

We recently made the mistake of moving one pole too close to the dryer in the lawn, and saw the squirrels climb the dryer, jump from the arm on to the baffle and empty the feeders.

We recently ditched a couple of feeders - for sunflower hearts and fat balls - since they were increasingly being monopolised by parakeets - the little birds weren’t getting a look in. I often counted 7or 8 parakeets waiting their turn - and the bird food bill was getting ridiculous.

We now have just the one, a sort of cage thing, designed so that only the little birds can enter it.

Took down the sunflower hearts and now bluetits are feeding off the peanuts….😁

Athrawes You are more than welcome to our jackdaws. I looked into the garden yesterday and it was like a scene from 'The Birds'. Magpies, Jackdaws, Crows, starlings covering the feeders and the lawn, with young ones sitting in the nearby trees. The noise was horrendous. I think the woodpeckers usually see at least some of them off but they was nowhere to be seen.

I have given up putting peanuts out. They were never eaten.

Tizliz

I am fed up digging out seedlings from our ‘no grow’ mix

Same here! We grow enough wheat to supply a bakery!